Fate & Furies (The Legends of Thezmarr, #3)

by Helen Scheuerer

Wilder Hawthorne reached for the lone piece of hair that had escaped her braid and tucked it behind her ear. ‘Thea…’ he murmured, his voice broken and hoarse.

‘I don’t want you,’ she told him, knees buckling. ‘I don’t believe you.’ He closed the small gap between them, still clutching her hand. ‘My shirt smells like you,’ he murmured, the sound a low rumble in the shell of her ear. ‘I still have your marks on my back from our last night together. You claimed me long ago, Thea. You don’t get to say I’m not yours now.’

‘I knew from the moment I first kissed you that I’d never think of another woman again. That you were it for me. Despite everything, that hasn’t changed. Nor will it.’

‘If you need something to believe,’ he said, his blood heating as he closed the gap between them and hauled her body to his, ‘then believe this.’ He kissed her. It was the kiss he’d been dying to give her, the kiss that fractured every doubt between them and reforged the cracks with something golden. She tasted just as he remembered, like hope and salvation, like home and his.

‘Come find me at Thezmarr, little brother,’ he said. ‘We’ll be Warswords together.’

‘He loves you. That was never in any doubt. Not to us. I’ll wager that everything he does is for you.’

‘I told myself that it was enough,’ he murmured into her hair, his voice hoarse. ‘That I should be grateful for the time we had. It was more love than most people get in a lifetime. But the truth is, Thea… A thousand lifetimes with you wouldn’t be enough.’

He fucked her as he loved her: fierce, hard, unrelenting.

‘When I stand against the gods at the end of my days,’ he told her fiercely, ‘I will regret nothing. Not the lies I’ve told, nor the lives I’ve claimed or the rivers of blood I’ve spilt. I do not regret a single moment, because every one of them led me to you.’

For all the uncertainty and danger that lay ahead, Thea knew three things. First: that she loved Wilder Hawthorne with every fibre of her being. Second: she would do whatever it took to get him back. And third… No one, neither man nor monster, was going to stop her. ‘I am the storm,’ she vowed. And so, freshly forged with blood and steel, Warsword Althea Embervale, the Shadow of Death, stepped into the darkness to rescue her love.