18. Chapter Eighteen Seren Veyr #3
Not perfume, nothing obvious. She hated herself a little for noticing. Then Elira’s gaze dropped to her mouth. The world narrowed brutally. The storm softened outside the hollow, as though even the mountain had decided to listen. Seren had stood closer to death than this.
It had been simpler.
“Elira,” she said.
The name came out wrong. Too low. Too much like warning.
Too much like question. Elira’s eyes lifted to hers.
There was nothing innocent in them, nothing surrendered.
Anger, yes, but not the kind that pushed away.
Hunger too, though Elira wore it like an insult.
Fear beneath both, buried deep but not deeply enough.
Seren should have stepped back.
Instead, Elira’s hand rose from her coat to her collar, then to the edge of her jaw. The touch was so light it might have been accidental if either of them had been the kind of women accidents trusted. Her thumb brushed once along the scar beneath Seren’s jaw.
Her breath stopped as something changed in her expression, and a colder thing slipped through the heat between them. Recognition, perhaps. The scar had stories buried in it, and Elira looked suddenly like she had read the first line of one she wished had stayed closed.
“Who gave you this?” Elira asked.
Seren’s hand tightened at her waist before she could stop it. “An imperial blade.”
Elira went very still. There it was again.
The war between them, crawling back into the space like a wounded thing neither of them had killed properly.
Seren saw the moment desire became danger in Elira’s eyes.
A distant crack sounded above them, and more snow shifted.
Elira’s hand fell from Seren’s face and she stepped back as far as the hollow allowed, which was not far enough for either of them to pretend retreat meant anything.
Cold rushed between them, sharp and immediate.
Elira looked away first, jaw tight, cheeks faintly flushed from cold or fury or whatever else neither of them would name.
Mara’s voice came from the other side of the drift. “Do I need to dig you out, or are you two enjoying the mountain’s hospitality?”
Seren closed her eyes for half a breath.
Elira almost smiled, which was apparently all the situation deserved.
The almost-smile vanished, but not quickly enough.
Together, they turned toward the snow-blocked opening.
Seren drew her dagger and began cutting through the packed drift where a narrow thread of air still moved.
Elira crouched beside her, pulling away snow and broken twigs with gloved hands. Their shoulders brushed once.
Then again, unmistakably so.mNeither of them commented. That, more than anything, made the silence unbearable.
When they finally broke through into the cave-mouth, Mara stood with her arms crossed and one brow raised in a way Seren immediately disliked. Coren hovered behind her with the horses, trying extremely hard to look like he had not been imagining scandal in the middle of a natural disaster.
Seren stepped out first. Elira followed, hair loose around her shoulders, face composed into something glacial and untouchable. Only the faint red mark near her throat, where Seren’s coat clasp had pressed against her skin, suggested anything had happened at all.
Mara looked from one to the other. “I assume,” she said, “the snow was defeated heroically.”
Seren sheathed her dagger. “With great discipline.”
Elira brushed snow from her sleeve. “Minimal casualties.”
Mara’s gaze sharpened. “How inspiring.”
Seren ignored her and moved toward the horses, because command gave her somewhere to put her hands and irritation gave her somewhere to put everything else. Behind her, Elira said nothing, but when Seren glanced back, she found Elira looking at her—at her mouth, of course.
Only for a heartbeat, then Elira turned away, pale hair disappearing beneath her hood, and Seren felt the absence of that look like a hand withdrawn from a wound.
The storm continued around them, cold and merciless.
The air had teeth, and the wind cut through the seams of Seren’s coat with enough cruelty to numb her fingers inside her gloves, but none of it reached the heat gathering beneath her ribs.
That warmth had nothing to do with the fire, the lantern, or the press of too many bodies in too small a space.
It had begun the moment Elira stepped too close, all sharp composure and impossible stillness, and it lingered now with the irritating persistence of a wound that refused to close.
Seren flexed her hand once at her side and told herself it was only vigilance.
Vigilance did not make her notice the shape of Elira’s mouth when she was deciding whether to lie.
It did not draw her attention to the elegant line of her throat, the cool arrogance of her eyes, or the way danger seemed to sit on her like silk.
Seren had survived war, fever, hunger, and men who thought themselves gods, yet somehow this woman’s nearness had become the thing her body could not properly defend against.
The cold should have helped.
It did not.