Page 91 of Soulgazer

“Saoirse.”

Pure heat bleeds into my soul when he whispers my name. Gathers lower as his mouth finds my throat, fingertips dragging beneath the hem of my shirt. I’d thought this was a game to him—coaxing me to play along. But I remember his face after the cove. The way he’s avoided me since.

There is something here. Something I’m hungry to understand.

“You drive me mad,” I groan.

His laugh is lost against my collarbone seconds before his tongue finds it. “And what is it you think you do to me, love? Having to lie beside you every night, not touching, knowing you disapprove of me. And—feck, your skin is soft here.”

I can’t control the noise that leaves my lips when his fingertipscurl into my waist. Slide higher, bone by bone, until they reach that sweet, unsteady curve and—

“Wait!”

He goes still immediately, hand plastered against my chest. Our breaths tear the air apart between us, but I can’t look at his face. I can only focus on the humming that fuses my jaw together, dancing up and down my spine only to lock in place at the spirals carved into my back.

Magic. Fighting my body to be free.

“I’m sorry.” Faolan’s head falls to my shoulder, breath skating across my collarbone. I feel it like lightning against my skin, his want bleeding into mine. “I shouldn’t have—”

“It’s not that. It’s—”

Words fail as pain and pleasure form a wicked dance down my spine, drawing me to excruciating awareness. Of the ache between my legs—the restraint in his own. Calluses bite into my thigh where one of his hands rests, and leather scrapes my breast from the glove wrapped around his other.

A glove constantly laced and unlaced, but never taken off.

Even when we swim.

I drag Faolan’s hand higher until it lies just over my thrashing heart. Dig my fingers into the laces. Swallow as he searches my eyes for permission, even as a weight drops in my stomach.

“Kiss me again.”

Faolan’s lips tug into a smile like sunlight before he drops his mouth to my throat again, and for a moment, I could believe the magic is lying. Whatever has drawn us together all this time is fate, nothing more. But I think of the vision in the gods’ chambers, and the way wounded spirits call to me—how when the magic draws me in, the whole world falls away.

Like that first night at the Damhsa, when our eyes met across the fire.

Or the bone-deep yearning I feel whenever we touch.

His lips chase my pulse, kissing such a sweet path along my jaw that I want to die—something he’s afraid of in spite of all his talk and teasing, the phrase he uses like a prayer:Legends don’t die.Yetdeathis what calls to me, though I once believed it was the other way around.

I close my eyes and press my thumb into the knot of his laces, easing the cords apart.

“Please…”

Faolan goes still. But it’s not until the laces unspool that my husband, the Wolf, realizes what I’ve done.

“No. Saoirse—wait!”

He’s too late. I peel the leather back and expose a bare palm sliced by a gleaming abalone scar swirled at its center in a triskele, bright as moonlight.

The exact color of a soulstone.

Thirty-Four

“Faolan, what is this?”

The words are barely audible, hoarse from his kisses and something else I’m fighting to keep down. Because I must be mistaken. It wasfatethat drew us together, not curses or death. Any moment he’ll tell me the real story of how he got that scar—wrestling a silver-clawed bear or seducing a murúch who blessed his hand with her scales.

Except he wouldn’t have bothered with the glove if it was only another adventure. He’d find excuses to show it off.

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