CHAPTER NINE #2
"All the time." Torin studied her carefully, something gentler than desire moving behind his eyes, though she caught, distantly, the older want still banked beneath it, patient as it had always been.
"I used to think if I just waited long enough, the complicated thing would eventually become the simple thing, given enough time.
" His mouth twisted, rueful. "I'm starting to think that's not how any of this works.
Some things stay complicated. You just decide whether they're worth the difficulty anyway. "
"Is that what I am to you? A complicated thing worth the difficulty?"
"You're the only thing I've ever been sure was worth it," Torin said, quiet and honest, "complicated or not."
Briar looked at him for a long moment — familiar, warm, endlessly patient in a way that ached with its own particular kindness — and felt something in her chest, worn thin by weeks of silence and unanswered longing, begin, dangerously, to lean.
Six weeks after Kade disappeared without a word, Briar stopped fighting the lean.
It happened on an evening that felt, in the moment, indistinguishable from a dozen others before it — Torin finding her on the garden wall, spice-wine in hand, the two of them talking about nothing important until the nothing important gave way to something heavier.
"I keep waiting to stop hoping he'll walk through the gate," Briar admitted, staring out at the fire-globes of Pyrhollow without really seeing them.
"Every single day, some stupid, stubborn part of me still expects it.
And every day it doesn't happen, I feel a little more foolish for hoping at all. "
"You're not foolish for loving someone," Torin said quietly. "Even when loving them costs you this much."
"Maybe not. But I'm tired, Torin. I'm so tired of hurting over someone who couldn't even tell me himself that he was leaving.
" Her voice cracked, raw and unguarded in a way she rarely allowed herself to be anymore.
"Sometimes I wonder if the simple thing was right in front of me the entire time, and I was just too stubborn, or too scared, to let myself take it. "
Torin went very still beside her. "Briar—"
"I know what I'm saying." She turned to face him fully, something reckless and worn-down driving her now, grief and exhaustion tangling into a decision she'd spend the rest of the night making.
"I know exactly what I'm saying, Torin. I'm just done pretending I don't feel the pull of you, when you're the only person who's shown up, every single day, without conditions. "
He searched her face for a long moment, giving her every chance to take it back, the way he always had. She didn't.
When he finally closed the distance between them, the kiss was nothing like the desperate, guilty thing from months earlier.
It was slow, deliberate, both of them fully choosing it this time, and Briar let herself sink into the familiar warmth of him without the frantic guilt that had stopped her before — because there was no one waiting for her tonight, no image of coal-dark eyes crashing through to pull her back.
Just Torin, patient and warm and finally, achingly present.
"Tell me to stop," he murmured against her mouth, echoing words he'd said once before, "and I will."
"Don't," Briar breathed, and meant it completely, for the first time.
They made it to his rooms this time, not hers, storm-static crackling soft and constant against her skin everywhere his hands moved.
He undressed her slowly, reverently, murmuring her name like something he'd been waiting years to be allowed to say properly, and Briar let herself be worshipped in a way that felt, for once, blessedly uncomplicated — no politics, no prophecy, no ancient monster weighing the outcome of her own heart.
He laid her back against his sheets and took his time with her, unhurried in the particular way of a man who had imagined this exact moment more times than he'd ever admit, mapping her with lips and hands until she was trembling, aching, gasping his name into the dark.
When he finally settled over her, his forehead dropped to hers, breath uneven, storm-light crackling faint and steady along his shoulders.
"I've wanted this since we were children," he admitted, voice rough. "I need you to know that. Whatever tonight is, whatever it means tomorrow — I have never once wanted anyone the way I've wanted you."
"I know," Briar whispered, and drew him down to her.
He entered her slowly, giving her every moment to adjust, and the low, charged hum of him settling inside her felt like static before a storm finally broke — nothing like Kade's banked, steady fire, but its own kind of overwhelming, restless and electric and entirely Torin.
They found a rhythm unhurried at first, then faster, deeper, his hands gripping her hips with barely restrained hunger while she arched to meet him, every gasp swallowed by the next kiss.
