28

I open my eyes and see only darkness. Am I alone?

No. There’s a silhouette framed against the dying light.

My muscles tighten, my mind still lost between sleep and phantoms.

He clears his throat—it’s Jadon placing a bundle of wildflowers in a vase on the dresser. Even in the coming twilight, the flowers are vibrant purples, yellows, and blues. Their perfume wafts through the bedroom, sweet and earthy, and mixes with Jadon’s scent of smoke and pine.

Right as he tiptoes to leave the room, I say, “They’re beautiful.” My mouth feels dry and stale, like old bread and straw.

“Just wanted to add some cheer and color.” He turns away from the door but doesn’t move any closer.

A fresh cup of hot tea sits on the nightstand, a tendril of steam rising from the surface. “You brought me today’s brew?”

He smiles. “I did. How are you feeling?” He hands me the mug.

I try to sit up, and an ache moves through my muscles, a reminder that I’m still injured but healing. “My limbs don’t feel like I’m being pulled down by anvils. The pain’s different. And my throat feels scratchy and tight. Something’s wrong. I feel like my mind is all over the place, like a leaf being blown by the wind. It’s not this.” I gesture toward the undressed wound.

Jadon takes a small step closer to the bed.

“Veril says that I don’t have Miasma. He thinks that I’m just recovering from an otherworldly attack. And if I don’t have Miasma, then that means that I’m not contagious.”

Amused, Jadon says, “Are you sure about that?”

“No.” I pat the spot beside me. “But you’re an adventurer. You court danger.”

His eyes turn silky-soft. “I do.”

“Then come sit. Tell me something thrilling that happened to you today. How was herb and plant collecting?”

“Veril wasn’t impressed.” Jadon eases onto the bed beside me, and he tells me that Olivia mistook oleander for summer shiso. “The old man was so mad, he turned every color possible. He told her she would have killed you immediately. And that’s before he saw that she’d found jimson weed. She thought they were morning glory.”

“Were morning glories on the list Veril gave you?”

“No. She said she saw me picking flowers and she wanted to pick flowers, too, because the cottage was just too dark and she wanted to pretty up the sitting room.”

I belt out a laugh.

Jadon does, too. “Veril nearly tossed her and the plant out. The plant is so dangerous that you shouldn’t even inhale it outside.”

I point to the wildflowers in the vase he set on the dresser. “Those are?”

“Jimson weed and oleander.”

I snort a laugh. It feels good—like I’m lighter.

He snickers. “Nah. Those are daisies and sweet pea.”

“And they’re beautiful, thank you. Please tell me you found my amulet.”

He shakes his head. “I looked again. Retraced our steps and everything.”

I deflate a little. “Oh no.”

“There’s still time,” he says, tugging one of my curls.

“If you say so.”

“I say so.”

The tea tastes like oranges and ginger and, yes, rum. I inhale a deep whiff of steam. The scent loosens my lungs some, but the pain in my leg and hip throbs. The coolness of the eucalyptus in Veril’s salve has tempered the pain.

Jadon glances at the door. “I’m already on Veril’s hate list, and you need your rest. If I stay, we’ll talk and you won’t rest, which means that you’re not gaining your strength, which means we’ll be here longer. So sleep, please.”

“Alone?” I want someone to share my raggedy web. Him . I yearn to be connected to someone. Him . To be touched instead of torn. To be touched not because I need to be nursed but touched because I want what I want.

Jadon rubs his neck with one hand and squeezes the bridge of his nose with the other.

“You look miserable.” My voice is raspy. “Am I making you miserable?”

He briefly clenches his jaw until his mouth softens, surrendering. “Absolutely.”

“Too bad.” I smile. My gaze flits from his eyes to his lips, then down to his rewrapped hand. “Good thing I know how to turn your frown upside down.”

“Yeah?”

I reach out to touch his hand. I spread my fingers across his skin, enjoying the story of his hands, rough from ironwork and battle.

The silence between us is taut, ready to snap.

My fingers drift from his hand to his cheek, and there is a different story here. The bristle of days-old stubble. The lift of his smile. This is the touch I want. One that causes that familiar fire to build in my belly, the fire that burns whenever he’s around.

“Drink more tea,” he says. “At least I can tell him I made you do that.”

“Yep.” I sip more tea, and its magic slithers through my body. I purr and sink farther into the pillows.

“Better?” he asks.

“Umhmm.” I give him a lazy smile. “Tell me…”

“About?”

“Why you’re covering the tattoo on your hand. You saw mine. Now I wanna see yours. All of it.”

He holds my gaze. “Some of us aren’t fortunate to have ink as intriguing as yours.”

