Page 62 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

So I say it out loud. “It doesn’t stop with me.”

The room takes it. Nothing happens.

“I’m what they built the fourth point to catch. Not the shard. Me. And I can carry a line forward.”

There it is, out in the air where I can look at it. If I ever have a daughter, she comes out of the same convergence I did. She’ll be the same proof their system failed. She’ll be the same target for the next person who works out what she is. I would be handing her that on the day she’s born. Nobody who did it to me knew what they had in their hands. I’d know exactly.

I put the case down on the floor. Underneath the fear there’s something else. Want. I want Valen exactly as much as I did before any of this. Before the archive, the doorway, before he walked off my porch and out across that yard. The anger burned nothing out of me. There was a quiet assumption in me that it would, it turns out that assumption was wrong. I can sit here on the edge of this bed with my spine straight and my hands still. I can get through the night the same as I’ve gotten through every hard night I’ve ever had.

Or I can stop.

I lie back on the mattress. The ceiling in here has the same crack running out of the corner that it had when I was a child. I look at it for a while. Then I let myself think about him for the first time since I left and it comes immediately.

My mouth open on his throat on the floor of that room in Doria. Both points down against his skin and not one muscle in him moving under me. The sound he made when I ground down on him through both our clothes, with both my hands on his face.

Heat drops through me low and hard. My hand is at the laces of my dress and I don’t remember starting. I work them loose down my chest and get the front of it open to my waist. The air off the stone floor is cool on my skin. My nails drag down my own throat and over my collarbone, hard, hard enough to leave the line of it behind them. My fangs come down on their own, the same way my eyes go gold under dragonfire. They catch my bottom lip hard enough to open it. The sting arrives with the taste of my own blood. Days of holding every part of myself in place give out at once.

My other hand goes down my stomach and between my thighs. I’m already wet from a memory of my mouth on his throat and nothing else. Two fingers find my clit and circle it slowly. I’m slick under my own hand. My free hand moves to my breast, thumb rough over my nipple, imagining his mouth where I want it. My skin has started running hot everywhere I touch it, and none of that heat is coming off the room. I sink two fingers into my pussy. It’s tight around them, wet enough that they go in with nothing in the way. I curl them up hard but it takes teaching. It isn’t enough. It never is. My own hand gets me close and leaves me there.

“Valen.” His name goes out into the empty room. It’s the only word I let myself have.

My hips rock up to meet my own hand. I lose the rhythm. My fingers move faster, harder. My breath goes to pieces. I stop caring about any part of how I sound. Then my skin lights up, it comes up gold from the inside, fine, warm, spreading out of my wrist, up my forearm, into my chest, until the room has a second light in it. It’s brighter than it has ever gone.

I come hard. My back arches off the bed and I clench down on nothing. I know the rest of it before I’ve stopped shaking. I can put three realms between us. Every truth I have can stay locked down where nobody reaches it. Standing in my father’s cathedral with the last piece of the founders’ work lit on my own arm, I can tell myself I did the correct thing by every one of them. None of it makes me want him any less. Pushing him away never stopped me choosing him.

I lie there with my hand still between my thighs, my breathing coming down slowly. I let my thoughts go to him and stay there. His hands instead of mine. His weight over me instead of an empty room in my father’s house.

I fall asleep like that, still afraid of what I am, still wanting him.

Across the room the shards go on glowing faintly on the desk. My own wrist glows with them. The key stays exactly where I set it down.

Chapter 36

Ben

Iwalk the fence around the horse pasture. The light’s gone gold and low over the ridge. It’s still warm on the open grass out here. Behind me, the air has already started giving up its warmth for the night. The fence is solid. Nothing to log. Finish the loop, get back before Harper starts dinner without me, and that’s the evening. Then I look at the horses - bunched at the far end. All of them, tight together against the north rail, when they should be spread out over the grass working through the last hour of light. Their ears are pinned toward the treeline. The gray mare stamps twice and goes still.

I cross the pasture to check that side. The fence over there is as sound as the rest. Nothing on the air, no scent that shouldn’t be here, nothing moving in the trees that I can pick out. In August, with the graze this good lower down, nothing bothers coming off that ridge at all. Whatever they’ve got their ears on, it’s their business and not mine. I’ll mention it to Dane in the morning. I turn back to finish the loop when light gathers between two pines ahead of me. It’s too steady for the last of a sunset and too gold for anything at this hour. It holds where it is instead of moving. My hand goes to the knife on my belt.

The light settles and a man stands in it, wings folded back, fair skin with warmth under it, hair in a loose gather of gold. I know that face, I stood in front of it at the top of the Ascent with nothing left in me. It told me her soul comes back. It told me not to waste what I was paying for.

“Samuel.”

“Ben.”

I plant my feet at the edge of the pasture. “Is this it? Is the debt due?”

“It is.”

“Then make it quick. And leave Harper out of it.” I keep my eyes on him. “Whatever gets taken comes off me. That was the arrangement. She stays clear of it.”

He looks at me a while. “Nothing is being taken from you,” he says. “Not the kind of thing you’re braced for.”

“Skip whatever’s meant to make this easier and name the price.” I don’t soften it. “I’ve had months of nights since the Ascent putting together every version of what you people might come for. Say it. I’d rather have it than keep guessing at it.”

“There’s no soul-taking in this. No injury, nothing physical waiting for you at all.”

I’d rather it were physical. I set my feet and wait for the rest of it.