Page 43 of Incarnate

Kallúm reclaims my lips with his, holding his breath until he presses fully into me, stiffening, shaking and growling. He leaves my mouth to bite my neck, and I cry out as he pins me down. The asshole even bites the other side of me, to which I start to fight him, but then he kisses me hard with my blood in his mouth. “Those should last for a very long time.”

Oh how I hate that I love that.

He rests against me, his full weight, his body still inside mine as he kisses my cheek, my neck, the shell of my ear. The shadows in the corners of the room recede, the candles returning to their normal flicker.

"You keep trying to return to a place that was killing you, love.” His voice is harder now. Not cruel, but firm. The voice of a man who has had this argument with a ghost for decades and has not once changed his position. "Every time you reached for the ocean, your soul thinned. Every time you tried to channel your power through the border, you lost a piece of yourself that I could not restore. You fought our bind, so it never could properly tether you here.”

We lie there in silence, my neck aching, but I don’t push him off. I can feel his emotions through it now. The way anger, love, and fear braid together in him, inseparable, each one feeding the others.

The things he did to keep me here…

“You don’t have to tell me what happened,” I say something in me telling me to soothe my mate. Because he won’t like that no matter what, I am returning to my pantheon. "I have to go back," I say, my brows upturning. "I came back to you once, from death itself. I will come back again."

"You can't promise that."

"I'm an ocean goddess, Kallúm. The tide always returns."

His eyes continue to hold me there, looking at me with an expression he is trying very hard not to break. His thumbs trace my cheekbones. His breath is unsteady.

"How long?" he asks, his voice slightly broken.

"I don't know."

"Let us just sleep tonight," he says, and his voice is so quiet I feel it more than hear it.

I press my lips to his forehead.

K A L L Ú M

I have held many things in these hands.

Swords, throats, the wheel of a ship in a storm that swallowed lesser men. I have held the beating heart of a god who begged me to put it back, and I did not.

But the conch shell is the lightest thing I've ever carried, and it weighs more than all of them.

She asked me to walk her to the shore, as if the ocean at the bottom of these cliffs were not about to take her from me for the second time in my existence.

I did not argue. I have learned, at great cost and over decades measured in storms, that the ocean does not respond to commands. You cannot order the tide to stay. You can only stand at the edge and trust that the water remembers where the shore is.

The black sand was cold beneath our feet. She walked half a step ahead of me, her hair unbound and pale against the dark dress she'd chosen. Dawn had barely crested the horizon.

When she reached the waterline, her shoulders rose like someone returning home.

I stopped behind her. Close enough to touch.

My tempest…

The world provided the other half of my soul as a goddess of the ocean, one of the only pleasant gifts to ever reach me. And it was so fucking determined to remove her. I loathed accepting that this could simply be what it is to be in love with the ocean.

“The necklace," she said, and turned to face me.

I looked at her, took her in the way I did the first time I saw her in that cave, the first time our paths crossed, luminous, broken, and entirely mine. Now, the mortal's warmth tempered the goddess's fury, and the combination is something I have no name for. Something better than either alone.

She is evolving.

My hands found the clasp at the back of her neck. My fingers grazed the skin there, the place where her hair meets her spine, where I have pressed my mouth a thousand times in the dark. I take in both bites on her pearlescent skin, the claims on who she belongs to.

I unhooked the chain.