Page 23 of The Beautiful Blade

My attacker staggered back. Blood dripped from a gash across his chest. Unfortunately, I wasn’t fast enough to avoid the next opponent.

A blade came toward me again, and I braced for the hit—only it didn’t come. Instead, there was a metallic clang. I turned to see Charlotte standing beside me, the beautiful blade I'd made for her raised, her expression fierce.

Her movements were fluid. Each strike precise. Every lethal movement graceful. She wasn’t just holding her own in the fight—she was dominating.

The last of our enemies fell. Their weapons clattered to the ground as they crumpled at Charlotte’s feet. The arena erupted into cheers. It was all a distant hum in my ears. All I could see was her.

Charlotte turned to me, her chest heaving with exertion, her face flushed. We picked up where we’d left off in our reunion; we just stared at each other. The weight of years and distance and pain hung between us.

She moved, closing the space between us in a heartbeat. “Let me see.”

I was a child again. Holding up my scrapes and wounds to her. Hearing her scolding tone as she gaveme the care I'd been so sorely deprived of my entire miserable life. Hungry for the numbness her magic would flood inside me. Every time Charlotte took away my pain, she left something of herself inside me. It became my addiction. I'd been so long without my fix.

For three years, I had been holding her hand. In the trenches of war, in the bitter cold of the barracks, through every brutal skirmish, I had felt her fingers wrapped around mine. She had been my anchor, my strength, the reason I kept moving forward when everything else tried to break me.

The moment Charlotte's fingers brushed against mine, my world realigned. My brain connected the memory to my body, filling in the pieces that had frayed over time. I had forgotten the way her warmth seeped into my palm. How her thumb always moved in slow circles over my knuckles. How the knuckles of our other four fingers aligned so perfectly. I had forgotten how I could feel the subtle rhythm of her pulse in my palm because her hand was slightly smaller than mine. The top part of her wrist came to rest in the bottom part of my palm.

Then she jerked from my hold. My phantom limb clenched at the loss, grasping at nothing, desperate to hold on to what had always been there. A sharp, gutting ache spread through my chest, worse than any blade had ever carved into me. The connection that hadcarried me through every battle, every wound, every moment of agony—severed.

Charlotte stared at my empty hand.

No—not my hand. The thing that had replaced it.

Undisguised horror flickered across her face as she took in the smooth, dark metal where flesh should have been. The fingers I had reforged, the ones I had spent years perfecting so they could move, flex, and function like they were my own—she looked at them as if they were something unnatural. As if they were something unworthy of her touch.

Then, as if catching herself, she blinked and looked away, as though she could pretend this moment hadn’t just cracked something irreparable between us. She reached for me, pulling me into her arms. I went to her. Of course I did. I was the moth. She could burn me alive, and I would thank her for it.

Her lips met mine, demanding as always. Her hands wrapped around my neck and pulled me closer as though I was her due—which I was. Her body was flush against mine. All that was left to do was take what was being offered to me. My hands obeyed, and a new memory was formed. One where Charlotte's fingers in mine were replaced with the firm roundness of her ass in my palms.

Together, we deepened the kiss. I poured every unspoken word, every unshed tear, every unfulfilledlonging into that single, perfect moment. She was here, she was alive, and I felt whole.

“Attention, competitors and spectators,” the announcer’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers, cold and devoid of emotion. “We have a situation. One of the combatants has entered the arena illegally. Both the illegal participant and his partner will be disqualified and removed from the Games immediately.”

The cheers died down as a wave of confusion rippled through the stands. A chorus of boos rang out. The crowd's displeasure didn't change the official's ruling.

Guards marched forward. Their hands reached for Charlotte to take her away from me. Charlotte palmed her blade.

I turned toward the announcer’s platform, scanning the high crystalline screen where the voice originated. I raised my arm, prosthetics gleaming under the twin suns.

“I am a survivor of the Convergence Games. My name is in the records. By your own rules, all former competitors are eligible to return.”

The arena fell into silence, the murmurs dying as all eyes turned to the announcer’s box. The weight of a thousand stares pressed down on us. Beside me, Charlotte reached for my prosthetic hand. The knowledge that we both might lose our lives in moments felt lessimportant than her acceptance of what I had become. The warmth of her skin seared through the cold metal, sending a jolt through the mechanical nerves, tricking my mind into believing I was whole again.

“We will… review the records. For now, both contestants will proceed to the barracks. Further decisions will be announced.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHARLOTTE

Jorge’s hand wrapped around mine, pulling me through the chaos behind the scenes of the Convergence Games. I didn't mind the manhandling in the slightest. Not when I was doing my own version of it to him.

I couldn’t stop touching him. My fingers curled tighter around his, the occasional brush of my arm against his. He felt so different.

Harder. Stronger. But not just in the way his body had filled out with his lean muscle, honed intosomething lethal.

Jorge had always been pliable when we were young. Soft where I was sharp. Yielding where I was unmovable. He had been the boy who bent beneath the weight of expectation, who never resisted when pushed, who absorbed every blow life threw at him and kept going.

But now…

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