Chapter 29
Verity made it halfway down the corridor before her knees decided they were finished with the business of holding her upright.
She put a hand on the wall. The stone was cold and solid and did not care that she had just walked into a room full of orc warriors and told them she was refusing the position she had wanted for nine years in favor of organizing their dead archivist's papers.
The stone was very sensible. She should be more like the stone.
She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor of the corridor with her knees drawn up and her hands still shaking in her lap.
She had done it.
She had actually done it.
The laugh that came out of her was not entirely sane. It bounced off the walls of the empty corridor and came back sounding like something between relief and hysteria, and she pressed both hands over her mouth to stop it from happening again.
I am choosing this.
She had said that. Out loud. To Durgan's face. While Targesh watched.
While Targesh watched and said nothing and then approved her appointment with a voice so steady she wanted to throw something at him, because how was he steady, how was anyone steady, she had just upended her entire life in front of witnesses and he had responded like she was requesting a change to the patrol schedule—
The door at the end of the corridor opened.
Verity scrambled to get her feet under her. She was not going to be found sitting on the floor like a—
Too late. Targesh came around the corner and stopped.
They looked at each other.
He was still wearing the expression he'd had in the council chamber. The one that gave away nothing. The one that made her want to take his face in her hands and shake him.
"You're on the floor," he said.
"I am."
He crossed to her in three strides. His hand closed around her elbow, and he lifted her easily back to her feet. She swayed. His other hand came to her waist.
"Why?"
Verity looked up at him. "Why was I on the floor?"
"Why did you refuse it?"
"Because the work here matters."
"The work in Valdara matters. To you."
"It did."
"You would refuse that position for the work here."
"Yes."
His jaw tightened. The scar at his brow pulled. She watched him not ask the next question, watched him hold it back the way he held everything back, and she was done.
"And for you."
His hand on her waist went still.
"Verity."
"Don't." She flattened her palm against his chest. "Don't tell me I should go back. Don't tell me the position is too important. Don't tell me I'll regret it."
"You should not stay out of obligation."
"Obligation," she repeated.
"Krenna carries weight. I am aware of that. And you are—"
"You think I turned down the highest archival appointment in Valdara because I feel obligated to you."
"I will not be the reason you—"
"Targesh."
He closed his mouth.
Verity grabbed a fistful of his tunic. "I am not sacrificing anything," she said. "Do you understand? I am not giving something up. I am not settling. I am not noble, or generous, or confused."
His eyes were on her face. The hammered-iron gray that she had spent weeks learning to read, and she could read him now, she could see exactly what was happening behind the stillness. He was braced. The way he braced when he expected a blow he wouldn't dodge.
"The Keeper position is a room full of documents that belong to other people," she said.
"Restricted collections I'd maintain but never change.
Filing systems built two hundred years ago by men who decided what mattered and what didn't, and I would preserve those decisions.
I would keep them intact. That is what the Keeper does. She keeps."
Her grip on his tunic tightened.
"Varresh's archive is unfinished. It has gaps the size of an entire kingdom's memory, and I know where the missing pieces are, and I know how to get them. No one else in Valdara or in the Iron Wilds can do this work. No one else would want to." She exhaled. "I want to."
He had not moved. Had not touched her beyond the hand at her waist, which was rigid now, fingers spread against the wool of her dress as though he was holding himself in place.
"And you," she said. "I want you. Not because you're convenient, or because I'm far from home, or because you've been kind to me. Because you are the first person who has ever looked at the way my mind works and not asked me to make it smaller."
His hand came up from her waist to the back of her neck and he kissed her.
She was against the wall. His hand cradled her skull so the stone didn't scrape, but the rest of her was pressed between cold rock and the furnace heat of him, and she couldn't breathe and didn't want to.
Her fist was still knotted in his tunic.
She pulled. He came closer. There was nowhere closer to go, and he found a way anyway, his thigh between hers, his other arm banded around her waist lifting her onto her toes so he didn't have to bend so far.
Voices from the council chamber. The scrape of chairs.
Targesh broke the kiss. His forehead pressed against hers. His breathing was ragged, and she could feel the effort it was costing him to stop.
His thumb traced the line of her jaw. His pupils were blown wide, the iron-gray reduced to a thin ring, and she could feel him against her hip.
"You are staying," he said. Not a question this time.
"I am staying."
His hand tightened on the back of her neck. Just enough pressure to make her breath catch, to send a signal straight down her spine that arrived between her legs with absolute clarity.
"Then we are going to my quarters. Now."
Targesh took her hand and walked.
He did not hurry. His stride was long enough that she had to half-jog to keep pace, but his shoulders were level, his jaw set, his grip on her fingers absolute.
The corridor turned. Stairs. Another corridor. A pair of warriors coming the opposite direction stepped aside without being asked, their eyes tracking Verity for exactly one second before finding something fascinating on the opposite wall.
She didn't care.
A few weeks ago she would have cared. A few weeks ago, the knowledge that every orc in this fortress could smell exactly what was happening in her blood would have sent her retreating to the archives with her journal and her embarrassment.
But that woman had written handover documents and packed her bags in her head and called it professionalism, and Verity was done with her.
Targesh's door. He shouldered it open without releasing her hand, pulled her through, kicked it shut behind them.
The bolt slammed home.
The sound echoed off stone. His quarters.
The hearth banked low, the table cleared, the bookshelves with their worn spines.
The closed door to the sleeping chamber.
The room smelled like leather and wood smoke and him, and she breathed it in and felt something loosen in her chest that had been clenched for two days.
He turned to face her.
For a moment, neither of them moved. The low fire cast shadows across his face, catching the ridges of old scars, the sharp line of his jaw, the way his chest rose and fell with breaths that were not quite steady.
"You were going to let me leave," she said.
"Yes."
"Without asking me to stay."
"You are not a thing to be kept."
His free hand came up to her face, his palm rough against her cheek. She turned her face into his palm. Pressed her lips against the callused skin.
"I am here," she said. "I chose to be here. And I need you to stop being noble about it and take me to bed."