MAYBE SHE’D LIKE THE PANSIES. I REACHED FOR THEIR LONG STEMS BUT

retracted my hand. Too boring. The spider orchids were more joyful, more unique. Like her.

I plucked a handful and added them to the growing bouquet. Spindly bat flower, cerulean daisies, and pitch-black lilies, of course—her namesake and the flower that populated my dreams most nights.

I trudged back through the castle doors and up the winding staircase to my room.

I had given Eardley Beth’s father’s description. Griffin would walk him through where Halden and his men had last been stationed in Peridot, and we’d hope the man was still being kept there, alive.

Dagan would get ravens to our spies, as he had when the blade first went missing. If the blade was in Onyx, someone had to have quite the network to have kept it a secret for the last five years. Dagan would start with Briar and go from there. Beth had said it was “thrown beneath heaps of other weapons. Tied to another master, but yearning to be paired with its mate.” He’d search every weapons cache, every hoarder, every high-ranking criminal boss in every city. Again. We’d do it all again.

And I would track down the White Crow.

Arwen was leaving with Fedrik. I wasn’t bitter. I wasn’t angry. Or, if I was, it wasn’t the emotion I was leading with.

I wanted her to be protected, to live, and to enjoy doing so. I’d never free my mind from the sound of her sobs last night. Thousands of years I’d

live if I failed to take her place. And that memory would stay with me through each and every one.

I had to do something.

And have hope something could be done.

Stepping into my bedroom in Shadowhold after all these weeks away felt like bathing after a hot day spent in mud. I sighed, deep and even, and walked toward my desk to twine Arwen’s flowers, but my eyes lingered on my bed.

A memory, so potent it was as if I had stepped backward in time, shot through my mind at the sight. One of Arwen, in that very bed, two days after her battle with the wolfbeast. She was wearing my shirt, eating breakfast, laughing as she bit into an apple.

“Kane,” Arwen said, breathless.

Oh Gods. I had finally lost it. I was hallucinating now.

“Kane?” she said again, this time a murmur of worry twined with the urgency.

I whirled.

There she was. Hand clutched to her sternum, breathing rushed, lit by a pool of fading sunlight in the foyer of my room.

“Are you all right?”

She stepped inside, olive eyes wild. “You weren’t in the gardens.” “I was—”

“I have to . . . I have to tell you something.” I quirked a brow. “Go on.”

“I’m in love with you.” My heart stilled.

“Also, I think Drake Alcott stole the Blade of the Sun and took it with him to Hemlock Isle, and it’s still there now, five years later. Are those for me?” She pointed at the flowers in my hand.

My mind roared with utter silence, and I leaned onto the desk behind me. “You . . . love me?”

She strode forward, stopping just close enough for me to smell the orange blossom of her swaying hair. “I’m sorry I didn’t say it sooner. Back

in Azurine, that night we kissed. Or at Briar’s. Or in your cottage earlier today . . . Stones, Kane. I had so many opportunities to be brave.” She stepped even closer. “But it would’ve made what I have to do impossible. And at the time—” She looked up as she searched for the right words. “At the time it felt like the only way to make it through was to not . . . want things. But I’m not afraid of hoping now, because of you.” She stopped to take a shaky inhale, left breathless by her own confession.

Relief soared through me like a bird on a tailwind. Light and smooth and

—

And then fire thundered through my blood.

I dropped the flowers and captured her soft, full lips in mine, sighing at

the taste of her on my tongue. Arwen’s startled eyes closed a heartbeat later, and she tilted her head, allowing me to press myself even closer to her. My tongue to lick over hers. I nearly groaned.

Such an uncanny feeling, to experience something I had fantasized about more times than I could count. The sincerity of it all. Of her feelings. Of her.

I would consume her. Slowly. For days. Years. Hundreds of years.

She sighed into me, and my cock swelled with the need to be inside of her.

“Wait.” She pulled away, chest rising and falling. “What about the blade?”

Fuck the fucking blade.

“Right.” I stepped back, clearing my throat. “How did you put that together?”

