Page 137 of Scarlet Wars
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I was shaking when I pressed my ear to his chest, the world narrowing to the silence between heartbeats. I didn’t breathe. I didn’t blink. I only listened, desperate for the sound I never thought I’d be begging for.
I held my breath until I heard it.
A beat.
Faint, but there.
“Come on,” I muttered, already on my knees beside him, my hands fumbling for his jaw. His skin was like ice beneath my palms, slack, unresponsive, wrong in a way that made panic roar up my throat.
“Breathe,” I whispered, though it came out broken, barely a sound at all. “Please, Caden,breathe for me.”
I tilted his head back, my fingers trembling so hard I could barely find the right angle and sealed my mouth over his.
His lips were freezing—laced with the cold taste of river water and skin drained of color—but I breathed into him, anyway, forcing air into lungs that refused to move. The St. Lawrence clung to him asdeath itselftried to claim him.
And some frantic, hysterical part of me thought…
So this is how I feel his lips for the first time.
Not in the heat of everything unsaid. Not in surrender. But here, on my knees in the mud, forcing life into him while the world burned behind us.
One breath.
Two.
I pulled back, gasping, the sound tearing out of me like fabric ripping. His chest stayed still.
No!
I bent again, breathing harder this time, desperate enough to shatter something inside me. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare fucking leave me.”
I crushed my lips to his and forced his mouth open, pushing air into him like it was the only thing keeping the world from collapsing. I poured everything into it, every breath, every heartbeat, every piece of me that still remembered how to hope.
And for one raw, uncontrolled second, my restraint broke; my tongue brushed his, tasting the cold metal tang of the river, the ghost of life I was still fighting to pull back into him.
The contact was electric—violent—a spark ripped through me so hard it felt like my soul flinched. And as if the same shock tore through him too, Caden’s body convulsed. His eyes snapped open, wild and disoriented, right as a wet, choking cough exploded from his chest.
Water spilled from his mouth, cascading over my hands as his body arched, fighting for air, for life, forme.
Relief punched the air from my lungs. I sat back, shaking, drenched, half-laughing, half-sobbing. “Gods, you idiot,” I whispered, brushing the wet hair from his forehead. “You couldn’t make this easy, could you?”
He coughed again, chest heaving, lashes dripping with river water. For a moment, he stared at me—unblinking, disoriented, alive.
Then his fingers twitched, rising to his lips as if he needed proof they still existed.
“You kissed me?” His voice came out rough, like gravel dragged through water.
I raised a brow, trying to hold on to sarcasm because the alternative was falling apart. “I gave you mouth-to-mouth, genius.”
He coughed again—harder this time—then pushed himself upright with a groan, water streaming off him in rivulets. “With tongue?” he rasped, a flicker of that infuriating arrogance ghosting across his face.
I narrowed my eyes into slits. “You were dead, Caden. Forgive me if resuscitation wasn’t on your list of preferred kisses.”
He blinked, his eyes dark and unguarded in the moonlight. “You’re crying.”
I shrugged and swiped at my cheeks with my already-soaked sleeve. “Excuse me for having an emotion about your untimely death.”
