Page 180 of Shifting Hearts 1
I flipped her over, driving into her from above, hands braced on either side of her head. Her eyes met mine — wide, tear-glossed, burning.
“Say it,” I demanded.
“I can’t,” she whispered.
One hand went to her face, brushed a strand of hair away from her face. “I think you already did.”
She came then, shuddering, her back arching, her fingernails digging into my spine. And I followed, losing myself inside her, inside the chaos, inside the fucking ecstasy of it all.
Afterward, we lay tangled on the old stone floor, sweat cooling, magic fading.
Her head rested on my chest, her breath uneven. The knives had gone dark. My threads, slack and listless, hung from my wrists like bloodied ribbons.
“I shouldn’t have—” she started.
“Don’t,” I said hoarsely. “Please.”
She sat up, pulling her tunic around her shoulders like armour. “This changes nothing.”
“It changes everything,” I said, too quietly.
She looked at me like she wished I were wrong.
And maybe I did too.
Because I knew what came next. The guilt. The fear. The walls rebuilt, stone by stone.
She stood, and I didn’t stop her. I couldn’t
“We can’t stay here,” she said.
I nodded, rising slowly, every muscle aching with the weight of her absence. “Then we run again.”
She turned her back to me, heading toward the narrow break in the cathedral’s wall. But just before she disappeared into the night, she looked back.
“I saw it,” she said. “What you carry. What they did to you.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“You didn’t deserve it,” she added.
And then she was gone, just like that.
And the cathedral, once alight with prophecy and need, fell silent once more, but the magic that lingered between us stayed.
And I knew — no matter how far she ran — she’d never outrunthis.
I stood in the silence long after she had vanished. The fire had burned low, leaving nothing but embers now. My shirt hung in tatters from my shoulders, streaked with soot, blood, her fingerprints. I didn’t bother fixing it. Didn’t bother pretending I hadn’t just surrendered everything I had to her – the symbol of everything that had made me who I was and then tried to erase me off the face of the earth.
I sat back on the cracked stone floor, the heat of her body still echoing through mine like phantom fire. My hands shook — not from exertion, but from what I’d let happen. What we’dbecomein that moment. No mask. No armour. No excuses.
Just man and woman, fate-tangled and fire-bound, damned from the start.
The silence pressed in around me, thicker than before. Not empty.Watching. The cathedral had seen our truth. It would remember. It would keep the shape of her cries and my groans carved into its bones like runes.
I dragged a hand over my face, trying to scrub away the scent of her on my skin, but it didn’t work.
Part of me wanted to chase after her. To stop her before she disappeared again, to force her tostayand face what this meant. But the smarter part — the older, more broken part — knew better.
