Chapter 15 #2
Her forehead dropped against his. Her hands were still in his hair, not releasing. He had one hand against the back of her neck and the other flat against the small of her back. He could feel the frantic thud of her heart through her ribs, echoing his own.
They stood there for a moment with their breath tangled between them and the fire in the brazier, throwing its low light across the stone floor. The silence was no longer heavy, but charged with a terrifying, new light.
Her eyes opened. They were bright with unshed tears and a sudden, fierce heat.
Green, dark at the edge, closer than they've ever been. Her mouth was red, and her hair had come half down from its braid, and she was looking at him with a directness he felt in his sternum. The intensity of her gaze made his knees weak.
He kissed her again.
She kissed him back.
Slower this time. It was a deliberate, searching touch that made his skin feel too small for his body.
Her hands moving from his hair to the sides of his face, holding him still. She cradled his face as if it were something precious, something she intended to keep.
He let her, one hand at her waist and one at the back of her neck. Her mouth soft and deliberate, and taking its time, and it was worse than the desperate first kiss. It was considerably worse. The tenderness of it was a knife to his heart, cutting through the scar tissue.
It was the kind of kiss that meant something specific and did not pretend otherwise. It was a claim, and he felt himself surrendering to it.
He pulled back enough to breathe.
Not far. An inch, perhaps two, the distance a man allowed himself when he was trying to remember what caution felt like and finding he no longer could. Her forehead came to rest against his. Her hands were still in his hair, not releasing.
He could feel her heartbeat.
Not hear it, feel it. Through the press of her chest against his, a rapid, unguarded rhythm that matched nothing steady or controlled.
She was not managing herself. She had stopped managing herself entirely and had not noticed, and something in him recognized that with a clarity that went straight through his ribs.
He brought one hand up slowly. Not to her hair, not to her jaw. To her collarbone, just below her throat. The flat of his palm, still, simply resting. Learning the pace of her breathing through his hand the way she had learned his scar through her fingers.
She stilled. Let him.
Her eyes were open, close, the color of deep water in low light. She was looking at him without armor, without the dry, careful guard she carried everywhere, and he was close enough to see the exact moment she chose not to put it back.
She was entirely unafraid and beautiful.
The thought arrived with the force of something falling.
Not unafraid of him.
She had never been afraid of him, that he had known from a cliff ledge in the western glens. Unafraid of this. Of being seen wanting something. Of letting it show in her face and her hands and the unsteady pull of her breath.
She had walked into this room open and she had stayed open and she was still open now, every part of her present and undefended.
He had not been that in six years. He was not certain he remembered how.
Her hair fell forward around them both, red and loose, the smell of herbs and cold air and something underneath that was simply her. He turned his face into it. Stayed there a moment, his hand still at her collarbone, her heartbeat still under his palm.
Everything I care about dies.
The thought arrived the way it always arrived. Without warning. Without mercy.
She is open the way things are open before they break. And it is always my hand on the thing that breaks.
He stepped back.
The movement was sudden, violent, as if he had been burned.
His hands left her. The cold of the room filled the space between them immediately, sharp and immediate, two feet of herb-room air that had not been there a moment ago. He felt the loss of her warmth like a physical wound.
She looked at him. Her eyes were wide, the pupils dilated, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps.
Her chest was rising and falling, her hair loose. Her eyes not soft, not hurt yet, still the heat of the last few minutes in them. But watching him, reading the step back, reading his face. He saw the confusion beginning to cloud the emerald of her eyes.
He looked at her. At the loosened hair and the red mouth and the woman who had ridden into his keep in his arms cursing him and had taken the boy's bad nights and Seumas's joints and Donal's ribs and Eidith's cold approval and turned them all without once asking for permission.
He saw her for exactly what she was—the most dangerous thing he had ever encountered.
Who touched the scar on his face the way it had never been touched and who was looking at him right now without fear and without retreat. His heart felt as though it was being squeezed by a giant's hand.
