Page 170 of Mother of Death and Dawn

Everything, he promised. But this was not everything, this was just one touch and the desire for more—for so much more—even as that single touch reduced me to nothing.

I wanted to tell him this, demand more from him, but I opened my lips and only managed to produce a single strangled whimper.

He was leaning heavily against the wall now, closer to me. His body, and the stone against my back, were all that kept me standing.

The circles grew faster, harder. The additional pressure drew a moan to my throat, made me press against him.

“It feels like the basest hunger,” he said. “It is selfish… and giving.”

His fingers pushed aside my undergarments, and two slid inside me.

I swore.

Everything disappeared except for the sensation of him within me—still not enough, not enough, not enough—and yet so much that my body didn’t know how to react, that I forgot how to breathe and see and speak and move. The pain was brief, gone quickly beneath a wild, impatient pleasure slick with my desire.

I didn’t know what was happening to me. I didn’t know what I wanted, except that it was everything—faster, slower, deeper, gentler, harder, I didn’t know, I only knew that I was coming undone and I wanted more of him everywhere.

He bowed his head, brushed his lips to my throat. He pressed against me, and the pressure of his body, even clothed, was too much.

It was too much.

“Let go, Aefe,” Caduan murmured against my skin, his voice rough and demanding—like he was begging me, like he needed this just as much as I did—and I didn’t even know what he was asking me to do but suddenly I was doing it, I was falling, I was exploding, I was stars and earth, I was everything, and I was relinquishing all of it to him.

It was only once I started coming back to myself that I realized I had been saying his name, over and over again, in desperate moans. I was boneless, barely managing to stay upright. I felt messy and undone and… and exposed, like I had just shown him something raw and vulnerable.

He breathed heavily, too, looking as shattered as I did.

He, too, looked afraid.

My lips parted, though I didn’t know what to say. But his hand swept over my cheek in a small caress and tipped my chin towards him.

I did not know how to kiss someone. But this kiss was easy. The touch of his lips was gentle over mine. Slow. Almost shy—perhaps it should have seemed strange to share such a timid kiss in this moment, something so tentative, but it felt right. He tasted like honey.

He pulled away, and for a moment, neither of us breathed. I leaned in again.

But then Caduan’s face changed abruptly. He jerked away from me, leaving me scrambling to push myself upright.

“I— This—” He ran his fingers through his hair. “This isn’t—” He glanced at me and snapped his jaw shut, then turned away. “I shouldn’t have— I should go. Goodnight, Aefe.”

I didn’t know what was happening. One moment, his presence surrounded me, and the next he was halfway down the path. The world was cold without him.

“Caduan!” I called after him.

But he was already gone.

CHAPTERSIXTY-THREE

MAX

We set off in the morning. It wouldn’t take us too long to get to Orasiev, at least not with the help of Stratagram travel—we were lucky to now have multiple functional Wielders, which made life so much easier. We stayed away from main roads, choosing to move along side paths and camp at night instead of finding inns. Getting run out of town by bounty hunters once was more than enough for me.

Ishqa, as we had come to expect, came and went as he pleased. He traveled with us for the first day, then said he had business to attend to and abruptly flew off into the sunset, leaving us a few feathers to contact him.

What “business,” I wondered?

I kept waiting for the moment when Brayan, too, would announce his departure, but it never came. At the end of the first day, as he was putting together his tent, I approached him.

“You’re staying?”

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