He watched her the whole time, storm-bright eyes fixed on her face like he refused to miss a single flicker of what he was making her feel.
The night stretched on slow and thorough, neither of them in any hurry to let it end — a second joining after the first had left them both trembling, and then, near dawn, a third, softer and slower than anything before it, more tenderness than heat by then, both of them chasing something that felt, in the exhausted, unguarded hours before sunrise, almost like peace.
When it was finally, truly over, Briar lay tangled in his sheets, his arm heavy and warm across her waist, and let herself drift into the kind of dreamless, bone-deep sleep she hadn't managed in six long weeks.
She woke at first light to a silence that felt entirely different from the one she'd fallen asleep inside.
Torin was still sleeping beside her, peaceful in a way she rarely saw from him, and Briar lay very still, staring at the ceiling of his quarters, waiting for some rush of rightness to settle into her chest and confirm that she'd finally made the simple choice everyone had always assumed was hers to make.
It didn't come.
Instead, cold and immediate and entirely unwelcome, came guilt — sharp enough to steal her breath, twisting through her chest like something with teeth.
She thought of Kade's note, rushed and desperate and still, somehow, full of intention to come back to her.
She thought of every promise he'd made her in the warded chamber, on the balcony, in his own bed the night he'd finally chosen her over everything his father wanted.
She thought of the particular, banked warmth of his hands, and felt, lying in another man's bed at dawn, like she had taken something precious and irreplaceable and let exhaustion and grief talk her into throwing it away.
"Briar?" Torin's voice was soft, sleep-rough, as he stirred beside her. "You've gone somewhere far away. What's wrong?"
She didn't answer right away. She sat up slowly, pulling the sheet against her chest, staring down at her own hands like they belonged to someone else.
"I think," she said finally, voice unsteady, "I just made a terrible mistake."
Torin's face, still soft with sleep, went carefully, quietly still — and Briar watched him understand, in real time, exactly how much that sentence was going to cost him.
Kade returned to Pyrhollow two months later, on a gray, rain-heavy afternoon, with no warning beyond a border rider sent an hour ahead to announce his approach.
Briar felt the news land in her chest like a physical blow, equal parts relief and dread so tangled together she couldn't separate one from the other.
She had spent two months rehearsing this moment in a hundred different versions, and none of them had prepared her for the way her whole body went cold the instant she saw him dismount in the courtyard — thinner than she remembered, exhausted in a way that spoke of weeks she knew nothing about, and looking at her with an expression so openly relieved that the guilt in her chest turned instantly, sickeningly sharp.
"Briar." Her name in his mouth after two months of silence undid something in her chest she hadn't realized was still so carefully held together.
He crossed the courtyard fast, pulling her into his arms before she could find a single word to say, burying his face against her hair like he'd spent every night of his absence rehearsing exactly this.
"I am so sorry. I wanted to tell you everything, I wanted to send word a hundred times, and every single time my father—"
"Kade." She pulled back, gently, forcing herself to meet his eyes even though every instinct screamed at her to simply let herself be held instead. "There's something I need to tell you. Before you say anything else. Before you keep being glad to see me."
Something in his expression sharpened, old wariness surfacing fast. "What happened?"
She told him. All of it — the weeks of silence, the grief that had worn her down to nothing, Torin's steady, patient presence, the night she'd let exhaustion and heartbreak convince her that the simple thing might be the right thing.
She watched his face while she spoke, watched warmth curdle slowly into something more devastated than furious, and made herself finish every word instead of softening any of it.
"I don't have an excuse that makes it smaller than it was," she said finally, voice raw.
"I was grieving you like you might not come back at all, and Torin was the only steady thing in front of me, and for one night I let myself believe the easy path might actually be the right one.
It wasn't. I knew it the moment it was over.
But that doesn't undo what I did, or what it cost you to come home to. "
Kade was silent for a long moment, jaw working, something raw and wounded moving behind eyes that had, until a moment ago, looked at her like she was the only steady thing in his own world too.