Chapter 18 #2
"I killed them. All of them. I burned the eastern wing of the estate to the foundations.
Saevra was in the eastern wing." His hands were open in his lap now, palms up, as though presenting evidence.
"I do not know if she died from the slavers or from my fire.
I have never known. I sealed the wing afterward. I rebuilt everything else."
The training room held the weight of what he had just said without buckling under it.
"I am not sure I loved her," he said. The words came raw, scraped clean of any attempt to make them easier.
"I know I failed her. I know that if I had never come back — if I had stayed gone, stayed missing — she would still be alive in her family's house with her dry humor and her minor holdings and her life.
I came back and I claimed the hold because I believed I had a right to it, and three months later she was dead because of that decision. "
He turned his hands over. Closed them.
"I would make the same decision again. That is the part I cannot reconcile.
I would come back. I would claim what was mine.
I would build the network. I would do all of it.
Even knowing what it cost. And I would carry the cost because I believe what I have built since is worth the carrying.
" He looked at her. His eyes were dark and entirely clear.
"But I have never stopped wondering if she would have been safer if I had stayed gone. I will never stop wondering that."
November looked at him — this man who had just handed her every broken piece of himself and not flinched while doing it.
Who had told her about the child he had been and the weapon he'd been made into and the wife he might have killed and had not once asked her to make it smaller or easier or more bearable.
Who had laid it all on the stone floor between them and was sitting in the wreckage without looking away.
She reached for him.
Her fingers found the edge of the wing membrane first. Traced the border where ruined tissue met the scarred skin of his shoulder.
She followed the scars over the ridge of muscle, up the column of his neck where burns and scales tangled together in a map of the worst night of his life.
Along the line of his jaw where the damage ended in a ragged border, half his face untouched, the other half rewritten by fire.
Her thumb traced the scar along his jaw. Slowly. The ridged tissue was warm under her skin. He was always warm, but here, where the damage was deepest, the heat was almost startling — as though the fire that had broken him still lived in the bones underneath.
"November."
Her name in his mouth. Low. The resonance under it, the harmonic she could feel in her sternum. Warning or question. Both. Neither.
She answered by closing the distance.
The kiss was quiet. Almost careful. She pressed her mouth to his and felt him freeze, every muscle in his body locking, the trembling stopping entirely for one suspended second as though his body could not process what was happening and had simply ceased all function while it tried.
His lips were warm and slightly rough and he did not move and he did not breathe and she was about to pull back — had she read it wrong, had she pushed too far —
His hand came up.
It cupped her jaw. Trembling. His fingers spread along the side of her face, his thumb resting against her cheekbone, and his hand against her skin made something collapse inside her chest because she knew what those hands could do.
She had watched them crush a man's throat against a tavern wall.
She had watched them grip a blade in this room.
And here, now, the gentleness of them. The specific, devastating care of a man who was terrified of his own strength placing his hand against her face as though she were the most fragile thing in the world and the most important.
She kissed him deeper. Not hungrier. Not desperate.
Just more. More of herself against more of him.
His mouth opened under hers and the sound he made was low and involuntary, the resonance in his chest humming against her lips, vibrating through the places where their bodies touched.
His other hand found her waist and rested there without pulling, without pressing, just holding. Present. Shaking.
The trembling undid her. The gentleness of a weapon holding itself in check, not because it had to, but because it wanted to.
Because she was worth the effort of calibration.
His thumb moved against her cheekbone — one small, deliberate stroke — and she made a sound against his mouth that surprised them both.
When they separated she did not move away.
She stayed in the space between them. Close enough to see the amber bleeding into his irises, the vertical pupils slowly expanding.
Close enough to see the scales along his jaw, surfaced and dark and warm where her hand still rested against them.
Close enough to feel his breath against her lips, ragged and unsteady.
He looked at her. She looked back.
His hand was still on her jaw. His thumb still resting against her cheekbone. The trembling had not stopped. She did not think it would. She covered his hand with hers and held it there.
November sat in the quiet of everything that had been said and everything that had just happened and thought about Earth.
She had been thinking about going back since the moment she agreed to this.
Every day. Earth was the fixed point — the thing waiting on the other side of the tribunal, the place she would return to when the testimony was given and the transaction was complete.
Earth was horses and wide skies and the barn where her mother's memory lived in the grain of the wood.
Earth was the plan. Earth was the after.
She looked at him. At the scars and the scales and the trembling hand and the dark eyes watching her with an expression she had never seen on anyone's face before.
Not want. Not need. Something underneath both of those — raw, terrified willingness to stop performing containment and sit in the open, waiting to see what happened next.
She was not going back to Earth.
She did not know when she had decided that.
Sometime between his voice in the dark saying I count them and his hands shaking as he promised she would never be touched without consent.
Sometime between his arm around her waist on the ride home and her hand on his face in the firelight.
Sometime in the last thirty seconds, when he had kissed her as though she was the only real thing in the universe and he was not sure he was allowed to touch her.
She did not know when. She knew it was true.
She leaned forward. Rested her forehead against his. His breath shuddered out warm against her skin. His hand tightened on her jaw — just barely, just enough — and held.