Page 27 of Chained to the Horned God
I guide him back to the cell without speaking. We pass no one. No guards. No prisoners. Just silence wrapped in blood.
Inside, I rinse his knuckles in the basin. He doesn’t flinch when the salt stings. I press gauze to the worst split. He holds still the whole time.
When I finish, he speaks again—barely above a whisper.
“I don’t want to lose this. Whatever it is.”
“You won’t,” I tell him. “Not unless you let go.”
He doesn’t.
The torchlight bleeds down the hallway in sickly orange stripes, casting flickering shadows on the stone walls as we return to the cell. The blood on Barsok’s hands has dried into rust-colored lines. I can still smell it—sharp, metallic, with that faint trace of sweat and earth that always clings to him. But I don’t recoil. I don’t ask questions. I already know all the answers that matter.
Inside, the silence wraps around us like a second skin. The air is heavy with everything unsaid. He sits on the edge of the straw pallet we’ve managed to make less terrible with stolen blankets and flattened rags. I kneel before him, slowly, not because I am weak but because something about the moment demands reverence. Like this isn't just a man covered in scars. Like he's a temple of pain that only I get to enter.
He watches me with those storm-dark eyes, his expression unreadable, carved from stone but trembling at the edges. My hand finds his wrist. His pulse jumps against my thumb. I lean in, my breath fanning against his throat, and press my lips gentlywhere that beat drums beneath the surface. A kiss, not of passion or claim, but of recognition.
He lets out a sound—not quite a sigh, not quite a sob—and tilts his head so our foreheads meet. We stay like that, breathing together. Not speaking. Not needing to. My fingers trace the edge of his jaw, where the fur gives way to skin scarred from more battles than he’ll ever recount aloud.
His arms encircle me slowly. No urgency. No hunger. Just care so precise it nearly undoes me.
He’s massive—bigger than anything in this gods-forsaken pit—but right now he holds me like I might break if he shifts wrong. His hands splay across my back, one callused palm moving in slow circles, grounding me. My breath hitches. I blink fast, trying to trap the tears before they fall.
His voice breaks the silence first, low and rough as worn stone. “You sure?”
I nod, barely moving. “You?”
He nods too. His horns graze the stone wall as he leans back against it, drawing me with him. I rest my cheek against his chest. Beneath the fur and muscle, his heart beats steady, slow, a rhythm I could fall into if I let myself.
No more words come.
We lie down together, side by side. No kiss. No wild press of mouths or skin or need. Just warmth. Just closeness. I tuck my face beneath his chin, feel the weight of his breath stirring the loose strands of my hair. He shifts so that his leg touches mine, his hand wrapped around my wrist like a promise he doesn’t know how to say out loud.
The chains are still there—on our lives, on our wrists, on the rules of this place—but they feel... quieter. Less suffocating. Maybe it’s the illusion of safety or the simple act of knowing someone would bleed for me again. Maybe it’s the firelightdancing on the walls or the echo of his voice still tangled in my memory.
But for the first time since they threw me into this gods-cursed arena, I don’t feel like I’m surviving just to survive.
I feel seen.
I feel like someone.
The quiet settles between us like dust, soft and patient. He doesn’t move, doesn’t push. I think that’s what undoes me the most—not the violence he’s capable of, not the stories he keeps locked behind those eyes, but the restraint. The reverence. The way he treats me like I’m more than blood and bruises.
His breath deepens. I feel his body relax beneath mine, muscles unwinding, heartbeat slowing. I shift just enough to brush my lips against his jaw—light as the touch of a prayer—and then I settle back down, our foreheads resting against each other.
I dream, not of blood or fire, not of chains or screams, but of wind through grass and the way his hand felt when it closed around mine. Of sunlight breaking through clouds. Of what it might be like to be free with him. To wake somewhere far from this place and laugh without fear of who might hear.
I don’t say the words forming in my heart.
Not yet.
But I think them.
Loud and clear.
I trust him.
Not because he’s the strongest, or the fiercest, or the most feared among the pit.
