His chest heaved.
When the candle was lit, she tugged him toward the bed.
With a dry swallow, he followed her and sat on the edge of the thin mattress. She sat beside him. The brush of their knees sent a spark up his thigh that had nothing to do with energeia.
The porthole gave just enough light to soften the high bones of her cheeks and the wisps of her hair. He reached for one now, intending totuck it behind her ear, but hesitated.
His hand was shaking. He dropped it into his lap.
Her cheek indented, as if she were biting it. “Stop trying to control it,” she told him.
He huffed. “Control is all I have.”
“No,” she said simply. “You have me.”
She moved closer—close enough for him to see each long lash around her eyes, and the soft slope of her nose. Her thumb pressed to his eyebrow, smoothing away the tension.
It loosened something inside him.
“Energeia listens to the heart, not the mind,” he said, thinking of how he’d nearly lost control taking Petros’s energeia. How quickly his father had plunged a spear into his gut with only a word.
That power was still inside him, and if he couldn’t stop himself, he might kill her.
“What does your heart want?” she asked.
You.
He didn’t look directly at her, afraid he wouldn’t see the same truth on her face.
“That’s not a simple question,” he lied.
“It’s guided you before. Why don’t you trust it now?”
Because I don’t want to hurt you. Because I am capable of terrible things.
But her words nestled beneath his skin and took root. His anathreia had not always listened to him, but when it had, it wasn’t because he’d ordered its compliance. It was because he’d felt something too strong to ignore. Ash’s grief. Jann’s hate. His love and fear for Cassia.
His love and fear for Ash.
All blanketed by a new terror taking the shape of the small woman who’d lived above him for eleven years.
He opened his eyes to meet Ash’s gaze. “I won’t be like her.”
Anathrasa.
He didn’t have to say the name. Ash knew.
“You won’t,” she said with certainty, her thumbs now pressing against his temple in a way that elicited a soft groan. “You healed me, remember? You wouldn’t have done that if you were like her.”
He wasn’t as sure as she was, but he remembered the force that had driven him toward her broken body. He hadn’t thought of what he would do in that moment. He’d only wanted her to be alive and unhurt.
When Petros had died, Madoc hadn’t thought to kill him; he’d only wanted to protect himself. When he’d stopped from taking his father as a tithe, it had been because of Ash’s face in his mind.
Intention is power, Madoc, whether it be a storm of rage or a whisper of regret.
He understood now what Anathrasa had meant. If the soul was the will of the heart, then he could never do Ash harm, because even with this strange, dangerous power, his heart belonged to her.
He leaned closer, and when her hands skimmed past his ears and traced lines down the back of his neck, he knew, finally, what he had to do.
