ARWEN

IHAD NO TIME TO think as the ground surged toward us both. My heart barely pumped a full beat. But I still had my lighte, and it coursed

through me on pure animal instinct—

The bubble of sun-flecked power blossomed around us just in time to cushion our fall into the shrubbery below.

We still landed with a thud, Kane’s hands around my waist and the back of my head.

My bubble fizzled quickly—far too much shock spinning in my mind— and thin sticks and leaves swallowed us whole.

Before I could utter a word around my astonishment, Kane climbed off me and pulled us both farther behind the hedges. We crouched, away from the prying eyes of soldiers drawn to the ruckus, twin breaths racing in our lungs. Tiny twigs had lodged in his dark hair and unruly beard, his face was gouged down the cheek, and his neck red and splotchy from where I’d all but strangled him with my grip—but that signature Kane half grin was undeniable in the moonlight. And those eyes, welling with tears, simmering softly on my own—

My heart gave out completely.

He must have seen it in my eyes, because he only brought a silver-clad finger to his lips as we observed the guards in shaky silence. Not a breath

between the two of us as they peered at the bushes we’d nearly died atop of and decided the brief ruckus was nothing more than a fox or stray dog.

“You’d think plummeting to your death once would have been enough,” he murmured once they were out of earshot.

That voice. I’d yearned for that voice. It was even better than I’d remembered: choked raw by emotion, and yet still a deep, confident rumble. One I had once described as thunder and a caress.

When he brought his hand to my face, I realized my cheeks were wet. Kane was here, in Solaris. Grinning at me.

I flung myself into his arms like a kite in the air. I was sure I’d topple us both farther into the bushes, but Kane only loosed a muffled groan as he held me to him tightly, steadying us both. Those massive hands spanning the length of my back was enough to set tears free like a river rushing away. And I couldn’t help it as I cried into the spot where his neck met his shoulder. Buried myself farther into him. His scruffy beard against my cheek. Despite the Fae armor, he still smelled of leather and mint and sweat and skin. His breath was hot against the shell of my ear and my fingers

twined in the strands of his dark, clean hair as I cried.

“Shh.” His words muffled against me. Those lips. That dark, bearded chin. “My love,” he murmured. “I’m here.”

I couldn’t inhale enough of him. His lips found mine in a daze of tears and I broke again. Choking out a weak cry as he kissed me so gently, so reverently, shrouded in brittle leaves and shrubbery. A kiss for all the times he couldn’t. For all the nights I’d stayed up wishing for just a minute like this. A single second of it.

Kane tipped my face up to his, angled my chin and brushed his large hands across my neck and my shoulders, dusting off leaves and thorns. Picked them carefully from my hair. Those searing quicksilver eyes shadowed as he said, “Whatever you experienced, whatever you went through, whatever made you want to…” His jaw was rigid as a glacier. “I promise, together we can—”

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself.” My voice was like gravel.

He narrowed his eyes at me as if he didn’t want to be cruel but knew that I was lying.

“Really,” I promised, pressing a hand to my cheek to dry my tears. “I was trying to fly.”

Relief swamped me as that pain in his eyes blossomed into awe and then male pride. “You can shift? Into what?”

“Well, nothing yet,” I admitted. “Someone distracted me.” “I thought I could catch you before you leapt.”

But…he hadn’t shifted. We’d been falling to our deaths, and he hadn’t shifted…“Why didn’t you transform?”

His gaze devoured my own, filled with sorrowful understanding. “I don’t have use of my lighte right now. And I don’t have my Fae strength, or my heightened senses…”

“Kane, you’re…” I couldn’t fathom the words. “Mortal. For the time being, yes.”

He moved us deeper in the bushes until we could stand. A long stick scraped along my thigh, still exposed in my scant gown, but I hardly noticed. Kane…the most Fae being I’d ever known—was mortal.

My dragon, unable to shift.

“Do you miss it?” I couldn’t help the question. His breath shuddered out. “Terribly.”

“How did this happen to you? Why did you come here? What were you even doing on the roof?”

“A piss-poor attempt at a rescue, clearly. Though, in my defense, I hadn’t expected you to fling yourself out a window.”

I tried to smile but my lips split where I had scrubbed them raw.

“What did you do to your lovely mouth?” he asked, reaching to stroke my bruised bottom lip with his thumb. The sensation sent sparks along my veins.

“He kissed me.” The memory curdled in me like sour milk. Kane’s nostrils flared with thinly concealed rage. “I saw.”

“You did?” I angled my head toward the castle roof, towering high above us. “How did you even know where to find me?”

He sighed tightly. “Every Solstice they hope the most fertile Fae will bear my father a full-blooded heir. I’m familiar with the ceremonial chamber.”

I winced.

Kane marked my reaction, and wrath—blistering wrath—rippled from that stare. “Which is why you need to go. It won’t be long before they realize you’re no longer in the washroom.”

