8. Surrender #4
I was fairly confident two days off the pill was not enough time for anything to become an immediate concern.
Fairly confident. But I was not about to explain ovulation, synthetic hormones, and pharmaceutical contraception to a man who had never heard of Philadelphia.
The claiming covered the variable at the theological level.
The biological level, I decided, was a conversation for another woman. Probably Caen.
Definitely Caen.
“That sounds,” I said, “somewhat like marriage. Where I come from. Two people, a ceremony, rings, a promise.”
He shook his head slightly. “It is much more than a promise. Once the bond is sealed, we will feel each other’s emotions. Joy, pain, desire, fear. We will be bound for life. There is no undoing it.”
“The ring only glows after,” he continued, voice dropping lower. “It is Yravel’s acknowledgment. The bond recognizing itself.”
He touched the plain steel ring on his left hand.
“When the claiming is complete, it will glow warm gold.”
I looked at my hand on his chest. My fingers were bare. They had been bare since I arrived in this world.
The weight of what he was describing settled over me slowly. A permanent empathic bond. Feeling everything he felt. Forever.
No quiet exit if things became too much. No careful separation. Just him, inside my heart, and me inside his, for the rest of our lives.
Divorce law, I suspected, was not a thriving profession in Mytharo.
The old Meghan—the one who had stayed in a dead-end engagement for years past the honest version of events—would have found sixteen reasons to leave this conversation immediately.
I was listening to what he was saying instead.
“There is something else you must know,” he said.
He was quiet long enough that I felt the room change.
“I have claimed a woman before. Her name was Mira. She was a soldier under my command long before she became my claimed woman. I found her in a field after a battle. I removed her ring from her finger with my own hands.”
He paused.
The fire crackled. The keep was quiet around us.
“That is why offering to claim you is not a light thing for me, Meghan. Once the ring is given and the bond is sealed, it is for life. You must be certain.”
I stayed very still.
His thumb was still moving slowly over my knuckles. I did not think he knew he was doing it.
He had been carrying this for years. And he had told me now, here, with my hand on his chest and the fire low and everything that had just happened still present in the room between us, because he wanted there to be no ambiguity about what he was asking.
I understood, then, what kind of man he was. A man who had pulled the ring from his dead wife’s finger—no, his claimed woman’s finger; wife was not a thing here—and gone back to work and held the line.
And now he was here with me.
For him, this was not a simple escalation.
It was not even sexual desire, though there was enough of that in his eyes to make my body remember exactly where we were and what we had been doing.
This was a man who had already given his life once.
Who had loved, and lost, and survived grief.
And he was considering opening that door again.
For me.
The realization moved through me slowly, more frightening than flattering. It made the whole room feel quieter. It made his hand on my skin feel less like hunger and more like trust. Whatever he felt for me, it was not small. It could not be small, not if it had brought him this far.
“I need to think about this,” I said.
“I know.” His hand moved once over my back, slow and steady. “It is not a thing to answer in the heat of the moment. I only wanted you to know that the choice is real, and that it is yours.”
He said it with a patience that made my chest ache.
He respected the weight of the answer.
***
I did not leave.
I had a room of my own, a desk with notes on it, and the private space a woman needed to think clearly about a significant decision.
These were good reasons to leave.
I stayed anyway.
Skip fell asleep. His breathing evened out beneath my cheek. His arm rested around me, heavy and warm. I did not move it.
The fire had burned low. The room was dark and quiet, and I lay awake thinking about the claiming.
A permanent empathic bond. His ring. His certainty.
I had spent years cataloging what I wanted as if desire were a research project. I had built a private inventory so specific it felt aspirational, a map of a territory I did not expect to find.
And now I was in a medieval fortress in another world, lying against a man who had made every item on that list seem not only possible but conservative.
The territory, apparently, existed.
I looked at his hand on my hip. At the ring on his finger, waiting.
Somewhere below us, the crypt door was locked and soldiers stood watch. The danger was real. None of that was insignificant.
I had seen what he was when fear had every right to own the room. I had seen him in battle, surrounded by blood and fire and the dead, and he had not fractured. He had moved. Decided. Protected. Held the line because the line had needed holding.
Now that same strength was at rest beneath me.
For the first time since waking under the wrong sky, I felt totally safe.
I closed my eyes, and I slept.