Page 46 of Queen of the Wicked
“Enough!”
The word lashes through the chamber, raw enough to stagger me. Rowan shoves me back with more strength than I expect, his chest heaving. His eyes burn like storm light, and for a heartbeat I see the echo of wings that no longer exist. “Do you think so little of me?” he growls, voice breaking. “Do you think I would crawl into another’s arms when I’ve bled across the world for her? When every breath I took was for her?”
The door groans open.
And she’s there. She’s real.
Every part of me that has withered since the Well, every piece of me that has clawed at shadows in vain, collapses at the sight of her standing there. Pale, trembling, rain-slick, butalive.
“Adelasia,” I breathe, the name tearing from me like a wound reopening.
My legs move before my mind catches up. One moment she’s across the room, the next my hands are cupping her face, terrified she’ll vanish if I blink. Her skin is warm, damp, trembling beneath my palms.
She gasps, tears spilling over, and presses into me with a sob that cracks me wide open.
I crush her against me, burying my face in her hair, clutching her so tightly it must hurt, but I cannot let go. Not again. Not ever.
“You’re here,” I whisper, my voice breaking apart as I crash my lips to hers. I taste her tears. I taste her life.
Every kiss is agony and salvation; every sound she makes a knife through my heart. I press my forehead to hers, panting, broken.
“I love you,” she sobs, clutching me tighter. Her lips find mine again, desperate, and I give her everything I have left.
For the first time since the Well, I feel alive.
Forty-Two
Adelasia
The night is quiet when Rowan finds me, pacing alone on the balcony outside our chamber.
I don’t hear him approach, but I feel him. That subtle shift in the air, the whisper of heat and energy that comes before Rowan speaks.
“You’re pacing patterns into the stone.”
His voice is soft, uncharacteristically careful.
“I can’t stop thinking,” I murmur without looking up. “About the Well. About…us. About how this doesn’t feeloveryet.”
The word hangs between us, heavier than I intend, and I finally lift my gaze. Rowan leans against the carved pillar, arms folded. The starlight spills across his cheekbones.
“You’re afraid,” he says simply.
“I’m—” I stop, pressing a palm against my sternum as if I can hold the tremor in my chest at bay. “I can feel her. Eternity. I can feel her rage inside me, like I’ve swallowed her whole and she’ll claw through my insides to get out. I can’t live like this. I want it out, but I can’t lose you both again, I won’t survive. And what if I break what little we have to hold onto?”
“You think you’re breaking something between us,” he says. “But the truth, Adelasia, is that you’re the only thing holding us together. If you feel that something isn’t right, then we trust you.”
My breath catches. The air between us tightens, charged and fragile. I feel him everywhere—in the weight of the silence, in the hum beneath my skin, in the way my magic stirs as though it recognizes him.
And then a voice behind us breaks the moment.
Kaius stands in the doorway, leaning against the frame, crimson eyes half-shadowed but sharp and burning. “Yes, we do.”
I turn to him, breath catching, and something in his expression softens when our eyes meet. “Whatever Eternity has left for us,” he says, stepping forward, “we end it. Together.”
Forty-Three
Adelasia