“Mari mentioned something about the vault being close to the dungeons. Which made me think back to Halden’s explosion. That night, when your guards interrupted the forum, they said he had been trying to access Shadowhold’s vault. That got me thinking—had any other prisoners ever tried the same thing given the layout? The proximity? Back in the caverns Niclas told me Drake Alcott was sent to Hemlock Isle five years ago. It didn’t mean anything to me then. But now I know Hemlock Isle is a prison, and he went there around the same time you said the blade was stolen. And

he was a great thief . . .” She shook her head. “When Ryder said Alcott had been imprisoned here in Shadowhold, I realized it was never in the Cavern or anywhere else. It went from your vault to Hemlock Isle, and it’s been there ever since.”

It made sense—when we sent Drake to Hemlock, I hadn’t even known the blade was missing.

“I’ll go retrieve it first thing in the morning,” I said, bringing my lips down to her neck. Her earlobe. She was so petite, I had to hunch almost comically. That was how few times we had kissed. How little I knew the shape of us together.

Not anymore. I’d memorize the way our bodies fit together. Sear it into my skin.

“You’re not going alone. I’m coming with—” Her voice hitched as my tongue slid down her neck toward her collarbone and my hands found her ass. “You,” she hummed.

I chuckled into her skin, but she pushed me back and straightened. “I’m serious, Kane. Wherever you go, whatever you face, that’s what I’ll face, too. All right?”

“Yeah.” I grinned. “All right.”

“Good. Because that’s what I want. For as long as we have together.” “We will have a lifetime. There is no other way this ends.”

She wrapped her hands around my shoulders. Olive eyes—whip-smart, fierce, fearless eyes—stared up at me. That gorgeous skin glowing in the light of the fading sun.

Her open, trusting, warm expression. An expression of love.

I claimed her mouth with mine once more, cradling her head in my hands as I pushed her into the post of the bed behind us. Twining my lips with hers, fisting my hand in her silken hair, and trying wildly to align our mismatched hips—

Messy and eager and fumbling. Like a hormone-ravaged boy. Trying to get as close as I possibly could to her. To close every gap between us. But there was too much fabric in the way. I needed to feel her skin. I regretted

every single decision in my life that led me to purchase the dress this morning. I abhorred the thing.

But I didn’t immediately detach from her to remove it. I couldn’t quite think straight—I couldn’t concentrate properly around her when she wasn’t palming at my cock over my pants with her perfect little hands. Now it was a challenge in itself to string two coherent thoughts together.

My mouth moved down her neck, her skin tasting like cream stirred with sweet honey. Or the purest vanilla from a far-off land. I pressed my tongue against the sensitive skin under her ear and felt her shiver. Licked her collarbone indulgently until I was sucking her breasts over the fabric of her dress, my hands slinking up her back.

And she was moaning. Mewling as I worked her nipple, the dress growing damp but neither of us able to detangle.

I wanted to fuck her with my fingers. To plunge them in between the folds I knew would be plump and ready for me. Finding some semblance of discipline, I released her just long enough to yank the dress over her lithe shoulders, over her head, letting it fall to the floor in a heap. And then I stared at her, gawking shamefully like I had never seen a woman in her undergarments before.

Lurid thoughts danced in my mind.

Lifting my hand to cup her heavy breast through the chemise, I ran my thumb across her pointed nipple, and the simple act made my cock throb so hard I winced.

Arwen’s eyes nearly rolled back in her head as I flicked my finger across the pebbled point a second time, eliciting a choked moan.

“There you go,” I encouraged.

Arwen reached up and wrapped her hands around my neck to pull me into her, her lips finding mine again, before reaching frantically for the laces of my pants and yanking at them. I was happy to help, ripping the laces off faster than I had ever done anything in my life and sliding the trousers to the floor. I tore my shirt over my head and tossed it, nearly catching a lit candle on the mantel behind me and setting the room ablaze.

Neither of us would have even noticed.

Arwen’s eyes went wide as she stepped back to drink me in before she ran a single finger along my lower abdomen above my breeches. I jerked with the contact and my balls tightened. I needed to—

Before I could finish that thought, or act on it, she raised her lips to me, reaching on pointed toes to kiss my chest. When her tongue licked down my ribs, my eyes rolled back in my head. She hummed in satisfaction, pleased with herself, and dipped her head lower. And then those lips were on my hip. And brushing along the line of my waistband. Only cotton separating my length from her mouth.

I must have made some effort to stop her, to make sure she knew she didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to, but—

Her lips on my bare thigh. On the thin skin between my navel and cock. Too heady, too euphoric—it was beyond anything I could resist.

Possibly beyond anything I could handle.

