The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

“Please, princess. Just a few minutes. You go out there and feel the sunrise. Maybe I’ll feel it too. Bond and all that. I’ll stay in the shade and then we can go a block away to the apartment and I can make passionate love to you for the next seven hours.” My eyes narrowed. He smirked. “It’s appealing to you,” he said. “I can tell.”

“I know we’ll still have to fight,” he said. “But we’ll never have to do it alone again. That counts for something.” It counted for everything.

Hell, maybe the love scared me even more. To give someone that much of yourself. To give someone the power to destroy you. I could understand it—why Vincent never learned how to do it. I could understand how it would be easier to never feel that kind of vulnerability. And yet. I pressed Raihn’s palm to my face, leaning into his touch. And yet. Ther

“You think I’m not terrified every time I look at you?” He touched my face—tracing the curve of my cheek, down to the point of my chin, his smile softening. “Fuck, of course I am. You have my heart.”

The love I felt now, for Raihn, was… terrifying in its ease. I was afraid that something would come to rip it away from me. I was afraid that I would destroy it myself, by not knowing how to feel something so right.

That was enough uncomfortably blatant emotion for Mische and me.

I took his arm and very subtly wiped the sweat from my palms on his sleeve. “Nice,” he muttered into my ear, as we followed Ketura out the door.

“Ketura and Vale wanted to execute you.” I nodded back toward Oraya. “Your queen wanted to execute you.” Bloodthirsty little thing that she was.

Right now, though, I didn’t need any kind of magical goddess-gifted heart bond to know that Oraya was pissed. She was wearing that a-cat-is-pissing-on-my-leg-and-you’re-the-cat face. My favorite of the diverse library of Oraya faces.