Chapter 55 The Stars Overhead
The Stars Overhead
The house is quiet in that soft countryside way, where even silence feels alive. Wind moves somewhere through the ivy. Water from the spring murmurs outside.
I stretch carefully. My body protests in small, honest ways. The sheets are still warm when I slip from the bed, and though I try to move quietly, I feel his attention follow me.
“You need to eat something,” he says.
He has not stopped watching me since I woke.
I glance toward the open doorway, stretching carefully. “What is in your kitchens?”
He blinks, slow and unbothered, as if I’ve asked him something absurd. “I have no idea.”
I turn back to him. “You have no idea?”
“I told them to stock it.”
“Who is them?”
“Whoever manages things when I’m not here.”
“And you never checked?”
“No.”
A small laugh escapes me before I can stop it.
“I do not usually keep a cook here,” he says after a moment. “It was just me.” There is something unexpectedly lonely in the way he says it, though he does not seem aware of it himself.
“Well,” I reply, already moving toward the stairs, “I’ll cook. I’m sure there is something.”
“Do you like to cook?” he asks, following.
I pause halfway down and glance back at him. “It is all I have ever done,” I say lightly. “I do not mind it.”
He comes down after me, slower this time, as though considering that answer. “Have you ever eaten a meal you did not prepare?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“At the palace.”
Something quiet shifts behind his expression. “Other than that,” he asks more carefully, “never?”
I shrug and reach the kitchen. It is larger than I expect. Clean. Stocked well enough, though nothing has been touched in some time.
“We have already established that my childhood was miserable,” I say over my shoulder.
His expression does not soften.
“This is different,” I continue, opening cabinets, inspecting jars. “I have never gotten to cook for someone I actually like before.”
He leans against the doorway.
“Like?” he repeats.
I glance at him from beneath my lashes. “Mhm.”
His brow arches slowly. “Say it.”
I smile and reach for a pan. “Nope.”
He pushes off the doorway. “Say it.”
“No.”
I feel him before he reaches me. His hands close around my waist, lifting me effortlessly off the ground. I gasp and laugh at the same time. I rub my side, where my wound had been fixed by the healers. “It barely hurts at all, I feel almost like myself.”
He nibbles my ear. “My seed has healing, restorative properties.”
I pull back. “Really? I didn’t know that about Siaka—”
He snorts. “No, not that I know of although the way you were moaning certainly would lead one to think so.”
I bite his lower lip. “Rude.” We both laugh for a moment, then the room goes quiet.
“Who said you could get dressed?” he murmurs against my neck.
I am wearing his shirt and it hangs nearly to my thighs.
“I did,” I say, breathless.
He hums thoughtfully. “That was a mistake.” His fingers slide beneath the hem and lift it slowly over my head. The air hits my skin again and I shiver. He tosses the shirt aside without looking.
“You are not cooking like this,” he says.
“Why not?”
“Because I will not survive it.”
I laugh again, and he steals the sound from my mouth with a kiss.
His hands travel lower. “You were saying something,” he murmurs.
“About liking you?”
“Yes.”
“I changed my mind.”
He growls softly at that and lifts me again, this time not toward the counter, but toward the stairs. “Dinner can wait,” he says.
“Colsar—”
“Say it.”
His voice is low behind me, amused and commanding all at once. I wriggle out of his arms, and land, grabbing his shirt off the floor.“No.”
His brow lifts. “Asha.”
I grin and turn on my heel. By the time he moves, I am already halfway down the hall, bare feet flying across the cool floor, laughter spilling out of me before I can stop it.
“Asha,” he calls again, and this time there is something in it that makes heat coil low in my stomach.
I do not stop. The front doors are unlatched. I shove them open and burst into the night, pulling his shirt on as I move. The hills are lit by moonlight. The air is cool, smelling of pine and damp earth. The river below reflects it.
I run. The grass is soft beneath my feet. My hair whips behind me. I can hear him now, slower at first, not rushing, certain he will catch me.
“I told you,” he calls after me, “to be good.”
I laugh over my shoulder. “I am never good.”
That does it.
The sound behind me changes. A rush of displaced air. A heavier rhythm.
I know that sound.
I glance back just as he shifts. Moonlight catches on fur and muscle. The siakar form moves faster than any man could, vast and fluid, covering the distance between us with terrifying ease.
“You are cheating!” I shout.
He does not answer. One moment I am running. The next I am lifted clean off the ground and rolled gently into the grass. He shifts back almost immediately, skin warm against mine, breath wild from the chase though I know he is not winded in the slightest.
“I told you,” he says again, leaning over me, hair falling forward, eyes bright in the dark, “to be good.”
I push at his chest lightly. “You turned into a siakar. That is not fair.”
“You ran.”
“You said say it.”
“Yes.”
“And I feel like being difficult.”
He leans closer. “Say it.”
The night is quiet around us. Crickets hum. The river keeps its low song. The sky stretches wide and open above us, stars scattered like careless blessings.
I slide my arms around his neck.
He goes still, staring at me with those eerie, beautiful eyes of his.
“Fine,” I whisper.
His hands rest at my waist, firm, expectant.
“I love you, Colsar Rathmor.”
It feels different out here. Bigger, somehow.
He exhales slowly, as if something inside him has been unknotted.
“Again,” he murmurs.
I smile against his mouth. “I love you.”
His hand slips beneath the hem of the shirt I am still wearing.
“You put it back on,” he says, almost thoughtfully.
“I knew it would displease you and couldn’t resist.”
He pulls it over my head with one smooth motion and tosses it aside into the grass.
“You are impossible,” he says.
“You love me.”
“I—” He pauses, looking at me with those mismatched eyes of his. I can see in them everything he cannot say. His desire to say it, his desire to hear it, his fear of saying it.
“Kiss me,” I murmur, tracing a line down his bare chest with my finger.
He bends down and kisses me under the open sky. The grass is cool beneath my back. His body is warm above mine. His hands move with familiarity now, unhurried and assured, as if this night belongs to us and no one else.
The hills hold their silence. The river does not look away. And when he lowers me fully into the dark and I pull him down with me, there is nothing fragile in it anymore.
Only me, him, and the stars overhead.