6. Aslan
SIX
ASLAN
She’s halfway up the stairs before I let myself move.
I stay by the fountain until her window goes gold, then dark. Counting the seconds the way I count everything about her now—automatically, uselessly, a ledger no one asked me to keep.
Goodnight. One word. I nearly said the other thing instead. The true thing.
The beast doesn’t nearly do anything. He’s already decided. Has been deciding since the first night I stood outside her shop and felt her wards hum a greeting instead of a warning.
Caius wants reports. Threat assessments. Patterns.
Here’s a pattern: I no longer remember what my apartment looks like in daylight.
I should go home. I don’t. I cross the square instead, mist curling silver around my boots, and let my feet carry me toward Duskfire—not for the ale, though I won’t say no to a glass.
For the noise. For something to drown out the specific quiet of watching a woman I can’t have go to sleep twelve feet and an entire world away from me.
Torin’s already at the bar when I get there, nursing something dark and unbothered by my mood. He takes one look at my face and pours a second glass without asking.
“Rough patrol?”
“Something like that.”
“Mm.” He doesn’t push. Bears rarely do. He just sets the glass in front of me and goes back to whatever he’s carving out of a coaster with his thumbnail.
I drink. I don’t stop thinking about the way she said Tiger like it was a name she’d chosen for me herself.
Grandmother Peach appears somewhere around my third glass, uninvited and unsurprised to find me there, and orders something with too much sugar in it before fixing me with that look that sees straight through several centuries of practiced restraint.
“Lavender bath salts,” she says, apropos of nothing. “Very wise choice.”
I don’t ask how she knows. I’ve stopped asking.
I stay until the noise gets loud enough to be useful, and later—much later—I walk home the long way, past a dark shop window with a citrine still glowing faintly on the sill, and let myself hope for exactly as long as it takes to pass it.