Page 315 of Scarlet Wars
His hands were in my hair, on my face, everywhere at once, shaky, frantic, grounding and desperate all at once. I grabbed fistfuls of his shirt, pulling him closer, needing to feel him, to know this was real, that he was solid beneath my hands and not some dying dream.
Our lips moved like we were trying to breathe through each other, too hard, too fast, soaked in blood and panic.
Tears blurred my vision, but I didn’t stop kissing him. Icouldn’t. His mouth was warm and trembling, tasting like salt and something I’d thought I’d lost forever.
He kissed me like he was afraid I’d vanish in the space between blinks. Like if he didn’t feel every inch of me, right now, he might lose me all over again.
We were breathing too hard, and still, we didn’t pull away.
He made a sound—half groan, half sigh—and I felt it echo in my ribs.
His arms crushed me to his chest, and I let him. Let him hold me like he could press us into the same shape. Like he could keep me here with the sheer force of his grief and love.
I kissed him harder, our lips slipping, colliding, shaking.
It wasn’t a perfect kiss.
It was asurvivalkiss.
Awe made itkiss.
Adon’t ever leave me againkiss.
When we finally broke apart, barely a breath between us, our foreheads pressed together, he touched my cheek with the gentlest brush of his thumb. He wiped away the tears I hadn’t realized were still falling, as if he could erase the pain with that one quiet gesture.
His eyes were red, his voice thick with everything unspoken. “We’re okay,” he said, like he needed to believe it as much as I did. “We’re both okay.”
And maybe we weren’t. Not really.
But I nodded anyway.
Because for one fragile, borrowed second—after tasting the quiet desperation in his kiss—I almost believed it too.
After a few long, heavy beats of silence, I asked the question I hadn’t wanted to form. The one that had been clawing at the edge of my consciousness since the moment I woke.
“Where are James, Cara, and Stephen?”
Caden exhaled slowly, then pulled back enough to meet my eyes.
“I have no idea,” he said, and there was a low tension behind his words that made my stomach twist. “I woke up in this cell with you and those assholes. I don’t even know how much time has passed.”
Cold, creeping dread pressed against the back of my neck like a hand.
“Maurice really died?”
Caden nodded once. “He won’t come back from the dead a second time.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that—relief, grief, something uglier tangled in between—but this wasn’t the time or place to untangle it.
“We need to break out of here,” he added, as his jaw tightened in anger. “Find the others, and kill that fucking High Chief, once and for all.”
My gaze shifted to the room around us. Stone. Seamless. No windows. No visible doors. Nothing but blank walls and blood and silence.
“How are we supposed to get out of a room that hasno doors, nowindows…withouttranslation?”
Caden looked at the wall.
Then at me.
