Ariella and Oranya remain at the campsite, the fire a small orange smear as I trudge up the ridge toward the sound of a stream we heard trickling an hour ago. The desert night is a different beast than the day. Heat drains from the sand quickly, and now the cold bites through my sleeves and settles into the ache along my shoulders where the sun cooked me. My boots sink with every step. If I never travel through this desert again, it will be too soon.

My eyes catch the black ribbon of water between the dunes, and I groan. How good it will feel to drink something that isn’t warm and tastes of leather.

Crouching at the edge, a deep sigh escapes as I splash icy water against my face and brush it through my hair. I dunk the first skin, and the leather mouth gurgles as air escapes.

A disturbance in the air alerts me to danger not one breath before an arm closes around my neck.

They yank me backward off my heels before my brain catches up. I hit the wet sand on my spine, the air punching out of my lungs, and then there are five of them—no, six shapes darker than the sky, all reeking of stale sweat and cheap liquor. A knee drops against my sternum. Something cold and sharp presses under my jaw, angling up.

“Easy, pretty,” one of them rasps. His breath is an assault worse than his knife. “Easy now.”

I go limp on instinct. Struggling against a blade at the throat is how idiots decorate the land with their blood, and I have exactly zero intention of decorating anything tonight…unless Ariella wanted to play, of course.

“Good boy.” A second one crouches over me, patting down my sides with quick, greedy hands. He finds my belt knife and takes it before tossing it to another man. He hums when he grasps the coin pouch and takes that too, weighing it in his palm with a grunt of disappointment. “Light.”

“There’s more,” the first one says. He grinds the blade a fraction harder into my throat. Skin splits, and I hold in a wince as warmth trickles down my collarbone. “There’s always more with soft hands like these. And we saw the little lady with you back at the fire. Cozy setup for just the two of you.”

My whole body seizes.

Not fear for me. That’s the part they don’t understand as they cackle, crouched here in the dark with their stinking breath and idiotic courage, congratulating themselves on the lone man they caught unawares. They think my wraith is leverage. That she’s a soft thing to be traded against my life; as if she’s a frightened woman who will empty her purse to keep her man breathing.

I nearly laugh. The blade against my windpipe is the only thing stopping me.

“So here’s how it goes.” The leader, I assume he’s the leader, leans down. My lip curls as he grins around rotting teeth. A scar splits one eyebrow. He looks every bit the man he believes himself to be. “You stay quiet. She comes looking—the females always come looking—and when she does, she hands over everything. The coin, the packs, maybe her cunt. She does that, and you both walk. She screams or does anything stupid—” the point of the knife dimples the skin below my ear “—and I open your throat wide as the stream and let her watch you drain out. You following, pretty?”

“Yes,” I grate.

A fist drives into my ribs. The impact lights up every knitted-together fracture like someone shoved a torch under my skin. I’m fully healed from Meridian, but I'm certain something shifted out of place. Air leaves me in a wet cough.

“That’s for talking.” The knee adjusts to pin my wrist. Someone else steps on my other hand, grinding the bones into the wet sand. “Quiet means quiet.” Several more kicks to the sides and a fist to my cheek come in quick succession, each more painful than the last.

When their fun is over, I count them once more; still six, though I can’t be certain some aren’t hiding as they wait for Ariella. There’s one at my feet, one on my chest, two flanking with more steel—a hatchet, maybe, and a long blade. All of them oriented toward the ridge, expecting the soft little lady to come tripping down the dune with her hands full of gold and eyes full of tears.

I let my head fall back against the sand.

The cold seeps up through my shirt as water laps at my boots. Above, the tear in the sky bleeds beautiful pinks and purples across the stars, and I stare up into it and feel my pulse slow, because the thing about being married—in every way that matters, for now—to the deadliest woman in the realm is that a knife at your throat stops feeling like a threat and starts feeling like a minor inconvenience I’ll have to apologize for later. I already know Ariella will be angry with me, and while I’ll very much enjoy that anger, these men will not.

Poor bastards.

“How long we wait?” one of the flanking men mutters.

“Long as it takes. She’ll come.”

“There’s nothing in those pouches worth dying over,” I manage, keeping my voice level as thick blood drips from my jaw.

