Chapter 25: Fire and Ice - 5
The cracked mirror sat propped on Mira’s small table, its jagged edges catching the candlelight in her room.
She kept it despite its flaws, a stubborn relic of her wandering years as a pyromancer, its fractured surface as much a part of her as her fire.
Tonight, it showed too much—her bronze skin, still marked by faint rope lines from the night before, her full breasts rising with each breath, her thighs sticky with lingering arousal.
But it was her eyes that held her—red-rimmed, vulnerable, soft in a way she hated. Until now.
Mira sat before it, nude, her red hair spilling wild over her shoulders, the air heavy with the scent of wax and the faint smokiness of her own heat.
The tavern below was hushed, its hearth cold, the silence broken only by the distant creak of settling wood.
Her chest bore the faint imprint of silk ribbons, her body alive with the memory of Kio’s ropes, but it was her own reflection that made her shudder.
"I thought I’d killed her," she said, the words slipping out, unbidden, her voice thin and raw.
Kio stood behind her, his presence silent but steady, a tide that didn’t need to announce itself.