“Let me see it up close and I’ll make that decision.”

He doesn’t move.

“I said, I wanna see it,” I slur, my tongue thick in my mouth, the tea still working through my blood, healing me, pushing me. “You’re gonna make me beg?”

He stares at me a moment more, then offers me his hand.

“Take off the bandage, please.”

He obeys and unwraps the cloth. The tattoo covers the top of his hand. Green ink, red ink, black, yellow, blue, creating a hand with fingers outstretched. One fingertip a flame. Another fingertip, ice. Water. Cracked earth. Darkness. In the center of his inked hand, there’s a large circle filled with a smaller circle, and then a smaller circle inside that circle until the final circle is a simple dot, with rings that ripple after a single drop of water disturbs the pool.

I trace my finger along that biggest circle.

Jadon closes his eyes.

My finger trails over to fire…ice…

“You should probably stop,” he says, his eyebrows high, his eyes still closed.

“You really want me to stop touching you?” My throat is tight, but not from Miasma.

“Oh, I want you to touch me.” He bites his lip. “I just want you to stop looking at my ugly tattoo.”

My finger trails from his hand to his wrist. “Where do you want me to look, then?”

His eyes open and pin me again like a rare moth. “I have another one. A nicer one.”

I quirk an eyebrow. “Ooh.”

He nods. “Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Here.” He places his hand atop mine and leads it to the center of his chest. His heart pulses beneath my palm, and I splay my fingers to take possession of his life-beat.

“What are you waiting for?” I say, my arm aching, all of me burning.

He pulls my hand to his lips and kisses the tips of my fingers.

I gasp, then whisper, “You want me to touch you somewhere else first?”

He studies me and holds his breath as I trail my fingers down his chest. He squeezes my hand before it can travel any farther, his bright-blue eyes darkening to bottom-of-the-sea blue. “Kai.” He says my name low, the same way he said my name that first time.

Flames lick across my skin as I lean closer, my gaze sliding from his eyes to his lips.

He whispers, “We can’t do this.”

“Hmm?” We are so close, just a breath away from touching, but I will not wait for that breath, and I pull closer to him and…

“We can’t do this,” he repeats, louder this time.

I freeze. “Why?”

“What if you’re already in love?” He removes my hand from his cheek and kisses it again before placing it on my hip. “We talked about this, remember?”

“We did.” I peer at him, heart pounding, waiting for the punchline.

Is he fucking kidding me right now?

The look in his eyes—no fire, no sparkle—tells me that he’s not.

He wraps one of my curls around his finger. “What if Before Kai doesn’t want the same things that Now Kai wants? And what if who she wants is nothing like me?”

A different kind of heat now warms my cheeks. Embarrassment. Rejection. “Move.”

“Kai—”

“Get the fuck off my bed.”

His face flushes, and his eyes dart from my face to the bed. “Can we just stop—?”

“We’re stopped. Go .” I tug my quilt from beneath him.

The mattress shifts as he wobbles to his feet.

I pull the quilt over my shoulders and face the wall.

“Please don’t get mad at me because I asked a valid question,” he says to my back. “I want this so badly, but I also don’t want to hurt you.”

I stare at the wall’s bumpy nothingness. Better than looking at him. Safer. But then the wall becomes too much, and I squeeze my eyes shut.

He sighs again. Then his soft footsteps move toward the door but don’t leave the room. Undecided.

I make the decision for both of us and let exhaustion pull me back into its cloud. And soon, it doesn’t matter if he’s standing there or not—I’m drifting off to sleep, and I don’t plan to open my eyes again until the new day. Nor do I plan to think about his valid question. Now Kai wants what she wants. She offered, he declined, and that’s that.

Neither Kai—Before or Now—begs.

My dream is not of silver-gray mountains or rancid seas or cries of despair.

Olivia is the only person in this dream.

I’m looking out the window beside my bed, and I see her hidden in the oleander bushes, pulling on my leather breeches and then swirling my cape around her shoulders. She’s already wearing my boots, and beneath my too-big tunic, she wears my bandeau.

Our eyes lock.

She glides her tongue over her sharp white teeth and backs deeper into the oleander. Before she completely disappears, I glimpse something shining on her neck.

My amulet.

I blink—she’s gone. Nothing there except crabapple trees and ferns.

I bolt up in bed, my head spinning. Panic rattles my achy bones.

That dream—it felt so real . But there’s no way it could be real. Right? Not after I warned her.

I’m dreaming. Yeah.

Right before we left the cottage, she claimed that my clothes needed additional washing because they were filthy. No, I’ll take over and wash them again, even if that means wheeling my way to the creek myself.