"So the dragon tamed the fox," he said. The words felt like ash, a hollow, desperate attempt to regain his balance.
His voice came out rough. He hadn't planned the words. They arrived the way armor arrived. Fast, without elegance, because something needed covering. He saw her flinch at the tone, and he hated himself for it.
Her chin came up. The defensive reflex was instantaneous, her spine straightening with a familiar, icy pride.
"Nay dragon tames me," she said. Her voice was a low, dangerous warning.
"Nay fox fools me." He met her gaze, his expression closing over itself like a door being shut.
It landed between them. He watched it land. Watched the heat in her face shift. Not gone, but moving, changing into something else, something cooler and more deliberate. The softness he'd just seen was being replaced by a hard, brittle anger.
She was visibly hurt but she was trying so hard not to show it. He saw the way her fingers curled into her palms, her knuckles turning white.
She took a breath. Let it out. The sound was a long, shaky exhale.
"Once James is healed," she said, her voice quieter now, steadied, "I'm gone." The finality in her voice made the room feel suddenly cavernous.
He heard it for what it was. The question underneath the statement, the thing she was waiting for him to answer, the opening she was leaving. His own pride rose up to meet hers, a stubborn, self-destructive wall.
He closed it.
"Cannae wait," he said. The lie was a bitter, leaden weight on his tongue.
The words came out before the thought had finished forming, and he heard them arrive and knew immediately they were wrong.
Not the truth, the opposite of the truth, the stupid reflexive answer of a man whose pride had gotten to the door before his sense had.
He felt his stomach drop as he watched her face take them.
He watched her face take them. It was as if he had struck her.
A small thing, what happened in her face.
Easy to miss. Her chin stayed level. Her eyes stayed on him.
But something went out behind them, briefly, the way a flame went out.
There and then not there, and the not-there was worse than any visible wound would have been.
The light in her eyes died, leaving only a cold, green glass.
She looked at him for a moment. The silence was deafening.
"So now ye want me gone?" she said. Her voice was flat, devoid of the emotion that had been there only seconds ago.
He dragged his hand down his jaw, the rasp of it loud in the small room. "I daenae ken what I was thinking." He looked away, unable to bear the sight of the emptiness he'd caused.
"Clearly," she said. Flat. Precise. The word was a scalpel, cutting him out of her life.
He almost stepped toward her.
Daenae.
He turned. The movement was a coward's retreat and he knew it before his foot had finished the turn.
He walked out. The cold of the stones came through his boots immediately, sharp and grounding, and he used it.
The door swung closed behind him. The click of the latch sat in the air like something said that couldn't be unsaid.
She had not argued.
He walked. Jaw set, hands at his sides, eyes on the corridor ahead. He did not look back. He was aware, with the precision of a man cataloguing damage, of the exact quality of the silence he had just left in that room and of what it meant that she had let him leave in it.
She had stood there and said once James is healed, I'm gone.
And I had said I cannae wait.
He reached the study. Stopped inside the door.
The map was where he'd left it, folded neatly at the corner. The fire burned low. The dispatch Fox had stolen sat at the edge of the desk, seal intact, unread. Everything exactly as it had been.
He had kissed her. He had held her.
He had felt the whole of it arrive in his chest. The specific, terrible thing he'd been refusing since a cliff ledge in the western glens. Then he had stepped back and opened his mouth and said cannae wait.
He pressed both hands flat on the desk.
The room had his maps and his fire and the chair he'd sat in for six years. He had made every decision that mattered from inside these walls. He had held this clan and this name and a child's breathing in his two hands and he had not broken.
This was different.
This, he did not know how to hold without breaking it.
It had always been sufficient, this room. These walls. Now it felt like a tomb he'd built himself one careful stone at a time, and he was only now standing in the middle of it understanding what he'd made.
He did not unfold the map. He just stood there in the growing cold, looking at nothing, a man who had finally seen what he was looking at and had no idea what to do with any of it.