Page 21 of A Monsoon Rising

“Forget the bucket,” he told her, a hint of his usual imperiousness breaking through the valerian fog. “Stay here.”

“All right.” Not her wittiest moment, but it was difficult to think when she was pressed up against his solid body, his hand on the small of her back. “I’ll stay.”

He looked like he didn’t believe her, and it pierced her heart. She wondered if this was a common occurrence: Alaric crawling back to his chambers after Gaheris’s punishments and nursing his injuries while he dreamed of not being alone.

Talasyn suddenly wanted nothing more than to assure Alaric of her presence. She sank fully against his form, holding him down with her weight, burying her face in the side of his neck in a chaste imitation of what he had done to her once, in another bed.

“I’m here,” she vowed into his smooth, overheated skin. “I’m not going anywhere.”

A sound between a groan and a hitch of breath caught in his throat. The hand on the small of her back rubbed compulsively, tracing the notches of her spine, and his arm tightened around her. His other hand tangled in her hair.

“I couldn’t kill that rebel.” It was a choked, bewildered rumble in her ear. “One word from you and I let my guard down. I couldn’t killyou, either, all those times before … What am I, if I’m not a weapon? What have you done to me?”

It shouldn’t have mattered what he was saying, trapped as his consciousness was in valerian dregs. But there was a kernel of truth in his bleak questions. This time the voice that crept into Talasyn’s head was not Urduja’s, although it was definitely telling her what Urduja would have taken away from the situation.

He cares what you think.It was Talasyn’s own inner voice, from some dark part of her.You can use this.

She blocked it out, this epiphany. She focused only on Alaric, on how his words reminded her of the orphanage at Hornbill’s Head, the keepers’ brutal fists, how they’d spat out that she and the other children would never amount to anything more than the bottom-dwellers they’d been born as. Her body was melting against her will into Alaric’s arms, rationality giving way to the urge to comfort. To do for someone else what nobody had ever done for her.

“You’re not just a weapon,” she mumbled into his neck. “You have a sweet tooth and sometimes you make me laugh. I tell you things that I’ve never told anyone else.” The very air seemed to spin golden with each surge of memory, aether humming between their forms. “You helped me with my magic. You tackled me out of the way of that void bolt. Today you made sure I could run and fight. All of these things—they’re not what a weapon is, or does. You’re so much more than a weapon. You could be more.”

She meant it, she acknowledged to herself, their past interactions blurring together. It caused a sensation that felt like surrendering, there in the hollows of her heart. She meant every word.

Alaric’s fingers tightened in her hair, a gentle tugging that lifted her head from the crook of his neck. She blinked down at his pale, anguished features, her pulse quickening as it wascaught in the stormy undertow lurking in the haze-ridden depths of his dark eyes.

“Be kind to me, wife,” he said.

It was a gruff entreaty wrapped up in a voice like smoke, all gravel and valerian, curling halfway between yearning and madness. She froze at being calledthat, but then a not altogether unpleasant shiver rippled through her veins as his palm slid along her hair, cupping her nape, exerting just enough pressure to urge her lower.

Talasyn let herself be moved, just as she had done at the Roof of Heaven, in that place of sunlight and snow-white plumerias. Here and now, however, there was no Sevraim to interrupt them as her mouth slanted over his and the world went—soft. Like summer rain.

It was a bad idea. It would always be a bad idea. But Alaric’s lips pressed against hers with quiet hunger, his hands were hot and heavy on her, and his callused fingers curled around the back of her neck, tracing staticky patterns on her spine. He smelled like herbs and sweat, and he was so broad beneath her, offering a taste of an end to loneliness. She surrendered, relaxing in his strong arms, unthinkingly chasing his mouth with her own.

Then he went still.

Am I doing it wrong?In a burst of panic, Talasyn broke the kiss in order to cautiously check on Alaric. His eyes were closed, his breathing even, the line of his mouth slack.

He was asleep.

“You’re an asshole,” she snapped. It echoed through the quiet, lamplit room, but he didn’t so much as stir.

Despite her annoyance, perhaps there was some tenderness in her touch as she reached down to brush strands of his wavy black hair away from his bandaged forehead. She allowedherself this one small gesture, because no one would ever know.Especiallyhim.

Talasyn was awakened by the sound of a Shadow Sever, a faint, sputtering screech, like icefall.

She bolted to a sitting position in Alaric’s bed and peered out the open window into the distance, where the Shadowgate billowed in plumes of smoke at the stark gray edges of the Citadel.

Alaric’s chambers overlooked the building from which the horde of inky chimeras had spewed forth the day before. From its rooftop, a black ship was taking to the air, and it wasn’t long before it glided in the direction of the active Sever. Amidst the slew of legionnaires on the deck, Talasyn could make out a stooped, dark-robed figure with fingers as pale and brittle as twigs clutching the railing.

Gaheris.

It had to be. The Shadowforged circled him protectively, all of them facing outward. Before Talasyn could get a closer look, they cast a dome of obsidian magic, obscuring the entire deck from view.

The emaciated figure remained burned into her mind long after the ship had become a speck sailing past the Citadel’s walls. Talasyn had seen aethergraphs of Gaheris from before the Hurricane Wars, then no more after that. She now saw why. The change in the Night Emperor from those earlier images to this wraithlike Regent was alarming. The might of Gaheris’s aethermancy and the frailty of his physical form were incongruous.

Alaric stirred beside her.

His brow was knitted even in sleep, speaking to the immense pain that he was in. One look at the multitude of bandages she’d done her best with was enough to ignite an ember of fury withinher, to have her clenching her fists. She should have hurled a light-woven dagger into his father’s chest while she’d had the chance. She should—

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