He was so beautiful. Lips parted, eyes sharp, his focus fixed entirely on me. Every angle of his face, every scar, every flaw.

Perfect.

The wave melted away, and with it, so did the tension of our muscles. Raihn rolled off me, and I settled easily into the crook of his arm, surrounded by the cadence of his breathing.

We didn’t speak. There was nothing more to say. I kissed the scar on his brow, and the upside-down V on his cheek, and finally, his lips, and then I settled back into his embrace, welcoming our final oblivion.

64

RAIHN

Oraya and I lay together for a long time, eyes closed, but neither of us slept. I wondered if she knew that I always knew it when she was awake—I knew it when she was a room away from me, and I certainly knew it now, with her bare body against mine and my arms around her, feeling the cadence of her breathing against my chest.

Maybe some might’ve thought it was a waste to just lie there like that, in the hours before our potential death. Hell, the last time I’d faced death with Oraya, I’d wanted to spend every sleepless moment of that day inside her, working my way through a list of pleasures.

But this... this was different.

I didn’t need to collect more carnal moans. I wanted the rest of it. The way she breathed. The way she smelled. The exact arrangement of her dark lashes over her cheeks.

What it felt like, just to be next to her.

Maybe that was why, despite all we had to face come nightfall, I was glad I never fell asleep, not even when Oraya finally—finally—slipped off into a light, fitful rest.

Instead, I watched her.

Before the end of the Kejari, two hundred years ago, I had lain beside Nessanyn on a sleepless day not unlike this one. It was hours before Vincent would win the final trial, kill Neculai, and throw my life and the House of Night into chaos. Hours before I would beg Nessanyn to run away with me, and she would refuse.

That day, I’d watched her sleep, and I’d been so certain that I loved her. The fact that I loved her was, actually, the only thing I was certain of.

I was desperate to have something to love. Something to care about when I didn’t give a damn about myself.

But so little of it had anything to do with her. It was never frightening to love Nessanyn. It was a survival mechanism.

Loving Oraya was terrifying.

It required me to see things I didn’t want to see. Face things I didn’t want to face. Allow another soul to witness parts of myself I didn’t even want to acknowledge.

I now felt like such a fucking fool that I had never thought of it in that way, with that word, until this moment.

Of course it was love.

What else could it be, for someone to see that much of you? To see so much beauty in the parts of someone that they hate in themselves?

I almost wished I hadn’t had the realization, because it made what loomed ahead that much more devastating. Easier to have nothing to lose.

I’d gotten us all into this mess. If I had to die to end it, so be it. But Oraya dying for my mistakes—

That would be a tragedy. The world would never recover.

I, I knew in this moment, would never recover.

But right now, she was safe. We had a few precious hours until everything changed, for good or for bad. I wouldn’t waste a single one of them on sleep.

I spent them counting the freckles on her cheeks, memorizing the pattern of her breaths, watching the flutter of her eyelashes.

And when the sun went down, and Oraya stirred and blinked blearily at me with those moon-bright eyes and asked, “Sleep well?”

I just kissed her forehead and said, “Perfect.”

And I didn’t have a single regret.

65

ORAYA

People don’t really talk about how the days that make history, the days that change the course of entire civilizations, start in such mundane ways. Raihn and I got up and put on our leathers like it was any other night. We choked down a few bites of food, though my stomach was so nervous I could barely keep it down. We did a quick pass over our weapons. We broke down our tent.

All of it rote, unremarkable routine. We wasted no time. The sky was still stained purple with the remains of sunset. By the time it would turn pink with dawn, everything would be different.

Raihn and I didn’t talk. After yesterday, I didn’t have anything to say, or at least I told myself I didn’t, when the reality was just that I didn’t know how.

The map on my hand was now closer, the scale shifting and detail increasing as we ventured closer to our destination. We had only a short flight to the star, now at the center of the back of my hand, situated in the center of little illustrations of rocks and mountains that shifted with the angle of my hand when I tilted it.

We left the tent behind. No matter what happened, by dawn, we wouldn’t need it anymore.

We rose into the sky, the remnants of it disappearing below us. It was a mostly clear night, the sky before us bright with velvet darkness and silver stars, some thickening clouds lingering to the west, obscuring the distant skyline of Sivrinaj.

We flew for several hours, the deserts beneath us morphing gradually into rocky foothills. The distant silhouette of Sivrinaj grew closer, though still little more than smears of light through the clusters of clouds. I hated how much those clouds obscured our visibility.

“Look,” Raihn murmured, swooping close to me as we approached our target. He pointed out to the north, where some of the clouds had begun to part.

The smile broke out over my face before I could stop it—a big, stupid grin.

Because there in the sky was an unmistakable sight—a distant morass of wings, both featherless and feathered, blotting out the stars. They were far away, but if I squinted, I could make out the figures at their head: Jesmine, Vale, and Ketura, Mische in her arms.

And then, far below them, to the west, was another welcome sight: a wave of troops cresting the hills on foot, dressed in mismatched, makeshift armor and wielding scavenged weaponry, but bearing it all with their heads held high.

The humans.

We had a damned army. An unlikely, cobbled-together one, yes. But an army, nonetheless.

I let out a rough breath of relief, nearly a choked sob. I hadn’t allowed myself to think too hard about all the endless possibilities of how tonight might go. And yet the fear had remained in the back of my head—that Simon could have destroyed the rest of our forces before they even had the chance to make it to us.

The hope that seized me at the sight of them made the dark night a little bit brighter.

We gave them a wave of greeting they were probably too far to see, then soared down and landed among the foothills.

From above, this area had looked like nothing more than rocky desert, hidden in shadows and mottled moonlight. But from the ground, the scale of it all was staggering. Jagged stones loomed over us. What from above had appeared to merely be textures of the earth were revealed to be pieces of old buildings—stone beams and broken columns protruding from the sands, long-buried glimpses of some version of this society that had fallen long ago, worn down by time.

My skin burned where the necklace, ring, and bracelet touched it, the triangle of flesh that displayed the map tingling. A sudden sharp pain had me hissing an inhale when we landed.

Raihn shot me a questioning, concerned glance, and I shook my head.

“It’s fine,” I said. I cradled my hand and squinted down at the map. We were so close now that the lines reoriented with every step.

Glancing between the two, I stepped gingerly through the rocks, winding a convoluted path through the ruins. As the target grew closer, I got impatient, stumbling into a near run over the uneven debris.