Page 293 of Alchemised
His resonance hummed beneath her skin, following the pathway of her nerves and veins, mapping her. Not erotically, but in the same panicked way her own resonance sometimes flared when she was afraid someone was hurt and wanted to find the injury. It reached all the way to her toes and then vanished, but she scarcely noticed as his tongue ran up on her inner thigh, and then a haze of hot pleasure consumed her.
Her shirt was undone, skirts up around her waist, when he sank into her. She wrapped her arms tight around his neck, pulling him close, burying her face against his shoulder. The world had reduced itself to a single point, Kaine, his breath and body and touch.
As they lay entwined on that too-small sofa, limbs entangled, it was like that horrible hungover morning and yet completely new. This time, they’d gotten it right. Her eyes fluttered closed, tracing her fingers across his skin, but he sat up after only a few moments.
He was looking her over, his eyes searching.
She lifted her head, still catching her breath. “What’s wrong?”
His thumb found the scars on her ribs. “I worried about you. Had a lot of time to wonder if I’d done everything right when I healed you.”
She caught his hand. “You did everything perfectly.”
He still looked worried. “And nothing’s happened since?”
“No,” she said. “I haven’t left Headquarters at all since I got back. And I—I won’t anymore—except to come straight to you. I’m not—” The words caught, tangling in her throat. “I’m not allowed to. Got very strict orders about that, so you won’t have to worry anymore.”
He gave an audible sigh of relief and sank down to her, brushing a kiss against her forehead.
Helena closed her eyes, trying to let him have this, but her stomach clenched and her jaw trembled as she tried to swallow her emotions.
“What’s wrong?”
She looked up and found him watching her again.
“I—I liked foraging. I used to go with my father, during the summers.”
There was a pause. “I didn’t realise it was important to you.”
She was silent for a moment. Thinking of the wetlands stretched out around her, nothing but the wilds and the mountains and the brilliant blue sky above, the only place where she could breathe without smelling blood.
“Sometimes it was the closest thing to freedom I still had.”
She felt him freeze.
“It’ll just be until the end of the war,” he said, the words half plea and half vow.
A bitter laugh caught in her chest as she looked at him. “Just till then? When’ll that be? And what end do you think will somehow go well for either of us?”
He couldn’t meet her eyes.
She looked away, too. “There are things I’ve been a part of that I know the Eternal Flame would never officially approve of. I don’t know what will happen if it all comes out.”
Her chest tightened as she thought about those rooms underground where Crowther had taken her so many times now. The blood. The burns, the flayed body parts, tangled nerves, split open and twisted apart in horrible, terrifying ways. Helena’s name was beside Crowther’s in those prisoner logs. Her handwriting cataloguing in clinical terms the injuries she’d healed, the condition of the prisoners when they died or were placed into those horrible underground cells. She knew it was intentional on Crowther’s part, having her listed as the medical personnel on-site. Leverage.
At one point, he might have let it remain a latent threat, but she expected no mercy now.
If the war was won, without Luc on her side, she had few friends.
Kaine took her hand. “You can run. Say the word, and I’ll get you out.”
A craven, exhausted part of her sparked to life at those words. Out. Free. Away from the war.
She hadn’t known how much she’d wanted it until she heard it offered by someone who meant it. She’d been so quick to refuse her father when he’d wanted to return to Etras, but now she physically longed for it.
But the war would continue, no matter where she went, and Kaine would be there. He couldn’t run. If she was gone, Crowther would not keep him alive.
“No,” she said, meeting his eyes.
