22. Gavriel
Gavriel
She finds me on the Palace wall that night, which she shouldn’t, because it’s cold up here and there’s nothing to see but the red dark and the shape of the war coming, but Tabby’s never once done the sensible thing in her life and I’d worry if she started now.
“You’re brooding again,” she says, coming up beside me. “Loud quiet. I can hear it from the bedroom.”
“I don’t brood.”
“You brood like it’s an Olympic sport.” She leans on the parapet next to me, close, her shoulder against my arm.
She’s small next to me, always has been, the size of a thing I could break by accident, and instead she’s the strongest thing I’ve ever guarded.
“What’s going on in that big grumpy head, Gav? Talk to me.”
I don’t want to. I’ve spent a long life not talking, keeping the hard things behind my teeth where they can’t hurt anyone. But she asked, and she’s the one person I’ve never learned how to refuse.
“I was made for one thing,” I say, low. “Guarding you. Dying when you die. That’s the whole of what a Guardian is.
And tomorrow you’re going to walk into your ex’s fortress wearing a dead woman, and I can’t come.
I can’t guard you in there, Tabby. The plan needs me at the seam with the others, and it’s the right plan.
I hate it, because for the first time since I woke I have to send you into the worst danger of your life and stand somewhere else while it happens.
” My hand tightens on the cold stone. “That’s the going-on in my head.
I don’t know how to guard you from in another room. I’ve never had to.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then she turns and steps in close, right up against me, and puts her small hands flat on my chest. She looks up at me with those blue eyes that see straight through the stone of me every time.
“You know what I think?” she says softly.
“I think you’ve spent so long telling yourself you’re a shield with legs that you’ve forgotten you’re a person.
A great, gruff, ridiculous person who feels things so hard he has to stand on a freezing wall at night so nobody sees.
” She slides her hands up to my face, the scarred jaw, the cheek I’ve never let anyone touch but her.
“You’re not going to guard me tomorrow because a bond makes you.
You’re going to be sick with worry the whole time, because you love me, and that’s allowed, Gav.
You’re allowed to love me and be frightened for me and hate the plan.
It doesn’t make you a bad Guardian. It makes you mine. ”
The thing I keep behind my teeth cracks open, and for once I don’t shove it back down.
“I do love you,” I say, rough, the words strange in my mouth. “More than the bond. Before the bond, if I’m honest, from the moment I saw you. The shield just gave me an excuse to stay.”
“I know,” she whispers, and there are tears on her lashes. “Now kiss me, you great fool, before I freeze to this wall.”
So I kiss her. And it’s not gentle, the way I usually am with her, careful of my size, careful of my strength.
Tonight she doesn’t want careful, I can feel it, she wants all of it, wants me to stop holding back, and so I do.
I lift her clean off her feet and she wraps her legs round me, and I carry her out of the cold, back to the warmth.
I lay her down and I show her, with my hands and my mouth and every part of me, the thing I’ve never had the words for.
I take her slow and deep, my Queen, my whole reason, watching her face the entire time so she knows it’s me, knows it’s real, knows the man under the shield is the one worshipping her.
She comes apart round me with my name on her lips, and I follow her, and after, when she’s tucked against my chest half-asleep, I say it again, because now that I’ve started I find I can’t stop.
“I love you. Both. The bond and the man. Both.”
“Both,” she murmurs, smiling against my skin. “Told you I’d make you say it.”
She did. Mouthy to the last. My Queen.
Tomorrow I send her into the dark and stand somewhere else and hate every second of it. But tonight she’s here, warm and safe and mine, and she made me say the word twice. For a man like me, that’s as close to peace as I’ve ever come.