Six Scorched Roses (Crowns of Nyaxia)

My strength came back slowly. Vale warned me that recovery would be long and challenging. I wouldn’t have my full strength for months longer. He didn’t know that I already felt better than I had for most of my life.

Mina departed a week after I woke. She had a life to get back to, after all. Letting her go was bittersweet. I didn’t cry this time—I’d gotten all that out of my system when we first reunited—but I did watch her leave in the moonlight, a lump in my throat.

Later that night, Vale came into my room. While Mina was here, he slept in a different room—or, if I was feeling especially unwell, stayed in the armchair of mine. Now, with her gone, we both seemed acutely aware of our sudden privacy.

He stood awkwardly in the door, fussing with random items on the bureau.

I watched him, a smile tightening my cheeks, feeling strangely warm in a way that I suspected had nothing to do with my lingering fever.

“I have something I’ve been meaning to give you,” I said.

He turned, eyebrow twitching. “Oh?”

“Well, something I promised you.”

I leaned to the bedside table and reached into the drawer. Vale sat at the edge of the bed.

“Put out your hands.”

He did, and within them, I placed one last rose.

Mina had given it to me shortly before she left. “I thought you might want to remember home,” she had said with a wink, somewhat drily—a dark joke about all we’d escaped.

I had to drop the flower into his cupped palm, because it was falling apart. The stem was a dried-out stalk, the leaves crumbling, the petals disintegrating in dusty patches of black and faded dark red.

Vale let out a low chuckle.

“And to think I was going to forgive your debt.”

“I promised you six roses. Thus, I have provided six roses.”

“And I have given you plenty of my blood,” he said. “So it looks like our deal is done.”

He smiled at me in a way that was, perhaps, supposed to be coy, but felt sadder—more uncertain. It occurred to me that it had probably been a very long time since Vale had to deal with uncertainty.

I was still feverish and dizzy, but I leaned across the bed, turned his face towards me, and kissed him.

His arms folded around me, pulling me closer to him. He deepened the kiss immediately, like he’d been waiting for it, and it consumed me—with my senses heightened like this, I lost myself in his taste, his texture, the way his breath quickened a little when the full length of my body pressed against his. I wound my arms around his neck and reacquainted myself with him, running my hands over his shoulders, his back, his throat, his hair.

And he did the same, touching me like all this time he hadn’t been completely sure that I was really here. Not until now, when he had to reaffirm every angle of my form.

I pulled away just barely, just enough to tilt my head to a new angle.

But he said, before I could move, “I need to ask you something.”

I paused there, so close our noses were touching. My eyes flicked up to meet his. Our clothes were still on, our mouths parted, and yet I felt so staggeringly connected to him in this moment—our breaths nearly matching in cadence, slightly unraveled, shared between us.

“Ask,” I whispered.

“I need to return to Obitraes.” He leaned a little closer, so each word brushed my mouth. And here he snuck a little kiss in, a faint graze of his tongue over my lips. “I intend to go back to the House of Night.”

“And?”

Another touch, barely a kiss—mine, this time.

“Come with me,” he said.

He exhaled the plea, and I took it into my lungs.

“Yes,” I said, giving him my answer in my next breath.

Our next kiss was longer, deeper. I melted against him. The next thing I became aware of, I was against the bed, Vale lying beside me.

He pulled away.

“You have to understand what you’re agreeing to. It’s a nation at war. I’m not sure what we’ll be returning to.”

He held my shoulder, firmly. And though his gaze kept wandering down to my mouth, it always came back to my eyes—examining me, making sure he understood the answer to this important equation.

The answer to the equation of what I would do now, with my new, endless life.

The easiest question in the world.

“Do I seem, Lord Vale,” I said, “like someone frightened of the unknown?”

His eyes crinkled with a smile.

“Nosy mouse,” he murmured, and this time, when I tried to kiss him, he let me. We wound ourselves around each other. My thighs opened around him. I gave him every one of my new, heightened senses, and for the first time in my life, I felt so utterly at ease with the world that surrounded me.

Vale had discarded the withered rose in favor of my skin. The petals spread around us, now nothing but decaying dust.

Unnatural life.

Rightful death.

And Vale and I, between both, beholden to neither, and everything we were ever meant to be.