Page 43 of Fated in A Time of War
Instead…
I don’t let go.
Her hand comes up, slow, uncertain, settling against the line of my jaw. Warm. Steady. Terrifying.
And then she leans in.
The kiss is soft. Tentative. But gods, it’s electric. Sparks crawl through my nerves, setting every scar, every wound alight. It’s not hunger, not yet. It’s not surrender either. It’s something else. A truce carved in silence and breath. A fragile thing with teeth.
Her lips linger against mine, just long enough for me to know I’ll never forget the shape of them. Just long enough for the world to tilt, the stars to spin, and the weight of everything I’ve lost to feel… bearable.
CHAPTER 14
ALICE
The kiss lingers on me like a second heartbeat, thrumming under my skin with every step. It isn’t a memory. It’s alive. My lips still burn faintly, my nerves hum, and no matter how I tell myself to breathe, to walk, to keep moving like nothing happened, I know I’ll never be able to untangle myself from that moment. Not now. Not ever.
I don’t regret it. Not for a breath. Not even as the weight of it presses down on me heavier than any restraint he ever tied around my wrists.
Every step through the broken rooftops feels… altered. Not softer. Not safer. Just charged. Like the air after lightning hits too close, when your lungs taste of ozone and your bones buzz as if the world is reminding you that you’re alive.
Krall walks ahead, rifle steady, shoulders rigid. He doesn’t look back at me. Doesn’t say a word. But that stiffness in his spine—too tight, too precise—isn’t dismissal. It’s guarding. He’s protecting something. Not from me, but from himself. Protecting that crack in his armor he refuses to name.
So I give him space.
The path takes us across the broken shell of what used to be a commuter bridge, down into the skeletal remains of anindustrial quarter, and finally into the shadow of a crater so deep it swallows the horizon. At the bottom rests the carcass of a mag-train, twisted on its side like some metal beast felled mid-flight.
Krall motions us inside without a word.
The car’s husk is rusted, ribs of ferro-steel bent inward where the blast caved it, but it’s shelter. Dry. Hidden. And when the echoes of our boots fade into silence, the quiet isn’t like the silence outside—waiting, suffocating. It’s different.
It’s private.
I lower myself onto a half-collapsed bench. The cushion is long gone, just a strip of corroded frame under me, but my legs are grateful anyway. My muscles tremble with exhaustion, though I know it isn’t just fatigue. It’s the residue of him—his grip on me, the press of his chest against mine, the heat of his breath when the world cracked open.
Krall doesn’t sit. He stands in the corner like a sentinel, the barrel of his rifle tilted down but not away, eyes cutting over the wreckage as though shadows might rise up and bite.
I break the silence first. My voice sounds too loud in the hollow car.
“You going to stand there all night?”
His jaw flexes, a flicker of muscle under scar. “Maybe.”
“Not much of a bed,” I say, patting the bent rail beside me. “But it’s better than pacing yourself into a hole in the floor.”
He grunts. A sound that isn’t quite a refusal, but not acceptance either. His eyes flick to me for half a breath, then slide away, as if he’s afraid of what he might see—or what I might see in him.
I let it hang. Sometimes silence is louder than words.
I pull my canteen free, take a small sip, then hold it out. He doesn’t move at first. Then, slowly, he crosses the space, crouches, and takes it. His fingers brush mine in the exchange.It’s nothing. Barely a touch. But the current sparks again, same as before, same as it always will.
He drinks. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Passes it back.
“Thanks,” he mutters, so low I almost don’t hear it.
I don’t smile. Not where he can see. But something in me loosens, a knot I’ve carried since he first dragged me from the rubble and tied me like cargo.
We sit in that strange quiet, the walls creaking faintly around us as the wreck settles in the wind. Outside, the night is still, the distant thrum of artillery no more than ghosts in the air.
