Page 52 of What Whispers in the Dark (Promises of the Marked)

G arrik trained on the lawn again, ten paces from the lake and its pulsing shores.

Smokeshadows flickered around him, coiled from his shoulders, and bled down his arms in ribbons that brushed along his face and hands.

They moved as if testing the boundary between magic and flesh. A servant to his will.

He made no indication he knew Alora watched him as she deeply inhaled and curled her fingers around their bedchamber balcony railing.

Her wedding ring brimming with Garrik’s shadows, glinting in the morning light.

Cautiously admiring his skill and strength while he thrust a sword into a shadow-made figure much smaller than him.

Dawn had barely risen as she’d woken in their bed to the ebbing sounds of night bugs chirping under the morning sky.

The glow of the rising sun just on the horizon, shining through their windows.

But when she rolled to her side expecting to see his beautiful face …

where he should have been was empty. Disturbingly cold.

By the looks of him, he must have been out there all night… Filthy, his tunic and pants wrinkled. Skin gleaming with dirt and sweat. And with midnight annuluses as proof, she assumed why.

Alora closed her eyes at the realization striking her like a damning blow: he’d had a nightmare. There was little doubt. Not when they had spent the last few nights falling asleep together.

The next half hour, he trained himself into a stumbling mess of exhaustion, and even then, didn’t quit.

She waited until a deathly swing of his sword and Garrik’s soul-suffering growl echoed along the trees, house, and hills to messily dawn from their balcony onto the lawn.

Practically face-planting, half-catching herself by her knee and a palm flattened in the grass before she straightened.

It would have been better to have jumped, having only spent a few hours training on how to dawn. Not nearly as successful as she had hoped to be by now, she was surprised she’d made it that far instead of falling from mid-air like the last time.

If all else, maybe her dreadful landing would cause Garrik to smile.

But when she adjusted her ashen-gray sweater, which fell over her left shoulder to expose the curve and her death mark there, and batted the little dust from her knee, Garrik still hadn’t turned.

She couldn’t help but imagine those eyes as inky black.

Swirling with shadows as he stood cold as death, facing Airatheldra’s welcoming horizon.

A caged beast—her beast. Alone and trapped with no way out but through his silent screams.

If nightmares and darkness consumed him, then she would be his guiding light.

Pale, Garrik turned at the sound of her steps, and his abyss for eyes watched her approach. As if the sight of her was a vision of salvation, his swords clanged to the grass like every last ounce of strength forsook his hands.

Aware of his every labored breath, every tortured movement, Alora didn’t say a word as she wrapped her arms around his neck, pulsing warmth against his icy skin.

In an instant, his palms roved over the dark leggings covering her hips, up her back. Wrinkling the thin summer-sweater fabric from her trunk of belongings he’d dawned from her tent as he sought contact with her skin.

One palm cradled the back of her head, fingers lacing into her hair before her face buried into his chest. Above the burn mark that belonged to her. The one over his dying heart.

She placed a kiss there. Tender and warm and lingering.

Felt him shudder from it.

For a few long moments, they stood there. Holding each other, breathing each other in. The strength she had watched as he swung his swords melted off his broad shoulders the second she brushed her hand around the side of his neck and flattened it on his slow-beating chest.

Garrik made a small sound of relief, contentment even. A sound equal to a wound healing, enough to pull her cheek from his chest and find his haunted, shadow-misted hollow eyes.

He looked exhausted.

Alora cupped his cheek, studied her husband’s face, and offered, “Do you want to tell me about it?” Whatever nightmare plagued him this time. What kept him from their bed and her safe, loving arms.

Rather than answering, Garrik’s skin blanched to bone-white. His eyes went distant.

She knew that look.

And somewhere down their tether, Alora felt the words he didn’t speak. Heard his screams and a voice now so familiar. She vowed the moment she saw that wretched serpent-bitch’s face to unleash a storm of starfire so bold the entire castle would explode along with her.

Alora frowned. “I did this. This was my fault.” The thought tumbled through her head; she’d let this happen. Knew it was her doing.

Because the pain in his eyes now was the same pain she’d seen the night before.

When his body had seized up after he lay on his back and guided her on top of him in their bedchamber …

After he sank two fingers deep inside her while she rode his hand, watching his face for any signs of torment …

After he had encouraged her pleasured release and asked her to take him, slowly, lovingly.

