Page 95 of Kazimir

She looked directly at me and Kazimir.

“Rise,” she said.

The word moved through us like permission to breathe.

I pushed up first and nearly failed. My throat throbbed. My knees were unsteady. One wing dragged slightly where Sariel had pinned me badly against the wall. Before I could fully stand, Kazimir was there.

He crossed the distance between us in less than a breath.

Then his hands were on me—careful despite the blood coating them, despite the tremor of after-violence still in his body. One arm came around my waist. The other cupped the back of my head with a tenderness so immediate and fierce my knees threatened treason for a different reason entirely.

His transformed face hovered close to mine. Fangs still down. Eyes still black. A streak of celestial blood drying along one cheekbone. A line of my fear and his rage and all the ways he had almost lost me still visible in every hard angle.

“Devon,” he said.

Only my name. Yet it held enough to drown in.

“I’m here,” I whispered.

His forehead touched mine for one ragged second. Through the bond came a flood he would never have allowed in front of witnesses without this kind of necessity—terror, relief, murderous aftermath, devotion stripped clean of every ornament. Mine answered just as nakedly.

Around us, others were rising more slowly. Lucia drew a breath like someone resurfacing from deep water. Ryder shifted back toward his human shape in stages, swearing under it. Amelia sat back on her heels and wiped at her face angrily, as if tears were an administrative inconvenience. Archon stood and bowed his head once more to the Goddess. Wolves, demons, vampires, witches—all of them looked altered by witnessing whatever their species or politics had taught them before tonight.

The Goddess approached us.

Kazimir straightened, though he did not release me. Even now, battle-marked and monstrous, he managed a respect that looked like old-world royalty bowing before something older still. I would have bowed too if my legs had trusted me. Instead, I inclined as much as I could without swaying.

She smiled again, softer this time.

Her hand lifted.

She did not quite touch us. Her fingers hovered between our chests where the bond lived strongest, and light gathered there in a warm gold thread. It sank into us both at once.

The effect stole my breath.

The bond deepened. Not changed into something alien. Clarified. Every line between us grew cleaner, stronger, more resonant. Fear still existed inside me, but it no longer echoed in empty chambers. Kazimir’s presence in me became not louder, but steadier, as if some final uncertainty in the architecture of our joining had been sealed by a divine hand.

“For what comes after battle,” she said.

Her voice had lost none of its grandeur, yet there was an intimacy in it now, too. “May your bond be shield and refuge both. May love sharpen what power cannot. May neither of you ever again mistake loneliness for strength.”

The blessing settled into me like warmth into winter-stiffened hands.

Kazimir inhaled sharply. The smallest thing. But through the bond I felt where it struck him—right into that old hollow loneliness he hid beneath discipline and rule and centuries of command.

“Thank you,” I said, and my voice came out broken with awe.

Kazimir bowed his head. “We are honored.”

The Goddess’s gaze lingered on us one heartbeat longer. Then she looked out over Obsidian—the wreckage, the blood, the witnesses—and there was something in her face that might have been satisfaction, or perhaps simple justice properly arranged.

After that, she became light.

Not vanished. Became. Her form loosened into radiance, rose, and dissolved through the club’s ruined air in a swirl of gold so fine it left the scent of rain and night-blooming flowers behind. Then she, too, was gone.

Silence remained.

Real silence this time.