Chapter 8 #2
"Do you follow every person who obeys your weather reports?" I asked.
"Only the ones who make them sound like a challenge."
I should have stiffened.
I should have remembered the room full of lowered eyes and slowed pens.
Instead I almost smiled.
He stopped with deliberate space between us.
Not too near.
Not too far.
"Do you know this place?" I asked.
"I found it last winter."
"And did not tell the rest of the temple?"
"Then it would not look like this."
That answer was annoyingly good.
I looked back to the pool because flowers were easier than him.
"They smell strange."
"You say that like you dislike it."
"I say it like I do not know whether to trust it."
"Sensibly done."
The water made a soft sound where it spilled over the rock lip. Above us, leaves flickered in sun and shadow. No guards stood in sight. That fact should have worried me more than it did.
"The scriptorium was terrible," I said.
I had not meant to say that. His gaze came to me anyway.
"Brother Tomas said you endured it."
"He was generous. You looked like a monument people were afraid to dust."
For a second, something almost boyish threatened his mouth and vanished.
"That is the worst thing anyone has called me this month."
"Then your enemies lack imagination."
There.
The laugh came real and brief and impossible to take back. His face changed when he heard it.
Not triumph.
Relief.
We walked the pool's edge slowly. I pointed out the dragonflies. He pointed out a hawk wheeling above the ravine rim that I had not noticed. It should have been ordinary.
It was not.
Ordinary things were dangerous now because they asked nothing from me. When I knelt to touch the water, one stone shifted under my boot.
Lucian moved before I fell.
His hand closed around mine, warm and firm, and the world narrowed to the single impossible fact of his skin against mine.
It was only a hand.
That was what I told myself while every nerve in my body proved me a liar.
His thumb lay against the inside of my wrist, directly over the pulse Adrian's bond had once made ache.
Lucian did not press. He did not claim. Still my wolf went utterly still, listening to the heat of him as if his blood had spoken a language hers had been starving to hear.
Then the shift came over him.
Subtle at first.
His shoulders tightening.
His hand flattening against the birch trunk beside us.
Then the scent in the ravine sharpened into storm and hot metal.
I knew it now.
Not from theory.
From the moonlit courtyard and the way my body had paid for calming him afterward.
"Lucian?"
His eyes shut for half a second.
"Do not come closer."
The words sounded civilized.
His scent did not.
It rolled over the wet stone and lotus water, dark with a command he was refusing to speak.
His wolf wanted me closer and farther at once, wanted to press the storm of him over every place Adrian's dead bond had ever hurt, wanted to make the ravine itself remember who had stood between me and falling.
So of course I did.
Only one step.
Only enough for my wolf-soul to brush the edge of his and answer the pressure there.
The change hit at once. The wild edge in the air dropped. His breathing eased. The iron smell thinned. At the same moment, a hard wave of heat rolled through me so fast my knees threatened to fold. I caught myself on the birch beside his hand.
The world tipped.
"Selene."
This time he reached for me. I felt his arm around my waist just long enough to steady me against the trunk. No more. No less.
"You are pale."
"That would be new if I had ever not been pale."
"Do not joke if you are about to faint."
"Then help me preserve my dignity and wait until I sit down."
He guided me to the flattest stone near the pool and crouched in front of me with a focus that made the whole world narrow.
"Tell me what hurts."
"Heat," I admitted. "Sudden. Dizzy. It will pass."
"It happened in the courtyard too."
I looked up sharply.
He had noticed.
Of course he had.
"And afterward?" he asked.
That frightened me more than the dizziness.
Because it meant he had begun measuring absence as carefully as nearness.
"Less," I said.
His jaw tightened.
"Because I stayed away."
Neither of us said what that meant.
Not yet.
When the dizziness eased enough for me to stand, he did not touch me again until I asked for help on the ravine path. He offered his hand without comment. I took it without comment. That silence said more than most confessions. At the upper fork, I let go first.
"Thank you," I said.
"For what?"
"For not pretending none of that happened."
His eyes held mine.
"I do not think pretending will help us."
Us.
One word.
Too much weight.
I escaped before it could settle. That night, while the temple bells turned the dark into measured pieces, I sat by my lamp touching the spot on my wrist where his hand had been. I did not spend the night wondering whether I wanted him closer or farther away.
That question had become too small. I wondered instead how dangerous it was that even distance had begun to feel like a conversation. Before I could choose an answer, another set of footsteps passed my door toward the guest wing, and Rowan's low voice carried through the corridor.
"My lord, I will have her Vale records before the week is out."