Page 26 of Beast of Blood and Ash
Her lips glistened. She licked the honey from her thumb, then caught me looking and snapped her gaze away. A bloom of color rose on her cheeks against pale skin.
Without thinking, she reached up, fingers hesitant, and brushed at something on my jaw. Her touch was featherlight. A single fingertip, warm and sticky, catching on a spot of honey I’d missed.
Time fractured.
I didn’t breathe.
Her touch, her scent, the honey and the sweetness and the coppery thread of her fear, all tangled together, crawling over me with the crackle of lightning. Pressure built behind my ribs, a physical pain, aching for closeness, for anything to bridge the distance. I wanted to lean in, to press my face to her palm, to beg for just a second more.
“I …” I tried to speak, but my voice betrayed me, thick with longing.
She pulled away, fast and sharp, the connection snapped. Her cheeks went scarlet. Her eyes shuttered blank, her whole body drew in on itself, small and apart. She jumped up from her seat and retreated to the farthest corner of the room.
The distance yawned open again between us, as wide as the chasm between worlds. The moment was ruined, the ashes of hope drifting down around our shoulders. I was a monster. I would always be a monster.
I stared at my hands, fighting the urge to beg her to come back, to let me try again. But I’d already pressed my luck. My want was a wound I couldn’t close, raw and open and exposed to the air. Reika didn’t look at me. The stone walls felt smaller, the light colder.
The warmth of what might have been was already flickering out.
If I looked at her too hard, she would disappear. So I made myself look away, and waited, half alive, for something I couldn’t bring myself to name.
10
REIKA
If I thought sleepingin the human quarters was hard, sleeping four feet away from Omvar was a challenge my subconscious was too scared to face.
The room felt too small, and too big, both at once. Stone walls pressed in, but there was nothing to anchor myself against, just endless black and the faint, shifting yellow glow of a heat crystal that bled over everything.
It was an alien sort of dark, not the safe blanket of night from home or even the false dusk of Scalvaris's tunnels. This darkness had weight. Mass. It crawled into my chest and sat there like a boulder.
I lay curled on his too-large sleeping platform, every muscle clenched so tight it hurt. The blanket was bunched in my sweaty fists, a silky thing that was almost scratchy but radiated a low heat suffused with his scent.
Metal. Smoke. Sweat. And something deeper, something almost sweet. Not honey. Definitely not blood, though the copper-sharp ghost of it still threaded the air. A tang of sulfur clung to the humidity, coating the back of my throat.
My skin felt sticky. While my muscles screamed for rest, my mind kept gnawing on the question of why the hell I was there.
Omvar was on the floor. He’d made a nest from blankets, as if that made any difference to the way his body took over the room.
I’d tried to insist I could make a pile for myself, that I didn’t need the platform, didn’t deserve it, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He wouldn’t even look at me while he set out the bedding, just kept working silently, his hands steady, as if that could make the world make sense again.
My satchel was out of reach, flung by the door when I’d fumbled inside, half panicked, and still tasting steel and adrenaline from the brisk walk there. Not that the herbs ever really helped. Nothing did. My anchor now was this pathetic blanket, my fingers digging grooves into it with sheer force, as if I could hold myself together.
I hated how aware I was of him.
Every time he shifted, the gritty scrape of a claw against stone, or the slow, measured sound of his breathing, another jolt of panic shot through my gut. Every cell in my body was on high alert. Yet there was a kind of comfort buried under the fear. The heat of him, even from across the room, was more real than the artificial warmth of the bedding.
I closed my eyes, desperate for escape, but found no comfort in darkness. Just ghosts. The memory of him covered in blood, the fresh streaks I could still see behind my eyelids.
It wasn’t just that. My mind wandered, unwanted, to the taste of honey on my tongue, the press of his mouth against mine, that desperate, wild kiss in the training caverns. The confusion rose up in me like a fever every time I thought of him.
Monster. Protector. A new hunger as sharp as a knife.
That hunger shamed me. I fought it as hard as I fought the nightmares. Harder, maybe.
I pulled the blanket tighter, balled my fists under my chin, and tried to find somewhere in my body that wasn’t burning or aching or desperate. If I could just get warm, maybe. If I couldtrick myself into believing I was safe, even for a little while. I counted my breaths like they were steps out of hell. I repeated my makeshift mantra, the one that sometimes helped:You are not broken. You are not broken.
But the words were a lie, as thin as the air. Safety, always a lie.
