Page 91 of Kissed By the Gods
“Kiss?” He echoes, bewildered. “That’s what you call that?”
I look at him, still panting, still very much pressed beneath the full weight of his body. “Well, I don’t know what you call it in Faraengard, but where I’m from, when someone slams their mouth onto mine and groans, that’s usually a kiss.”
“That wasn’t a kiss, Leina. That was a fucking confession.”
I freeze. Because oh.
Oh.
He leans back, just enough that I can see his face, the way his eyes flick over mine.
“I can’t have you, not the way I want. Not without losing everything.”
My breath catches on a burst of anger. “Then why did you start?”
He lets me go, angling his body away in the small space.
“Because I’m tired,” he rasps. “Because you were in my arms. Because for half a second, I let myself forget that I’m not allowed to have you. Not like that.”
He’s staring at some fixed point beyond the tent, like if he doesn’t look at me, he can pretend I’m not there. It shouldn’t hurt—I know the rules.No distractions.
I took the vows myself—forsaking my family and my past and my future. But it does. Itdoeshurt. I don’t move; I don’t break the silence. Because I’m afraid if I do, I’ll beg.
But after a few minutes, he does.
“You’re shivering,” he mutters.
“I’m cold,” I say, defiantly, and wrap my arms tighter around myself.
He shifts slightly, repositioning us so that he’s holding me with my back to his chest again. He tries to make it more clinical, less intimate, as if he’s simply offering body heat to another warrior in need of shelter. But his breath stutters against my neck as I relax into his arms.
“You forgot the furs,” he scoffs, trying to break the tension.
Because I’m a coward, I let him. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”
“Not a chance.”
Despite everything—the cold, the exhaustion from the climb, the weight of this distance we’ve spent months building and we’ll spend years keeping—the corners of my mouth tug upward. His chin brushes the top of my head as he settles in.
As my eyelids begin to droop, another shiver of cold rips through me. Even wrapped in his arms, the brutal wind outside claws at our tent, dragging the heat from the air. Then—for a breath—it feels like something shimmers around us. The cold recedes, and our shared warmth thickens, soft and golden.
We don’t speak. I lie in the dark with him, wrapped in his arms, until our breaths sync and our bodies relax. I let myself enjoy it.
In the morning, we’ll need to pretend again.
But right now, in this moment between oaths and longing, I let myself be his.
And I let him be mine.
“They made us forget with holy songs and rewritten scrolls. But memory is war. And I remember everything.”
Margin note in The Treatise on Tactical Collapse, inked in what appears to be dried blood
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
