She feels the touch of him but not nearly as much as she feels the heat.
The closeness nearly makes her dizzy, the way she can pick up all of the subtle tones of spice and musk and the earthiness that is distinctly his own. She tastes the metallic copper on the back of her tongue, and it is a memory of when she had just crawled from her own grave. The grave that seems to hold him captive now, she knows, but suddenly he feels so very alive to her that she can nearly believe he is.
His words are individual blows.
The sorrow she has always known that he was born with—his birthright in so many ways.
His hopelessness.
His savage need to protect himself and his family.
They all war with the chains of her heart until she nearly cries out at the unfairness of it all. She wants to pull his father from the earth, drag him back from hell just to force him to stare at what he has done, but for all of her complicated emotions that revolve around Ghaul, they fade before his son.
“Hope,” she whispers, breath fanning out against the scales of him—the things that she does not trust herself to touch once more. Does she dare hope? She doesn’t meet his gaze even though her pulse quickens and her throat tightens. Although the world shrinks until it is just the two of them. Him, shelled out and emptied. Her nearly gorging on this feast he lay before her—this promise of what once was.
She doesn’t look at him, cannot bear to see the glimpse of her future in his gaze.
The promises it had once shown her, entangled and snarled around him.
The things yanked from her.
“I have loved you from the first,” she whispers, and wonders why it sounds so sad to say it now.
I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in