“How, though?” I peered through the dense shrubbery as best I could. We were outside the castle, but in the heart of the city. Soldiers surrounded the perimeter, wealthy homes were gated and the streets too wide to offer cover.

“You’re going to cut through that leftmost alleyway. The one to the right of the marble fountain in the center of that courtyard. Run until you reach the city’s eastern limits. Then you trek for the next city over, Aurora. Once there—”

Horror was beginning to patter in my heart. “Wait, Kane—”

“Once there,” he pushed on, “ask around for Hart Renwick. Find his compound. How much lighte do you have right now? Was that protective sphere the last of it?”

“Kane, I’m not leaving you. No chance.”

His eyes gave his remorse away, and for some reason that was worse than if he’d argued with me. His hands tightened where they rested on my shoulders. “You’re going to have to, bird.”

No, no, no—

He released me—misery, pure misery being parted already—and fished through the dirt for his helmet.

“Why?” I knew I sounded desperate. “Where are you going?”

“Back inside to find the blade and hope none of those weasels realize who I am before I do so.”

“The blade is gone, Kane.” I’d gone through this in my own mind a thousand times. “He destroyed it.”

“It can’t be destroyed. It always finds its way back to a master, and he wouldn’t gift it to another. Not when it can be used to kill him. The blade is

in the castle, trust me.”

All this time my blade had been here? Waiting for me?

“How do you know all this? Why did you come here if you thought I was dead?”

“It’s a long, deeply unpleasant story,” he said. “If we make it out of here alive, I will regale you with the entire thing and you can tell me all the ways in which I’m an absolute moron.”

“Kane—”

He drew his attention back toward the city beyond the bushes. “You’ll look like any other partygoer to the soldiers out there. You’re fast, you’ll outrun anyone who catches on. Worst-case, you may have to—” He cut himself off to study me. “But we both know you can take care of yourself.”

“What is your master plan here? Sneak back into the palace, steal the blade, and meet me in some other city?”

His silver eyes crinkled with warmth, but there was something else there. Sorrow? “Doesn’t sound so hard, does it?”

“Kane.” His jaw was tense when I reached to cradle his face in my hands. His beard rough and unkempt. I was going to cry again. “Don’t do this.”

“Don’t worry about me.” One dimple revealed itself with his crooked grin, and my stomach flipped anxiously. “The armor will do half the work.”

“Do you even know where the blade is?”

“At first, I thought it would be in the monster lairs.”

“Monster? What kind of monster?” I was braver now…brave enough to launch myself out a window with nothing but gold heels and a dream, but still—the word “monster” didn’t do nothing to me.

“Monsters,” he corrected. “Plural. Their lairs are peppered all throughout the palace catacombs.”

“Wonderful.”

His large hand encircled mine and squeezed. I could feel his muscles, taut and ready for the bloody fight to come. “I figured he’d have the blade guarded by the fiercest creature in Lumera.” He gestured down to the impossibly tight heels laced around my legs. “You can’t run in those.”

“Right,” I muttered.

“Then I realized,” Kane continued, kneeling to the ground, “I was right.” He gently slipped my foot out of the heel and all the blood rushed back into my toes and arches. I flexed my foot gratefully. “Lazarus believes himself to be the fiercest creature in Lumera.”

“You think he keeps the sword in his own wing?”

When Kane stood back up, his frown was almost a sneer. “I think he’s the kind of person who gives an order and then does the job himself before anyone can fuck it up. I bet it’s in his very bed.”

I shuddered at the thought.

Kane’s eyes shot down to me and I clocked the grimace he fought to hide. “I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s fine. I’m—”

“Ready?” he asked, eyes grim.

I wasn’t. It was all happening too fast. Too soon. Kane was mortal. We’d just been reunited, and now to be split apart so soon once more…What if we never found each other again?

But I knew this man better than I knew the rhythm of my own heart. He wouldn’t budge.

“Fine,” I breathed. “Go. And I’ll meet you at that compound.”

With a nod he slid the helmet down over his head. In the suffocating dark night, he really did look like one of them. I tried to focus on the familiar shape of his nose and dip below his lips. I lifted to my toes and pressed a single kiss to the slice of his neck that wasn’t covered in weighty Fae silver.

A resigned sigh ebbed from him. It was bereft, actually, but I could barely see his expression under the silver helmet. “I love you, Arwen,” he said, the silver rings on his hand scraping gently across the skin of my back where my dress hung open as he pulled me close.

Before I could say it back—before I could get in one full inhale of his warmth, his smell—Kane slipped from the bushes, fitting seamlessly in with the other soldiers milling about the street.

Something cold and prickly crawled down my spine, gnawing through my stomach and limbs. A sensation I’d felt too many times.

He was keeping something from me.