4. GARDEN HEAT
Chapter four
GARDEN HEAT
PORTIA
Itell myself I go out to the garden to breathe, and it is the kind of lie you can only tell when the truth is too large to hold.
The wake has bled into evening. Inside, the court does what courts do over the bodies of the dead, which is feed.
They drink the king's wine and weigh the king's heir and trade their small sharp speculations behind their hands, and the air in there is thick with perfume and politics and the particular heat of a room full of people pretending not to watch each other.
I have spent six hours wearing my face like a mask carved a half-inch too tight.
When the doors to the terrace open and the cold spills in, I follow it out the way a drowning thing follows light.
The garden at night is a different country than the garden in daylight.
The hedges are black walls. The drained fountain holds a single coin of moon in its dry basin.
Somewhere a night bird turns over one low note and lets it go.
I walk the gravel path until the noise of the wake thins to nothing behind me, and I stand in the dark and I let my shoulders down for the first time all day, one notch, and then another, and I breathe in primrose and stone and the green smell of clipped box.
And then, under it, smoke and pine. Him.
I do not have to turn to know. The bond knows before my senses catch up, that hook behind my sternum drawing taut, and when I do turn he is there at the mouth of the path, and the sight of him goes through me like the first swallow of something I have been thirsty for so long I forgot it had a name.
"You keep finding the dark," Leon says.
"It's quieter than the alternative." My voice comes out level. A small mercy.
He comes closer, unhurried, the way a tide comes in, and I let him, which is the first mistake, and I do not step back, which is the second.
The cold of my own nature reaches toward the heat of his and the air between us does something I can feel on my skin, a charge, a held breath, the silence before flame catches.
"You ran from me in there," he says. "In the gallery. I felt it."
"You shouldn't be able to feel anything," I say, and it is too honest, and I watch him hear it.
"But I do." He stops close enough that I have to tip my chin to hold his eyes.
Up close he smells like winter and like want, and the want is the dangerous part.
"I've been able to feel you since the second I walked into that garden last night.
I don't have a word for it. I keep reaching for one and it isn't there.
But I know that it's you, and I know that it's real, and I am done pretending in front of these people that it isn't."
My dragon presses up under my ribs, and I press her down, and the effort of it makes my hands shake.
"There are words for it," I say quietly. "I'm just not allowed to give them to you yet."
He hears the yet. Of course he does. It is the same word I gave him in the dark last night, and it lands between us now like a struck match.
"Then don't give me the words," he says, low. "Give me the rest."
I should leave. Every disciplined cell I own knows the math.
Reach too soon and the bond locks crooked.
Reach too soon and I doom us both to the slow wrong death I watched take my cousin.
I know all of this the way I know my own name, and none of it is louder, in this dark, with his eyes on my mouth, than the simple animal fact of him.
So when he lifts a hand and sets it, careful, asking, against the line of my jaw, I do not pull away. I turn my face into his palm like something starved, and the small surrender of it undoes a knot in me I have kept tied my whole life.
"Tell me to stop," he says against my temple, and his voice has gone rough, "and I will. Right now. Say the word and I walk back inside."
That he asks at all is what breaks me. Not the heat of him. The asking. The way the most powerful thing in the garden is holding itself still and putting the choice in my hands like a coal he is afraid will burn me.
"Don't stop," I say.
He kisses me and the world tilts, the way the deck of a boat tilts, and I think wildly that we have both been carrying the same broken compass all this time, both of us spun around by the same dark water, and here is the magnetic north of it at last. His mouth is warm and certain and the cold in me rises to meet it, fire and ice braided together with nowhere to go.
My back finds the stone wall, mercifully cold against the heat building under my skin.
His hands learn me carefully, reverent, asking again with every inch even when his mouth is busy, and I answer with mine, and the careful diplomat I have been my whole life dissolves like salt in the sea.
The heat-flare takes me before I can stop it.
It rolls up from somewhere below my sternum, a wave of pure want with teeth, and my knees go and he catches me without breaking the kiss, one arm banding around my waist, holding me up against him and the wall both.
I feel the shimmer start across my collarbone, scales surfacing, the moon catching them, and I cannot make them go down, not with his mouth on my throat and my whole body singing the one word I am forbidden to say.
"You're warm," he murmurs against my skin, wondering, his thumb tracing the ridge of something that should not be there. "You run so cold and then you're like a furnace, how are you," and his breath catches as he feels the scales for what they are, and I brace for the recoil.
It does not come.
He pulls back just far enough to look at me, and there is no fear in his face. Only that same reverence, deepened, and the gold beginning to rise in his eyes like sun coming up under water.
"Whatever you are," he says, "I'm not afraid of it."
It is the most dangerous thing anyone has ever said to me, because I believe him.
I feel the gold flood his eyes the rest of the way.
I feel the air around him change, charge, the wolf rising in him the way the dragon is rising in me, two enormous old things waking at once with only our human skins between them and the night.
His grip tightens. His voice drops to something barely human.
"Portia." He has never said my name. I never gave it to him. He knows it anyway, the bond handing it over, and hearing it in his mouth nearly finishes what the kiss started. "Something's happening to me. I can feel it coming. I don't," his breath shudders. "I think I'm going to shift."
"No," I say, surfacing through the heat, the disciplined part of me clawing back to the wheel.
"Not here. Not like this. Leon, look at me, you have to," and I cannot finish because the gold is total now, and his bones are starting their terrible beautiful argument under his skin, and the law I have obeyed my whole life is about to be broken in a garden by a man who does not even know the law exists.
And then, into the breathless dark, the estate alarms begin to scream.
Floodlights slam on across the grounds, turning the black garden white.
Somewhere men are shouting. The wolf in Leon stutters, caught between the shift and the sudden violence of the noise, and he sags against me, panting, the gold guttering in his eyes, half a man and half something else and shaking with the effort of being neither.
"What," he breathes. "What is that."
I do not know. But my dragon has gone from molten to ice in a single beat, every instinct I own snapping from want to warning, and over his shoulder, beyond the white-lit hedges, I see figures moving toward the palace who do not move like the king's men.
"Inside," I say, and the diplomat is fully back now, cold and clear and afraid. "Now. Stay close to me and do exactly as I say."
Whatever I am, whatever I have just let begin, the night has decided it is not done with us yet.
Dearest Readers,
Well. I did say the garden would matter.
He asked her to tell him to stop. That is the part I want you to hold onto, loves, because the whole world is about to try to take these two apart and I want you to remember that the first time he touched her, the most dangerous creature in that garden put the choice in her hands and waited.
She said don't stop. She knew exactly what it might cost. She said it anyway.
And then the alarms.
Who is coming up that drive at midnight on the night a queen is buried? And why now, at the precise moment a prince is about to shift for the first time in his own country?
Coincidence, my darlings?
You know me better than that. Turn the page.
Your author.