Alchemised

by SenLinYu

Helena remembered that detail. Remembered that she’d been placed there as a prisoner, kept preserved, but someday, someone would come for her.

“Do I know you?” she asked as her eyes slid closed. “I suppose you do.”

“Ferron always comes for me,” she whispered.

“But at this point I suppose I deserve to burn. I wonder if you’ll burn, too.” His face was so close the words brushed against her lips, and his mouth crashed against hers.

“Because you’ll wear your brain smooth if you don’t find answers to all the things you want to know.” He sounded resigned.

“Don’t die, Marino. I might miss you.”

Instead of perpetually ice-sharp and guarded, he felt like something she might drown in.

Touch him and she’d bleed, and yet she could not escape the allure of it.

It was not a slow, sweet kiss. It was not a kiss caused by alcohol or insecurity. It was born of rage, despair, and desire so hot, it threatened to burn her into oblivion.

He wavered a moment and then something broke inside him, like a dam bursting, and Helena was drowning in him.

For the first time, Kaine Ferron was fully human to her. She’d slipped through his walls and peeled away the defensive layers of malice and cruelty, and found that there he carried a broken heart. She could use that.

He touched her cheek, tilting her face up and kissing her. “Use the ring, call me, if you ever need anything.”

“Then use me,” Kaine said. He was right next to her. He pulled her close and tried to kiss her.

His touch light, and yet it made her feel as though a flame were kindled inside her, a desire that made her ache.

“I think I’ve nearly memorised you,” she said. “Especially your eyes. I think I learned to read them first.”

She was locked in the dangerous embrace of Kaine Ferron, and it felt like home.

“Would you go now, if you could?” His eyes seemed to ripple with heat. “With you, I would.”

There was a possessive terror in him—in the ways he touched her—as though he always expected it to be the last time he ever saw her.

“Because I have warned you, if something happens to you, I will personally raze the entire Order of the Eternal Flame. That isn’t a threat, it’s a promise. Consider your survival as much a necessity to the Resistance as Holdfast’s. If you die, I will kill every single one of them. Given that the risk to their lives is the only way to make you value your own.”

Someday, she promised herself, someday I am going to love him in a moment that isn’t stolen.

He kissed her like he was starving. As though he were trying to pour himself into her or consume her.

Time always ran out for them. They’d spent years surviving on stolen moments, and now she finally felt how starved it had left her.

She was a non-active member of the Order of the Eternal Flame and did not fight.