My hand sought clumsily for something to grasp, and settled on the beam of the four-poster bed. I might’ve fisted my hands in her long, chocolate hair, pulled it tight as she sucked me off, guided her mouth around me, but I’d wait. Let her figure out first how she liked it.

Her hot, wet mouth continued a trail of indulgent, luxuriating kisses along my waistband, her fingers roaming up my thighs, her nose tickling the fine hairs of my low stomach . . . When she ran one warm hand over my length, I grasped the bedpost so violently the wood splintered beneath my fingers.

I needed her mouth on me.

She was torturing me. Teasing, taunting— Cruel, wild, vixen bird.

Until . . . a tremble.

A pause, a barely audible gulp—

Without realizing they had been closed, my eyes shot open and down to her. “What’s wrong?”

Arwen shook her head, on her knees as she ran her hands up my legs, and they were—shaking. Her hands were shaking.

I fought against the all-consuming urge to split the bedpost creaking under my palm in two.

A deep breath. I needed to take a deep breath.

I looked down at her again. So delicate from this angle. Her entire hand only half the width of my muscled thigh.

“Arwen,” I tried, burying the fury and disgust I felt at myself for not saying it sooner. “You don’t have to do this.”

Her eyes were soft under those full lashes. Not reluctant. Just nervous, perhaps. “I want to. I just—” Her breath came out in a whoosh. “Haven’t before. And I’d like it to be good for you.”

“Anything you do will feel . . . unbelievable.”

“Just tell me if I hurt you or bite you or something.” Slowly, with precision, she took off my breeches and pulled the base of my cock into her hand. The head was already sticky, and my cock twitched with her warm breath.

I grunted. And breathed. Slowly.

Resisted the urge to thrust into her closed fist.

Debased. That’s what you are. She’s already hesitant and you want to fuck her shaking hands?

After a few teasing strokes, she wrapped her mouth around me.

Stars sprang into my vision and all the blood in my body rushed downward.

I bowed, palm outstretched against the bedpost once more, as she swirled her tongue and pumped her fist. If Arwen’s tongue sweeping up my shaft, her hand lightly wrapped around my balls, her soft lips exploring the head of my cock—

If it was a dream, I’d stay here for eternity and never wake up.

She lifted those eyes—filled with nothing but passionate, primal desire

—to mine, her mouth full of me, lips wrapped obscenely around my— I had to stop her.

The base of my spine was tingling, that swell of pressure building low in my abdomen—

Gently wrapping my hands around her shoulders, I moved to bring her up from the floor. But she didn’t budge, continuing to suck me thoroughly, deeper into her, and I snarled as a plea formed at my lips.

“Arwen,” I nearly slurred, desperate and tensing. “Fuck.” “You want me to stop?”

“No. But I need you to.” The words fell out with a half laugh, and before she could protest further, I pulled her to her feet. Her lips were red and glossy, her eyes slightly wet from exertion, her cheeks flushed—I kissed her, humming as our tongues twined, as I sucked her full lower lip into my mouth.

Stripping the chemise and undergarments off her, I laid her down atop the dark sheets. Slick and blushing, chocolate hair fanned across velvet pillows, she looked like a blossoming dark lily from my garden.

And she knew what she did to me. Her pleased expression told me as much. “Come here,” she whispered.

And I obliged, caging my arms around her, tangling my legs between hers. On my thigh I could feel how soaking wet she was, nearly dripping with need that had pooled at her center.

Knowing that was a response to having my cock lodged in her mouth was almost enough to bring me back to the brink of release. In an effort to calm down, I conjured dusty books and history lessons in my mind.

Anything but Arwen’s full, heaving breasts, which were bouncing below me as she squirmed and writhed on my thigh, panting and clawing at my back.

“Hurry,” she said faintly, running her fingers through my hair and along my neck. I brought a hand down to spread her legs and trace her glistening, wet lips. To drag my thumb up the center of her until I reached the top and pressed down. Until I felt her contract beneath me with a little whine, and that pressure returned to my cock.

Shit. Shit—

“We can slow down. There’s no rush.” I sounded like a man starved.

She only angled herself closer, canting those hips, her tongue licking against my own. “There is,” she said. When she tugged my hair, just this

side of forceful, my eyes rolled back in my head.

Fuck.

I reached down and positioned myself at her slick, tight entrance and barely slid in before I blacked out from ecstasy.