makai

Disease is nothing new to him.

It’s a familiar friend—a rattle in the lungs, a fleck of blood on the lip. He’s worn it multiple times. Disease that has seeped up from the ground. Disease that has drained him of his health, of his vitality. Disease that has sucked him of his marrow, leaving him emaciated but never having the grace to let him die. Never having the grace to just let him go. Instead, it muzzled him and chained him and bound him.

Or, rather, it did.

Because his disease, his own personal brand of torture, died with the Chamber.

Since then, disease has not touched him. He has grown healthy and sleek and regained all of the wild muscle that he carried in his stolen youth. He has grown handsome, his mane unruly and tangled and his regal head maintaining that feral, sharp-edged beauty to it. He has continued to run. Learned to love it again as the ground opened up before him, as his strides lengthened, as he ate up the earth.

And he has continued to love. Wild, passionate, fierce love. The kind of love that leaves you open and aching. The kind of love that consumes. He’s never felt anything soft about Oksana. Never felt anything sweet or kind or gentle. Never tender. Instead, he has feasted on her, growing fat on the good times, or he has suffered in famine—self-imposed exile or the turned cheek of her when she grew tired of his antics.

Not now though. Now, they live together. Now, they live outside of Beqanna and outside of its rules and outside of its expectations. He is not anchored to the Chamber—a boy beat and whipped by the kingdom’s demands. She is not burdened with a crown given to her by a father who was not a father.

He finds her today, the spring air retaining a bite of winter, and he is slick with sweat. His neck is curved so that his chin nearly touches his chest, and his eyes find hers, hold it. Something secret shadows around his mouth, something flashes across his features, and his chest aches—always aches.

Not a moment is wasted as he finds her, as he crushes her to him, and it’s like they are finding themselves for the first time again. Everything around them fades away. The plague, their family, all of it.

It is just them and his mouth is hot on her neck and they are together.

They are always together.

you're the fire and the flood
and I'll always feel you in my blood