Page 61 of Severed Heir

His knuckles whitened. “Ah,” he sighed. “Well. Isn’t it lovely how perfectly that barter worked out.”

My temper flared. “Don’t start. You’re the one who offered it.”

“I know,” he murmured, stepping closer. One step. Then another. Each one splintered something deeper in my chest.

“I didn’t realize,” he said roughly, “how fucking unbearable it would feel to imagine you with someone else.” His voice dropped to a lethal rasp. “To imagine another man touching you. Kissing you. Claiming what’s mine.”

He stopped inches from the bed, towering over me, his body strung tight. “Your father needs sunlight,” Archer said. “And Hadrian’s sons are... convenient.”

“You bartered me, Archer.”

The words split the air between us, sharp as broken glass. “I know.”

His hand twitched at his side, like he wanted to touch me but didn’t trust himself. Didn’t trust that he wouldn’t destroy us both.

I pushed to my knees on the bed, rising to meet him. “I don’t plan on taking that date any further,” I said, voice shaking.

“Why not?” he asked. Shadows unfurled at his feet, curling around the bedposts and winding up the sheets. Then they slipped around my ankles like black silk.

“Because I don’t want anyone else,” I whispered. “I don’t know what to do.”

The bond between us cracked wide open. Archer sank to his knees before me. “Severyn,” he breathed.

I reached for him. Gods help me, I would reach for him even if it was the death of me. “Why can’t we exist?” I whispered. “Help me understand.”

Slender ropes of shadow coiled around my wrists. His voice, strained and low, brushed my ear as he pulled me closer to his chest. “I told you, if anyone suspects I kept that snake for you, I could be in trouble. The academy exists so heirs are chosen in good faith. I broke the sole purpose of the academy.”

“Archer,” I exhaled, leaning toward him. “I found the snake. I defeated it.”

“But I kept it. For you.”

His fingers brushed my jaw, curling around it—careful and devastating. Once again, I was a tealight. A fragile flame slipping through oil, always just out of his reach.

He rested his forehead against mine, taut and trembling, as if our skin might melt together. As if the shadow bath had fused us, ember and charcoal entwined.

“Then we lie,” I said. “We lie through our teeth and pretend we don’t care for each other.”

The death of us would not be sudden, but slow. It would wilt and decay, shrivel from a light that never dared to touch us.

“I cannot pretend around you,” he said. “You saw me nearly punch Rok.”

“I know. But what happens next?”

He cupped my cheeks between his hands and pressed a kiss to my forehead. I stared through my lashes, at the slant of his jaw, the glacial blue of his gaze. Then tilted his face lower, until only a breath separated us.

“I’m dangerously close to kissing you,” he said. “That is what is next.”

“I wouldn’t tell anymore.”

His lips met mine—cool and sweet, with the faintest bite as his teeth grazed my lower lip.

He moved forward on his knees, caging my hips beneath his, our bodies colliding with the weight of everything we hadn’t said.

“I could make you hate me,” he growled. “It would be easier.”

“Try.”

A hand slipped under my silk top, kneading my breast as his other cradled the back of my head. I memorized the feeling of him on me, the way his breath whispered my name, his nails tracing slow lines across my stomach, and the scrape of his jaw along my collarbone as he pulled my top away with his teeth.

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