Laughter rings through the space, rough and dry. The sound of men who have nothing to lose and an agenda to fulfill. One of them drags me up before wrenching my arms behind my back with rope, and the joint in my left shoulder screams as it’s cranked past the socket. Someone forces my knees into the wet sand as they face me toward the camp.

“Not interested in your pleas.” The leader leans closer, his rancid breath coating my face. I nearly gag at the sour stench.

“She’s got nothing you want, trust me.” Not much of a warning, but it’s the best they’re getting. They certainly didn’t see her hair before deciding to kidnap me. The miscalculation is so catastrophic it borders on comedic, but the knife at my throat keeps all laughter trapped behind my teeth—she’ll kill me if they slit my throat.

“You don’t say?” A fist connects with my kidney. “See, I think you’re lying, pretty. Those some nice clothes you’re wearing.” More knuckles drive into the soft tissue between my ribs. My vision whites at the edges as I double over, coughing. Two men hold me upright before another fist connects with my face again, and I curse when more metallic liquid fills my mouth. “You keep quiet, and nobody dies. It’s simple, really.”

Everybody dies, I think, but not the way you’re expecting.

The man at my throat makes a small, surprised sound. A soft huk, like a hiccup.

Then he’s gone. Pressure from the blade vanishes from my neck as his body pitches sideways into the sand. His limbs twitch. In the sliver of light of the sky I spot a blade jutting from the socket where his left eye used to be, buried to the hilt, and the sight of it is so absurd, so perfectly on-brand, that I lose the fight completely.

I burst out laughing.

Blood sprays from my split lip, speckling a man’s face and beard. He recoils as another one juts forward to wrench my arms harder, grinding my bones—a pained sound escapes, but I cannot stop laughing. Because I know that blade and exactly who threw it. Her accuracy is terrifying. And so fucking hot.

Only Ariella would turn a human eye socket into a sheath for the fun of it.

Weapons draw and heads swivel before the leader yells, “What the fuck was that?” Clustering tighter with blades pointed out, every man scans the shadows with the kind of frantic energy that suggests they know they’re no longer the predator here. They’ve absolutely no idea what just walked into their night.

I chuckle again, grinning around blood-stained teeth. “That would be my queen. She gets a little angry when I bleed.”

She appears from the dark like something the desert itself spawned. No urgency in her steps, just steady, measured strides across the sand as her lethal gaze maps every body left standing. It’s clear she finds them all wanting. She yanks her hood off, allowing my captors knowledge of her identity before they die.

Instead of freezing in fear as I expected, two of the men rush her. The first doesn’t make it two feet before she’s inside his reach, and there’s a wet gurgling as he folds around his opened stomach.

“You shouldn’t have touched him,” she tells the second in a conversational tone before slitting his throat. I roll when his body heaves toward me.

The one who’d been standing on my hand stares at Ariella, mouth open, and a long knife dangles, forgotten, in his grip. Amateur. I get a boot under me, lunge, and kick the blade from his loose fist before he registers I’ve moved. He whirls around with a curse. Ariella slices him across the backs of both knees, and I grimace as he screams and drops. The scream halts when I force my knee into his temple, crushing his skull.

His last breath is quite satisfying…I see why my wraith enjoys this so much.

I get my other knee under me, ribs shrieking, blood sheeting down my neck, and look up to help her with the rest—

“Don’t you dare,” Ariella snarls in my direction. Fuck, she’s pissed.

It only makes me grin.

She’s got a man by the wrist. Her eyes find me for half a heartbeat, and whatever’s in them is worse than the men dying around her.

I’ve never once listened to her orders, and she knows it. I’m already pushing to my feet when her rage changes the surrounding temperature, and then she stops holding back.

I don’t have words for how fast she is.

Her captive’s arm comes off at the elbow—I don’t see the cut, I just see the arm on the sand and him staring at the stump. She’s already past him. The fifth man raises his hatchet, but it’s no use as she opens him from hip to shoulder, steps through the spray of him, and catches the last one by the hair on her way. Her second blade drives up under his ribs, twisting before something dark and wet slides out of him into her waiting hand. She drops it in the sand as if she’s discarding an orange peel.

“Fuck’s sake,” she mutters to him, low, almost gentle, twisting the steel. “You made a big mistake, touching what’s mine.”

