Page 82 of No Greater Sorrow

“On that very first day, when you smiled at me as you were coming out of the forest, I knew that my life would never be complete without you by my side. You—miraculously—seemed to agree, and since that moment, my existence has been dedicated to keeping you safe, keeping you happy, even in the times that I faltered. For those, I beg your forgiveness. And I pray that you will let me belong to you from this moment on. Again, and forever.”

Aleja swallowed and squeezed his hands. “If you need to hear it said, then, yes, I forgive you.”

They surged forward at the same time, lips meeting so violently that Aleja tasted blood and didn’t care. Nicolas was alive. Nicolas was with her, tugging her tunic up so that he could run his hands along the length of her spine. He pulled her against his body so quickly that if Aleja didn’t have the advantage of Otherlander instincts, she would have stumbled. But there was no break in their kiss, even when it felt like all the air had been yanked from her lungs.

She had no idea how he managed to maneuver her to the ground, but the cool grass against her bare back made her gasped at the sudden cold—a sound that was swallowed by Nicolas as he kissed her again, his tongue slipping into her mouth. Vanilla and woodsmoke surrounded her, filling her, until she was drunk on the taste of it.

A part of her wished he would indulge the burning need between her legs right away—that he would hitch her shirt up and yank her trousers down and fill her as she wanted to be filled. But Nicolas simply trailed a line of burning hot kisses down her throat before whispering, “Give me your vows. Tell me what you want.”

Her back arched, allowing one of Nicolas’s hands to swoop under her, drawing her torso closer to his. Their hearts beat in tandem now, not as before, when she was human and hers had an extra pulse in the quiet space between his.

“I want all of you,” she whispered, feeling like she only had a few frantic moments to get her words out before she fell into a silent rapture from his hands, his mouth, his hard cock digging into her hip. “I want all of you, with no secrets, with nothing left unspoken. I want you to kiss me like the world is about to endevery single time. I want to love you until it hurts, until it makes me want to tear myself apart, and I want you to do the same. You make me a monster, Nicolas. So let me be a monster. Let me love you selfishly, wildly, until it destroys us both.”

“Yes,” Nicolas moaned into her mouth. “Ruin me as much as I want to ruin you.”

Hellfire, this kisshurt, and Aleja couldn’t get enough of it—she nearly gasped in protest as Nicolas wrenched his mouth away to bite at the soft skin at her collar. She knew she was grinding against him desperately, relishing in every small bit of pressure on her core, but she couldn’t stop herself any more than a starving animal could stop from devouring its kill.

She arched into him, the need for more contact overwhelming. Her leggings were gone with her hardly having noticed Nic fumbling with the waistband, but instead of the press of his cock against her, she was suddenly hauled up. Aleja’s back met the cool stone of one of the pillars as he lifted her, and her legs wrapped around his waist on instinct.

Two of his fingers slipped beneath her underwear, but Aleja was able to drag herself away from his kiss for long enough to mutter, “Need younow.”

She was so wet that Nicolas pushed into her with no friction. They both shuddered the moment he was seated inside of her—a mixture of relief and need. And then, he began to thrust, one hand on her ass to keep her steady, another on the ruined pillar he’d pressed her against.

There was no artfulness to their fucking, no sense that one of them was trying to seduce the other. Aleja shifted until she could free one hand. It flew to Nic’s hip, her fingernails curling into him like claws, urging him to move deeper, faster.

When she screwed her eyes shut, he growled, “No. Watch me. And let me watch you.”

Her legs spasmed around Nic’s waist, but he responded by pushing her more firmly against the stone, forcing her to take him deeper. A wild moan left her mouth. Maybe it was the freshly renewed marriage bond, maybe it was the long weeks she’d spent denying herself the Knowing One’s body, but the climax moved through her in waves, each more intense than the last. Her open eyes met the sky, and it swirled over her in bands of magenta and deep blue—colors that had always been there, but she was seeing for the first time.

Nicolas seemed to forgive the sudden break in their eye contact, because his mouth met her throat, and then he was spilling himself inside of her.

She didn’t realize there was blood beneath her fingernails until Nicolas slumped against her with one final shudder. If he’d any qualms about the lines she’d carved into his back, he made no mention of it as his mouth again captured hers.

It took a long time for Nicolas to release her legs, so she could place her shaky feet on the ground. A trail of his seed slipped down her inner thigh, but she had no desire to wipe it away, no desire to free herself from the ways he had marked her. From the ways they had marked each other.

The Knowing One trembled in her arms. Our Lady of Wrath had always been the only one who could bring him to his knees. “My Aleja,” he said, trailing another line of kisses along her jaw, punctuated by a nip at her earlobe.

They stood with their foreheads pressed together for a long time, listening to the sound of crickets in the tall grass and the humming streetlamps on the other side of the hill. A part of her wanted to take Nic’s hand and ask him to show her the place where their little hut had once stood. She wanted so badly to replace her memory of this landscape from the Trials with something else, something real. But the Hiding Place awaited them, no matter how much she wanted to stretch this night into eternity.

“Sorry,” Nicolas eventually murmured, inelegantly pulling on his trousers. Aleja couldn’t help but smile at seeing the Knowing One like this, trying to balance on one foot in the wet grass as he dressed.

“What? Why are you sorry?”

“Our marriage bed probably shouldn’t have been a patch of mud and a few ruined pillars?—”

“Stop. It was perfect. It wasus,” she said.

Nicolas smiled at her, and for a moment, she could forget everything that waited for them just a few minutes away, on the other side of a shadow.

10

THE SCHISMATIC

“Similar to human religions, the concept of an apocalypse is found in various myths of the Otherlanders. However, it is typically depicted not as an event to be dreaded but as a natural cycle of the universe, maintaining balance among all things.”

—Excerpt fromTen Myths of the Otherlandersby Emiel Nasir.

There waslittle to do in the Hiding Place, now that the army camp had disbanded, and its soldiers scattered among the ever-growing forest, patrolling more like bands of guerillas than an organized army. Aleja patrolled with them sometimes, Garm at her side. Despite Taddeas’s insistence, she mostly stayed quiet at meetings between the Dark Saints, feeling unable to contribute to discussions when the most she could offer was academic theory on Renaissance artwork. Something that may have been useful in the palace, should someone have a question about one of the paintings, but meant nothing in their grim reality.

---