Page 28 of Beast of Blood and Ash
He froze, his breath caught, as if even acknowledging the contact might ruin everything. But he didn’t move away. He letme set the distance. The message in his stillness was clear: I controlled the edges of this small, dangerous peace.
Warmth gathered behind my eyes. I wanted to curl against him, to be held, to forget everything for a few careless heartbeats. I wanted so much I could barely stand it. I felt small, and sheltered, and on the brink of something terrifying.
Was I safe with him? Or was I just trading one kind of danger for another?
I shut my eyes. Heat, strength, an impossible gentleness. The memory of his body carried me a few inches farther from the dark. The bands around my chest loosened. Slowly, I let myself curl toward him. I felt the shift of the platform, the careful way he adjusted his weight, as if to support me without ever caging me in.
I pressed my forehead to the side of his arm. The scales were smooth, warm, alive. The world narrowed to the shape of him, the low hum of his breathing, the furnace heat bleeding into my bones. I felt a vast, impossible arm come around me, cautious, uncertain, and then, when I didn’t jerk away, settle over my shoulders, drawing me in.
I could have cried. I didn’t. I just let myself be held, for once not the only thing standing between me and the dark.
The nightmares didn’t find me again. I drifted down into a silent, dreamless sleep, wrapped in heat and heavy limbs.
11
REIKA
Where was I?
That was the first shock. I woke up without a scream clawing its way up my throat, my heart not thrashing like a caged bird punching through my ribs. I just … existed. There, in the dark, warm and whole. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d opened my eyes without the world bracing for me to shatter it.
Heat and shadow pressed in close, a living wall against my spine. The night came back with a serrated bite: Omvar, looming in my room, dripping blood, his voice a low command for me to come with him. Omvar, leading me through silent tunnels where his shadow was the only shield. Omvar, giving me those honeyed donuts I’d devoured like a starving thing.
Omvar. Again and again. He was the only thread left tying me to reality.
My eyes adjusted slowly to the yellow creep of the heat crystal overhead. Its glow limped across stone walls and ragged textiles, painting Omvar’s room in bruised light. The air was thick, heavy with his scent and the ghost of copper. Blood, dried and baked into the seams between stone and flesh. The platform was a nest of tangled blankets, and it radiated the kind of warmth you could almost mistake for safety.
The word “safety” surfaced, and my brain spat it up like poison. It tasted foreign, unfamiliar, almost sweet. The idea of it curled in my gut.
His arm was thrown over my waist. Its rough scales were hard and smooth in alternating lines against my skin. His wing was a near-weightless canopy draped over us both—yet it felt like the most solid thing I'd ever known.
I lay frozen, my chest tight, my awareness a live wire stretched between every point where his body held me. My fingers trembled against his wrist, twitching along the ridges that ran over sinew and scale. I half expected him to jolt awake and make me explain myself. Half dared, stupidly, stubbornly, to believe this was allowed. That I could want this, want him, for even a moment.
With the edge of my mind, I poked at the feeling, bracing for it to bite back. Wanting had always been dangerous. Maybe deadly. But here, now, nothing snapped or snarled. Nothing chased me down for daring. Just Omvar, a furnace all around me, breathing slow and deep like he could sleep through a cave-in. His heat was animal, alien, but it soothed the frayed edges of old panic.
Shouldn’t I be terrified?
Shouldn’t I run?
The instinct was there, a raw, twitchy thing, but something new was drowning it. Hunger. A wild ache in the hollow beneath my heart. I wanted to press closer. To see if the warmth I felt was real.
I let my fingertips brush over his wrist, mapping the intricate patterns of scales with a featherlight touch. They felt impossibly smooth, nothing like the rough, scabbed hands of slavers.
No.
This was a different kind of danger. Tempting. Inviting. Making promises I wasn’t sure my body was ready to test.
Slowly, uncertainly, I trailed my fingers up, letting them glide over the corded muscle of his forearm. Omvar didn’t move. Just a steady mountain of heat, alive but untouchable. I inched higher, over the rise of his elbow, the soft indentation where crimson scales faded to something almost like blush. I kept going, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm in my ears, drunk on the audacity of it. Wanting more. Wanting to know every inch of what the world said I should fear.
He began to stir. A ripple of movement went through him as his hand twitched, claws flexing just enough to send a warning through my skin. I jerked my hand back, guilt flooding me, sick with the certainty I’d broken some fragile peace.
But his voice came, sleep-rough, rumbling from the shadows into the cradle of space he’d made for me. “You don’t have to stop.”
He didn’t pull his wing away. If anything, it pressed closer, a pocket of warmth that felt like a world inside his world. I swallowed, the words thick and sweet as honey on my tongue.
I knew I shouldn’t.
Just looking at him most days made me shake, and not in a way I liked to admit. But there, cocooned in the impossible, I was weightless. Braver than I had any right to be.