He can’t answer. There isn’t enough of him left to answer.

I’ve killed exactly one man in the time it takes her to unmake five. I stand with blood dripping down my fist and watch her finish, smiling as she mutters something I cannot hear into the last one’s ruined face before he’s gone.

Silence drops over the stream. Just the water, my own wet breathing, and the tick of cooling blood soaking into sand.

A chirp grabs my attention.

Oranya bounds from the shadows, using her wings for those hopping half-flights across the dune, feathers black as night. She lands beside the leader’s body and cocks her head at it, then at Ariella, and makes a small, expectant sound. Sweet. Almost delicate. She lifts one enormous talon and taps the corpse’s chest, once, peering up with those violet eyes.

Ariella walks over without a word. She drags a blade down the length of the man’s torso, hooks her fingers into the seam, and hauls the two halves apart, causing a nasty, tearing sound.

Then Oranya eats.

I redirect my gaze. Some things a man does not need to see, and a baby griffin dining on the ribcage of the man who threatened my life is one of those things.

Ariella marches out of the carnage, a stunning nightmare covered in her enemies’ blood. Silver hair mattes at her temples where something arterial caught as her chest heaves. Furious. She’s absolutely, incandescently furious with me.

And she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I want to kiss her so bad it makes my cock ache.

The pain in my side stops me. I open my mouth, but what comes out is another cough and more red.

Her hand shoots up and fists in the hair at the back of my skull. She yanks—hard, forcing my head back so I can’t look anywhere but down into those green eyes.

“You Angel-damned idiot.” Her voice shakes, though I’m certain it’s not from fear. “I told you not to move. Men had blades on you, and you thought—what? That you’d help? You had a knife at your artery, Caspian, one twitch and you’d have bled out in a puddle in the middle of the fucking desert, and I would have had to—” She cuts herself off. Her jaw works. “You never listen. You never—”

Her essence pours into me.

It comes through the fist in my hair, through her free hand pressed flat against my ribs, and I know the sensation now but it never gets less pleasurable—that warm gold tide flooding under my skin, hunting through the bruised meat of me for everything broken. My ribs grind, then knit. The split at my throat seals itself shut with a raging heat. My cheekbone stops throbbing. She berates me the whole time, volume increasing, and while I love it, her healing is anything but gentle. It’s punishing.

She falters after a few minutes, breath catching. The scolding halts as her eyes go half-lidded and her grip in my hair loosens a fraction. It’s strange, but I feel what she’s feeling—the essence isn’t only flowing one direction, and as it doubles back into her, we both groan. We drown together in its bright, euphoric pull, so good it’s nearly unbearable. Her lips part on a sound I know she doesn’t mean to make.

It’s instinct to reach for the new thing inside me.

I’ve had it for weeks and no time to learn—the ethereal affinity that woke after my father died. The umbral strand feels like reaching into a part of myself I never knew existed. I’ve barely touched it, never willingly opened its door. But I want, suddenly and fiercely, to give something back. I want my essence sliding through her veins as hers does mine.

The essence spills from my hands, cool as it wraps around my arms in search of its true home: Ariella. The tendrils belong to her as much as I do.

They reach for her, grazing along her jaw, her throat, the curve of her shoulder—and the second they touch her skin I still, because I feel her through them. Not see, feel. Like I’ve grown extra arms out of the dark, like the essence is an extension of my own nerves, and every place they touch her sends the shape of her back into me—the racing thud of her pulse guides my own, while the tremor still living in her muscles becomes mine. It’s magnificent.

“Caspian.” Barely a whisper. Her eyes lock onto me, the fury drowned under something more desperate.

“I know,” I rasp. I don’t know what I know. I only know I can’t stop.

Her hand slides from my ribs, up my chest, over the drum of my heart, and cups my bloodied jaw. She leans forward until our lips touch, though neither of us moves further as we soak in every bit of this strange pleasure. Who knew sharing essence like this was so good?

I wonder if she’d be opposed to me fucking her over these bodies…I’m not sure I have it in me to wait until we’re cleaned and back at camp.

My spine shivers as her thumb drags through the blood drying on my throat. It presses where the knife had been.

“If you ever get captured like that again, I will kill you myself,” she murmurs against my lips, and I grin.