“Caius…”
His eyes closed lazily when she said his name. He leaned in, his forehead coming to rest against hers. It would have been easy for him to close the space between them, to press his lips against hers. She wouldn’t have resisted if he did. But he didn’t.
Echo’s heart beat so loudly in the quiet that she thought Caius could probably hear it.
“Thank you,” he said again.
She knew he wasn’t talking about the healing balm. He meant Thank you for saving me. For not leaving me alone. For caring enough to come for me.
How easy it would be to tell him. To pull back the curtain on the last secret she had: the mark with its branching shadows slithering beneath her skin. Unlike the other occurrences of the ku?edra’s poison, this one did not transfer through touch. She had touched and been touched since then and no one had suffered for it. No one but her. It would be such a simple thing to lay herself bare before him now, when all artifice and armor had been stripped away.
She felt the mark pulsing with every beat of her heart. She and Caius were both scarred, in their own ways. Echo recognized it in him because she knew what it felt like to feel cold inside. To be cut off from things other people took for granted: compassion, empathy, love. She knew the harsh bite of neglect. And she knew what it felt like to discover those things, to come to know, without a doubt, that there were people in the world who cared. Who loved her. Caius hadn’t been truly alone, but a part of him had withered after Rose, like a garden without a soul to tend it.
For a while, they simply sat like that, breathing the same air. He wouldn’t push. Wouldn’t make demands. If the gap between them was to be closed, she would have to be the one to close it.
So she did.
Her lips brushed his softly, a tentative exploration. He stayed still, allowing her to angle her head just so, letting her direct the intensity of the kiss. She kept it light. He sighed, the feel of it tickling the sensitive skin of her mouth. His thumb continued to rub small circles on her palm, a counterbalance to the soft pressure of the kiss.
Echo had expected a spectral interruption in the form of Rose’s presence at the back of her mind, but none came. She was alone in her head.
She pulled away, just enough to break the contact of their lips. When Caius leaned back, his movements a mirror of her own, her hand snaked up to rest on the back of his neck, keeping him close. He tensed, but didn’t retreat another inch. Echo stroked the baby-fine hairs at the nape of his neck and felt him relax into her touch. His lashes fanned out against his cheeks, dark against his too-pale skin.
“Is this okay?” he asked softly.
“This is okay,” she replied.
He let out a slow breath as he leaned into her. They held each other up like that for a while. Echo would have been perfectly content to stay that way. Or, better yet, to let her tired body tip to the side and sleep there, face to face, knee to knee. She remembered the way he had rolled into her side when she’d crawled into his bed the night they had rescued him from the ruined temple. After weeks—months—of danger and gut-churning terror, it had been the first bit of peace she’d known. She wanted to feel that again. She wanted Caius to feel that again.
She pressed her lips to his, deepening the kiss. His hands found her waist, pulling her closer. With a shaky exhalation, he broke the kiss. His lips trailed over her cheekbone, along the curve of her jaw. They found her neck and the fluttering pulse there. She spared a moment’s thought for the black mark hidden beneath her shirt, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
BANG.
The sound of the door crashing open had them both jumping away from each other, like guilty children caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
Dorian stared at the two of them in dismay. A feathered head poked over his shoulder.
“I knew it,” Jasper hissed. “You owe me five bucks.”
“Can I help you?” Caius asked, remarkably casual, considering where his lips had just been.
Echo flushed scarlet.
“It’s Tanith,” Dorian said, finding his composure. In his hand he cradled a pendant, one side a mirrored surface, covered in smeared blood. “Our contacts at the keep have sent a call for help. Caius, she’s massacring them. We have to go back. Now.” Dorian started to exit, but then turned back. “If you want to try to get her blood, this is the best chance we’re going to get.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Caius stepped through the massive archway in the center of Wyvern’s Keep, and his chest seized up. He had the barest of moments to appreciate the arch’s soaring architecture—the two iron dragons with upraised heads meeting in the center, bellies burning with crackling braziers—before the guards registered his presence. They stared at him dumbly for a handful of seconds before one of them had the wits enough to press the edge of his sword to Caius’s throat. It was remarkably sloppy. He’d have to remember to see them properly chastised for their sluggish reaction time later. When the dust settled. And if he was still alive.
A smirk stole across Caius’s lips as he remembered explaining his plan to Echo.
“I’m not going to storm the keep,” he’d told her. “Those walls have withstood countless assaults for a thousand years, and they’re not about to fall to a ragged force of Avicen and Drakharin who can only just barely work together without falling at each other’s throats.”
“Then how do you plan to get in?” she asked.
“The front door,” Caius said, as if it weren’t an insane thing to say.
“You’re just going to walk in like you own the place?”
At that, Caius smiled, sharp and wicked. “Indeed. Technically, I do own the place. It is the Dragon Prince’s official residence, after all.”
When in doubt, Echo liked to say, bravado. It was a lesson Caius had absorbed well.
Their numbers were small, but if Caius couldn’t pull off what he was about to attempt on his own, then it wouldn’t matter if he showed up with an army at his back. Dorian’s presence was a given. Echo’s was a bonus—how marvelous it would be to sweep into his old home, the one that had been stolen from him, with the firebird at his back—but Ivy’s insistence on accompanying them was a surprise.
“After your previous experiences with Drakharin hospitality, I didn’t think you’d ever want to set foot within those walls again,” Caius had said, the pouch of shadow dust heavy in his hand.
Ivy had tipped her chin in Echo’s direction. “Where she goes, I go.”