Page 137 of Trial of Bronze and Blood
He nods, brow pinched in thought.
“What else did she say to you?” he asks after a moment.
Dru glances down at her bare feet, not wanting to meet his eye.She considers telling him about the dragon, but she’s having trouble believing it herself. And it’s not exactly easy to explain.
“That tomorrow will be the most difficult day I’ve faced in my life,” she says, meeting his gaze again. “It’ll destroy me if I let it.”
“It will be difficult,” he confirms. “There can only be two winners, and Cato must be one of them.”
She swallows, knowing the truth of it in her heart. One of them will likely die tomorrow. Maybe both of them, given one winner must be from the Imperium.
She looks away, staring at one of the thicker red veins in the marble floor. “Well, at least there’s a possibility you’ll be rid of me soon.”
Marcus silently brushes the sensitive skin beneath her chin, and she glances up at him. Sincerity shines from his bright eyes, brow furrowing with concern.
“Dru, I—I don’t know if I can live in a world where you don’t exist,” he admits, his hand grazing the back of hers before bringing it back to his side. She lets out a short breath through her nose. “All the time I spent away from you, I endured it knowing you were trained well enough to survive. If you hated me for what I said to you, if I could never see you again, I’d find a way to survive in that world. But…”
He bows his head and trails off, loose hair hanging in front of his face in blackened tendrils.
Dru swallows hard at his unfinished confession. Without saying it in so many words, he’s admitted what she wanted—needed—to hear him say. This might be her last chance to let Marcus in, to tell him how she feels.
Even if doing so destroys her.
Removing her grip from the balcony railing, she steps close enough to him that he has no choice but to look at her. His one hand flexes on the railing, the other straight at his side. She holds his gaze, hoping he’ll understand the depth of what she’s about to say.
“The only reasonIhave been able to survive this world isknowing you were somewhere in it. Even though I believed you’d betrayed me, that you didn’t feel for me the way I felt for you.” He opens his mouth to say something, but she takes a step forward and places a gentle thumb over his lips, her hand resting on his jaw. “At least you were alive. At least, one day, I might see you again.”
Blatant longing flashes across his face, deepening his gaze and flaring his nostrils. He closes his eyes, sucking in a shaky breath between his lips, his chest heaving with the effort. Her own breath grows shallow—she doesn’t think she’s mistaken his feelings for her, but once she does what she’s about to do, there’s no turning back.
Removing her thumb but keeping her hand on his cheek, she arches into him, her chest grazing his. His eyes wrench open at the contact, searching her face. Every single part of her body aches, from the places they’re touching—and the places they’re not.
Before she can question if she’s making the worst mistake of her life, she tips her head back and presses her lips to his.
Marcus doesn’t hesitate, destroying any uncertainty left inside her heart.
Oh, stellae.
He wraps his arms around her and pulls her to him, moving his lips against hers with a hard, hungry desperation she can only attribute to knowing this might be their first and last night together. Or maybe it’s because they’ve been dancing around this moment since the festival. Before that, if she’s being honest—since he pressed himself against her to hide them from the soldiers at the tabernae.
She throws her arms around his neck so that her nightgown rides up as their kiss deepens, reveling in the way he holds her to him. As if he can never get close enough.
With their bodies pressed so firmly together, the thin pieces of fabric between them quickly become untenable. The muscle of his chest and stomach flex through his tunic, and she wants it gone. She wants to bewithhim, to have nothing left unsaid or unfelt between them.
He presses into her, and she finds herself flushagainst the alcove wall of the balcony. His hands gently drag down her back and her sides until they grip the space between her waist and her hips, his skin hot against hers. She sucks in a breath at the contact, heat igniting in all the places he touches her, the rest of her aching fiercely from his absence.
Drawing her close again, he grips the fabric of her nightdress, pressing his fingers into the soft edges of her hips. He angles his head slightly and flicks his tongue inside her open mouth. A soft, quiet moan escapes her throat as she does the same, her body arching into him while the more sensitive parts of her ache deeper and deeper.
She’s been with men before as part of her duty. That’s all it’s ever been for her: a duty to the Faithless, to complete her orders by any means necessary. But each time she was with those men, she thought of him.
It’s always been Marcus. Even when she thought she hated him for all those years, she loved him.
Which is why she doesn’t stop him when he slides a hand up to her shoulder and deftly pulls down the strap of her nightdress, then the other. The material slides along her body and pools around her feet on the cold marble floor.
Carefully leaving her lips, he takes a step back. Her pulse pounds through her body as he takes her—all of her—in.
Using the concave wall to remain upright, she can’t help recalling all the physical scars left along her skin, a complicated map to her treacherous past. All the Faithless have scars, but many of hers were earned in the years she and Marcus spent apart.What will he think of them?
He meets her eyes and his own bare the depths of his soul. She finds understanding and longing and something deeper…