To claim him differently than those who declared themselves his masters had.

They’d barely started when his body—his soul and mind—wracked him in terror.

And she had fallen asleep sometime well after— starsdamn her. Fallen asleep before she could walk inside his mind and prevent the nightmares that would follow.

And now, that pain still lingered.

“No, my love. It was not you.” She didn’t believe him—couldn’t show anything but guilt. Maybe that’s why Garrik took her chin between his fingers and firmly promised, “It was not you.”

With her thumb, she tenderly stroked his cheek and nodded. “Are you okay?”

Garrik leaned into her touch, closed his eyes, and hummed.

When they opened, she could have sworn stars flashed in those silvery pools absent of darkness.

Where moments before he seemed so lost, so desolate and haunted, now color returned to his face.

The tension in his shoulders had eased. Garrik’s hand slipped around her waist and cupped the curve of her lower back as he answered, “Much better now.” His icy lips pressed against her wrist.

“Why didn’t you come get me?” She felt a flutter of warmth, a peace that wasn’t her own. A hint of restoration and calm rippled down their silver tether before a gentle kiss, a mental finger, caressed her mind.

His eyes softened. “I did not wish to wake you.”

“But I could have helped. You do not need to sacrifice for me.” He shouldn’t have to sacrifice for anyone ever again. “I could have?—”

“You have released me from decades of fearing the night. It is not a sacrifice to allow you to sleep. My darling, it is a gift.” His eyes twinkled with morning light, and then he kissed her hair.

“This will not be a circumstance of guilt. There will be many times we cannot share our bed. You need not feel guilty that you could not walk inside my mind for a night. I am?—”

“Used to this?” Alora’s eyes lined with liquid. She hated that phrase. Never wanted him to be used to it ever again.

Garrik sighed, registering the meaning behind that look.

“I shouldn’t have fallen asleep.”

He exhaled a chuckle through his nose, but she couldn’t find the humor in any of it as he grinned. “I did not give you much choice, now, did I?” He trailed a hand down her back, pulled her waist closer, flush against him. Then added, “Having spent the day with you on your back, naked beneath me.”

With memories like that, how could she argue? Though she still didn’t like it.

Despite it, a smile twitched on her lips, remembering how they began at breakfast, touching each other, learning every inch and burning it to memory.

Then later, at the lake, fucking on a blanket atop the floating dock in the velvety sunlight before he dawned them to their tub.

Amidst the glittering bubbles and warm water, her chest perched against his.

Straddling him, Garrik had proceeded to thoroughly make certain she was spotless…

Alora’s toes curled inside her boots.

Not only with his hands and a cloth but with his tongue after.

And when the water became too cold, when he wrapped her in a towel made of clouds, he took his time worshiping her with his body beside their fireplace until their bed became their home for the evening.

Poor humans . For not having fae lovers. Alora’s cheeks scarleted.

Garrik hummed. “Picturing my death, clever girl?”

Her knees tightened, rubbing the dark fabric on her inner thighs together.

Picturing not death, but … how his intoxicating body moved.

Every glorious muscle, dip and swell, scar and facet of flesh.

How undone he became when release shattered him and he spilled into her over and over.

His face, his roars, the addictive sounds and moans and every breathless plea and cry of her name.

Alora swallowed. “S-something like that.”

A dark, low chuckle rumbled from him. A cold finger trailed along the soft flesh below her ear.

“Clever girl,” he drawled. The words menacing.

Enticing. Like a cat that’d caught vermin only to play with it instead of pleasuring in the kill.

He tisked his tongue, drawing his knuckle down her neck, pebbling her flesh every inch by torturous inch.

“I do believe you are lying to me.” Something like wicked delight lingered there. Wicked and raptured and possessive.

“Maybe,” she hinted, breathless.

Quaint knowing lingered in his eyes. But Garrik simply smirked, and instead of addressing the matter further, asked, “Tell me, wife. How do you wish to spend our day?”

She could think of a few things …

Starting with her tongue tracing the veins of his length until she swallowed him deep, drawing him to the brink of insanity, to the point he’d fuck her against a wall, unchained from self-restraint or sense.