Page 38 of Burned Alive to Be His
The thought is an agony more profound than any physical pain. I look past him, my gaze finding her. She is standing by the altar, her hands pressed to her mouth, her eyes wide with a terror that is a sword to my heart.
And in that moment, as the world begins to fade to black, the last of my pride, the last of my arrogance, the last of my carefully constructed walls, crumbles to dust. All that is left is a single, terrifying, undeniable truth.
I love her.
It is a revelation. A cataclysm. It is the breaking of a world. I, Xvitar, the predator, the monster, the dragon who values nothing but strength and treasure… I love this fragile, impossible human.
“Run,” I try to say, but the word is a choked, strangled gasp.
The warrior above me laughs. “She cannot run. There is nowhere to go.”
He is right. The mountain is about to tear itself apart. The bridge is our cage, and we are all going to die here.
I gaze at her, at Judith, and I know this is the last time I will ever see her face. The last time I will see the fire in her dark, beautiful eyes. And I cannot let my last words to her be a command. They must be a truth.
“Judith!” I roar, my voice a broken, desperate thing, forcing the name past the crushing pressure on my throat.
She flinches, her eyes locking with mine.
“Run,” I gasp again, my vision beginning to blur. “Please… run.”
She does not move. She simply stares at me, tears streaming down her face, her expression one of pure, heart-wrenching agony.
The warrior above me tightens his grip, a cruel, final squeeze. The last of the air is being forced from my lungs. The world is a fading, grey tunnel.
But I have to tell her. She has to know.
“Meeting you…” I force the words out, my voice a raw, broken whisper. “It was… beautiful. The only beautiful thing.”
I look at the face that has become the center of my universe, and I give her the only thing I have left to give. A promise.
“In the next life… I will find you,” I rasp, my vision fading to black. “I will come back for you… I will take you as my mate…”
The warrior above me snarls in disgust and raises a fist to deliver the final, crushing blow.
But he never lands it.
Because in the last, fading moment of my consciousness, I see her move. She is no longer crying. Her face becomes a mask of pure, unadulterated fury. She turns from me, her eyes locking on the blood-soaked altar. She grabs my obsidian sphere, my most prized treasure.
She raises it high above her head, her mouth open in a scream I cannot hear over the roar of the volcano and the rushing in my own ears.
And then, the world goes white.
19
XVITAR
The first thing I’m aware of is the pain. It is a symphony of agony, a white-hot chorus conducted by my broken arm, my gashed side, and the deep, throbbing ache in my leg. The second thing is the silence. The roar of the volcano has subsided to a low, hungry rumble. The clash of steel is gone. The screams have faded. There is only the whine of the wind and the sound of my own blood, a slow, hot trickle against my skin.
My eyes flutter open. The world is a smear of grey sky and black rock. I am lying on the obsidian bridge, the body of the warrior who was choking the life from me a heavy, dead weight on my chest. His eyes are wide, glassy, and empty, a single, perfect hole drilled through the center of his forehead. It is a wound made not by a blade, but by a focused, impossible force.
I shove his corpse off me with a groan, the movement sending a fresh wave of agony through my entire body. I roll onto my side, my vision swimming, and I push myself up, my good arm trembling with the effort.
The caldera is a scene of utter devastation. Grakar’s other warriors are dead, their bodies twisted, broken things on the bridge. Grakar himself is a heap of shattered bones and ruinedflesh at the base of the altar, his chest rising and falling in shallow, ragged gasps. He is broken. Beaten.
But my eyes are not on him. They are not on the dead. They are searching, desperately, frantically, for the only thing in this world that matters.
And then I see her.
