Page 95 of What Is Dark Within Me

His wings spread, filling the room, then curled around her.

“I’m yours too,” he told her. “In this life and every other. I belong to you.”

He seemed to come for a long time and didn’t withdraw afterward. Neither of them spoke as she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him close, her bare chest pressed against his tunic. In unison, they took a deep breath.

“That’s one half of the promise fulfilled,” he said, shifting so he could kiss her forehead. “Where would you like me to put you back together, dove? There’s a nice bed upstairs. And marble counters in the galleries. I have been thinking a lot about bending you over my desk.”

“Calm down,” she laughed. The scent of vanilla and woodsmoke made her feel pleasantly lightheaded. “Let’s save some spots for later.”

She looked up in time to catch the way his smile disappeared. “There’s a war coming. There might not be a later.”

He was still deep inside her, his cock as hard as he had been when he entered. Aleja decided tomorrow would be a good day to worry about the war. Soon, she would no longer be fully human. She wanted to put an Otherlander's stamina to the test before she had it herself.

“I guess you have a point, Knowing One. Where should we start first?”

“Would you like a reminder of all the interesting ways we can take advantage of our very large wedding bed?”

Alejandra did.

* * *

Otherlanders slept,she learned. They dreamed too.

But if Aleja woke and found Nicolas was still up, he would put his notebook aside and tell her stories of their past. They were never the bloody ones—never memories made during wartime—but snippets of their life before, as Dark Saints, and even earlier, as humans.

“We were married then too,” he said. “We lived by the sea in a kingdom too old to have a name. One day, you went quail hunting. An asp was hiding near the stream where you stopped for a drink. The herbalists could do nothing for the snakebite, but I’d heard of the horned god that lived in the forest. When he came to me, I knew I would offer anything—even a lifetime of servitude to the Knowing One—if it meant you got to live.”

His fingers wound into her hair, and she wondered if he missed that Aleja, until he kissed her head with a sigh of relief as if he had come to the end of a long and treacherous journey.

“Of course, my priority was convincing the Knowing One who came before me to nominate you as a Dark Saint,” he continued with a low chuckle. “Like with Jack, it helped that you had already been on death’s door, but if I’m being honest, I was so relentless I think I annoyed her into agreeing. The others knew war was coming. The previous Wrath had been with the Dark Saints since the Great Fall. I don’t think he had it in him to fight again.”

“I wish I remembered.”

“I want you to have something,” he said. Her heart answered; a steady thrum that whispered,yes, yes, yes, I’ll take everything you give me and give you everything in return.

They disentangled, and he reached for the nightstand at the edge of the bed. It too had legs carved like flames to hold it aloft. He pulled a book from a drawer; a book she had seen twice before in glimpses. Beneath her fingertips, its leather cover felt like pebbles.

“What’s this?” she asked, allowing the book to fall open in her lap.

An image of herself looked back. Unlike the painting above them, this was recent; her hair was shorter, and her gaze more hardened. But the strokes of charcoal making the shadows of her face were gentle, carefully placed. She lookedbeautiful. Sure, she was used to seeing her face in the mirrors around the palace, but this… this must be how Nicolas saw her.

“It took a long time for me to return to my duties after you left,” he confessed, moving his body so that his wings encased her. “Once I did—mostly because Bonnie probably would have killed me and taken the title herself if I didn’t—you were the only thing in my thoughts. Whenever I saw a painting you would love, or noticed your favorite flowers blooming, it made me mourn you all over again. I started recording everything, so that when you returned, it would be like we were there together.”

There were not merely drawings of her, but of places and people; moments trapped in time. She could almost hear the bells of a small church in an old square, empty aside from a young couple stealing a kiss beneath a streetlamp. Then, a drawing of a marble sculpture she recognized from her history books.

Another page and there was a portrait of an old woman grinning from an armchair, a cat in her lap, and another draped across her shoulder. ‘Margie Crowle,’ the note beside it read. ‘Lit the black candle on her last day of life, wanting to be sure her cats were taken care of after she passed. In exchange, I asked for her company, and she complied. She was a poet, a philosopher, and an excellent conversationalist. You would have liked her. The cats, less so. They now reside at the Hiding Place. Even the hellhounds are terrified of them.’

And so it went on, for page after page. Among the drawings were frequent pictures of her; sometimes as she was then, but mostly as she was now.

“I warned you I was obsessed,” Nicolas said. “I suppose that makes me a hypocrite, doesn’t it? I cajoled the Second into allowing you into the Hiding Place. I broke a ceasefire to rescue you. How am I any different from Roland?”

“You never slaughtered innocents,” she answered, though she’d had the same dark thoughts herself.

Aleja didn’t keep a routine that week, and the days bled together. It seemed like she rarely left the room with the portrait of her and Nicolas watching like a mirror. She wondered what had changed in him since he was the brash young man who’d goaded the Knowing One into pulling his mortal wife into the Hiding Place—now, every time she asked what to expect in the Trials, he couldn’t hide the worry in his eyes.

She didn’t ask. She didn’t want to know the answer, but he offered it himself.

“I’ve lost you so many times,” he whispered one evening, using each pause between his words to kiss the corner of her mouth, her collarbones, the place between her chest where her heart beat in human rhythm. “I can’t do it again, not after this. So, you need to swear to me you’ll survive. Swear it to me.”

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