She nodded.
He kissed her, and they collided like stars.
Echo broke away just long enough to stand and tug him toward the daybed near the window. He followed, his hand warm in hers.
The backs of her knees hit the cushion and her legs, already wobbly, folded under her. She sank into the seat, pulling Caius after her. She thought it would be awkward, to be so entwined, but it wasn’t. The parts of her that she found ungainly fit against his body as if that was where she was meant to, had always been meant to be.
His hands traveled up her waist, his face buried in the crook of her neck. Her body was alight. She was a supernova, filling the sky with light.
Her brain processed sensation in fragments. A kiss pressed to her jugular as if to calm its frantic pulsing. A hand tracing the side of her torso, from her hips. Up and up and up. He trailed his mouth against her skin, his nose pushing against the collar of her T-shirt.
So close. Too close. His breath ghosted over the cotton shielding the black mark from view, and though Echo knew the effect was all in her head, the scar seemed to shrink from his touch, chased back into the deepest recesses of her being by his warmth.
“Don’t touch me,” Echo said. Caius’s response was immediate. He withdrew completely, sitting back on his haunches, hands upraised as if to suggest he meant no harm. She smiled to soften her words. “No, it’s fine. Just…not there.”
She tugged her shirt up. A frown creased his brow. She glanced down. A thin tendril of black had snaked upward, peeking over the collar of her shirt. It was hardly a millimeter, but it was enough.
“Echo,” Caius breathed, voice low, as if he already knew the answer and was dreading it. “What is that?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Echo.”
“Fine.” She sat up and shrugged out of the leather jacket she was still, for some ungodly reason, wearing. The T-shirt followed it, leaving her in nothing more than her jeans and a black sports bra, but there was no self-consciousness in her disrobing. It wasn’t longing that colored his stare, but concern.
He reached for her, his fingers falling short of the scar. She had told him not to touch it, and he respected that boundary.
“When did this happen?”
“At Avalon,” Echo answered. “When Tanith attacked. I’m not even sure how.” She looked down at the mark. “Lucky shot, I guess.”
Caius tore his gaze away from the scar to meet her eyes. Without her jacket and her shirt and the warmth of Caius’s own body heat, she was cold. A shiver skittered down her spine. Caius’s gaze softened.
“May I?” he asked, gesturing to the scar.
Echo’s shoulder hunched, as if that would make her seem smaller. “I don’t know if it’ll hurt you.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think it will.”
“How can you be sure?”
He lifted one shoulder in a shallow shrug. “You burned the poison out of me once. You saved me. You protected me then. And I think your power is protecting you now.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Echo nodded.
His fingers brushed her skin, sending an entirely different kind of shiver dancing along her bones.
Nothing happened. The skin of his fingers remained the golden tan it always was. He traced the lines of the scar as if he were mapping the branches of a tree. As if it weren’t a grotesque stain splashed across her flesh.
“You will fight this,” he said softly, leaning back into her space. Already she felt warmer. “You will fight it and you will win.”
“I’m not sure I can.” Her words puffed against his skin.
He pressed his lips to hers, silencing her doubt. His hand splayed across the scar, covering it with his palm. She let herself collapse against him, lighter now that she was no longer carrying her secret alone.
He pulled away, close enough to touch her everywhere she wanted to be touched, but far enough for her to feel the force of his gaze, steady and full of love.
“You will,” he said, his voice devoid of even the slightest doubt. “And there isn’t a force in this world that will tear me from your side when you do.”
A riotous mess of emotion bubbled up in Echo’s chest, well beyond the capacity of words to describe. And so she abandoned them wholly and leaned in to kiss him again. And again. And again.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Echo was roused from her slumber by the shrill sound of Stravinsky streaming from her phone. With a muffled curse, she blinked awake. The curtains were partially open, and sunlight fell in bright beams against the library floor. She had changed her ringtone countless times, but Jasper insisted on stealing her phone away to set it back to Stravinsky’s Firebird, no matter how much the song grated on her. Every time the phone rang, the frantic strings wreaked havoc on her nerves.
Grumbling about shrill violins, she groped at the floor beside the daybed, where she had a vague recollection of depositing her jeans the night before. A warm, solid weight was thrown over her midriff, pinning her in place. As wakefulness replaced the slow stupidity of sleep, Echo remembered to feel embarrassed about the position she was in.
It wasn’t the first time she’d woken up beside Caius. However, it was the first time she’d woken up beside Caius absent certain pieces of clothing. She had pulled on his sweater sometime in the night when the brisk evening had proven too cold, even with his body acting as her own personal furnace, but she was suddenly very aware of the way his skin felt against her bare legs.
Stravinsky looped as the phone continued to ring, starting the Firebird suite from the top. Echo tried to shove Caius’s arm away, but her efforts met only with a string of incoherent grumbling in Drakhar, and his nose buried deeper in the crook of her shoulder. He hooked his ankle around hers, ensuring her captivity.
“Go back to sleep,” he mumbled. He was awake, but he didn’t bother opening his eyes as he burrowed closer.
“My phone,” Echo said, though her conviction was wearing thin in the face of Caius and his strong arms and his sleepy drawl and his mussed hair. And his everything else.
“Let them leave a message.” Caius’s voice was muffled by her neck, his words warm puffs of air against the column of her throat.
Abruptly, the sound of Stravinsky fell silent.
“See?” Caius said. “They’re leaving a message.”
The phone rang again. Caius swore. Echo wasn’t sure if it was her imagination playing tricks on her or if the strings seemed even more frantic than usual.