Fearless (The Powerless Trilogy, #3)

by Lauren Roberts

Damn the pretending. Damn the hiding. Damn everything but him and us and this moment where I need him.

In love with a girl I’d have bowed to long before she became my queen.

I’ve been nothing but willing when it comes to drowning in those ocean eyes. But now, I can’t fathom drowning if she is not the anchor I’m sinking with.

“You’re not supposed to touch me at all.” “But you could command me to,” I drawl. “Then I’d simply be following an order.”

He had kicked the damn door down. “Can I get no privacy around here?” I joke weakly, voice still shaky with the remnants of my nightmare. “Privacy?” His chuckle skitters up my spine, awakening my sleepy senses. “Darling, I’d be in this bed beside you if my brother hadn’t slipped a ring onto your finger.”

Her dagger hangs loosely from the hand she’s twined around my neck. Odd, that there was once a time I feared her burying it into my back. Now I readily bare my weaknesses before her. It’s as though she is whole again in my arms, reunited with the ghost of her father and held in the arms of her Enforcer. And when she kisses me, long and fierce, I realize how happily I’d live the rest of my life at the end of a blade. So long as she is the one holding it.

“I worry about you, Malakai.” The sound of his full name has those gray eyes fluttering closed. “If I die—” “Stop.” “If I die,” I repeat sternly, “I need you to find something else worth losing yourself to. I won’t let my impending death be yours as well.” I press my forehead to his, voice breaking as I say, “Promise me that. Please.” “Pae.” His voice is ragged. “I would lose my life for you before finding something else worth living for.” His fingers weave into my hair, slide along the back of my neck. “You are my inevitable. In life and in death.”