Page 30 of Scorched By Fate

Her strength—astonishing in its raw, stubborn humanity during the ambush—was fading. Here, under the suffocating quiet that followed the fight and the crushing heat of Volcaryth’s ridge, she was cracking.

My claws ached with the need to steady her.

“I—” she began, her voice uneven and splintered, barely piecing itself together. Her weight shifted, grounding slightly against the ridge beneath her feet—but just barely. “I didn’t have time to think. Those things …” Her words faltered, lost somewhere in the raw scrape of memory and the overwhelming chaos still clawing at her veins. “I didn’t?—”

“Stop.”

My voice came sharper than I intended, biting through the fragile space she’d carved for her protest. The flicker of softness lurking in her defiance startled into something wide-eyed.

“If you think I need an excuse, save it,” I growled, every syllable taut with restrained weight. “You’re alive. You fought back. That’s the only thing keeping this entire ridge from being painted with scavenger blood.”

Her lips twitched—the hint of a frown brushing against her brow before she leaned into a sharp, uneven laugh. Bitter, almost broken. “Then what's all that?” she nodded to the splatter left by one of the beasts before I cast him off the plateau.

The quip fell flat, though, trailing off somewhere beneath the heat stretching between our bodies like a fault line ready to rip wide open. Her gaze twitched downward briefly—not submission; no, not her—but something tangled and cautious. Maybe even strained. Her grip on the knife slackened before dropping entirely.

The blade clattered against the stone.

“You’re trembling,” I said again. Not accusing her this time, just noticing, just reading her the same way I read every shift in battle, except this war was entirely different. Entirely maddening. “And it’s not nothing.”

“I didn’t come out of that unscathed,” she replied, cryptic but unconvincing. The false strength wavering over the brittle layers of her voice only sharpened my awareness further. “I’ll be fine. I just need?—”

Her hand rose briefly, brushing across her face as though she could physically press the lingering panic aside. “I need—” She stopped again. Her line of thought broke with a sharp breath before looking back up at me.

Her expression was fiercer than I’d anticipated. Fiercer, too, than I was prepared for.

“I’ll deal with it,” she said, quieter now, but with every ounce of strength her emotions had left to offer. “My fear. My shaking. All of it. It’s mine.”

“No.”

The word came without thought—without restraint. Low but deliberate, sharper than the hiss of hot air pouring from the distant geysers below us. Every sharp instinct, every fraying edge of my mind burned in protest against her words, against the thin walls she attempted to build between us.

Her gaze snapped sharply upward, dark and unyielding as disbelief flickered there. “What?”

“Give it to me,” I murmured, claws twitching where they hovered near my sides. “Your pain, your exhaustion—it’s what I’m here for.”

TWELVE

VYNE

I stopped myself.

The edge of my tongue scraped against my fangs, heat surging up my throat as something inside me howled at the thin, slipping leash I’d kept anchored around the truth.

Her expression hardened again—a flare of defiance. “I’m not something to be?—”

“Gods.” My hand shot forward—not sharply, not in anger, but steeped in the raw frustration she pushed into every space between us. My claws brushed against her shoulder, feather-light, then froze when I felt her flinch beneath the soft but unyielding pressure.

Every ounce of me recoiled, a surge of self-control wrenching through my chest. But before I could pull back fully, her own movement stopped me. She leaned, imperceptibly but undeniably, just barely toward me. When my grip stilled—steady but quiet along the curve of her arm—she didn’t step away.

I couldn’t stop looking at her. At the fragile tremor carved into her jawline, at the roughness blooming over her cracked lips, at her lashes dusted with the ever-present ash streaking the rest of her face.

Her scent—fates above, her scent—threw every part of me into restless chaos. I burned brighter than the veins twisting deep through Volcaryth’s blackened heart.

Krysfruit. Smoked salt. Her. Always her.

“Selene,” I murmured, without meaning to. Her name cracked through my throat, more growl than word. “You don’t get to carry it alone.”

She stiffened a little beneath my touch, her gaze flickering over my expression like she was trying to read something there. “I do. I have to. I?—”

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