Page 134 of Beasts of Briar
I couldn’t stop running my hands over him, touching every part of him to make sure he was real.
“This isn’t possible,” I stared up at him.
“I don’t know.” He reached up a hand to scratch the back of his head. “One minute, I was in more pain than I’d ever felt in my entire existence, and the next, I was washing up on the shore. I started walking to find you, and then, here you were. Like the most magnificent vision.”
“Kairoth, the magic. It gave you back.” I pressed a hand to his heart. “It knew you. It knew you weren’t a monster like them. And it gave you back to me.” I hugged him tight, tears streaming down my face.
Bloody stars, the amount I was crying these days.
“Hey.” He thumbed away a tear.
“Happy tears,” I said, sniffling.
He looked down at his hands, his arms. “I don’t have magic anymore,” he said. “None at all.”
I looked at him, realizing his shadowy beast was gone.
“How do you feel about that?” I asked.
His face broke out into a smile. Without his shadows he looked so young. So unburdened. “I feel alive.”
I started laughing, and soon we were both laughing.
He caught me in his arms again, taking my breath away as he stared down at me.
“So what now, Bellamy?”
Driscoll and Leoni had just asked me that very question, and I hadn’t had an answer, yet now it came to me so easily.
“We rebuild my father’s farm,” I said. “We make a home.”
“A family,” he added.
I nodded. “A family.”
He leaned forward and pressed his lips to mine. “That sounds perfect. It sounds like everything I’ve ever dreamed of.”
And it would be. It truly would be.
Epilogue
KAIROTH, TWO YEARS LATER
Iwatched from the window of our farmhouse as Bellamy sat in the garden, planting seeds. The ocean washed up on the black-sand shores in the distance, the skies blue, not a cloud to be seen.
Bellamy stood, the curve of her round belly just barely visible underneath her dress. If you didn’t know to look for it, you wouldn’t notice. But I noticed everything about my wife.
She’d be showing soon enough, and then maybe, we’d tell everyone. Or we’d keep this secret to ourselves just a little longer.
I wasn’t sure what I’d done to deserve this life, but I would cherish it for as long as I lived.
Bellamy glanced in my direction, catching me staring at her through the window. A smile curved her lips and she gestured for me. I tipped my head and walked out the front door, joining her in the garden she’d planted as soon as we’d started rebuilding this farmhouse.
Peppers, okra, and potatoes grew in abundance, and behind her, rows of corn stalks popped up from the ground.
“You summoned me?” I asked as I approached her.
She wore a bandana around her head, her wild black hair sprouting from it. She still wore that same red dress she’d been wearing when we first met. Except now it was her gardening dress, smattered in dirt and soil.
