I leave before dawn and don't go back.
We circle each other, Rhystan and I. Pass in hallways with careful nods. Exist in the same castle without ever occupying the same room.
Until we do.
Four weeks in, I round a corner and nearly collide with him. Close enough to see the gold flecks in his eyes, to smell smoke and something wilder underneath. Close enough to touch.
We both freeze.
"Kess." My name in his mouth, rough and low.
"Rhystan."
Silence stretches between us. The bond screams at me to close the distance, to press myself against him, to?—
"You've been in the archives," he says.
"You've been watching me train."
Something flickers across his face. "I watch everything in my castle."
"Everything?" I hold his gaze. "Or just me?"
He doesn't answer. Doesn't have to. The bond tells me what his face won't—want, guilt, that desperate restraint that's costing him as much as it's costing me.
"Excuse me," I say, and step around him.
His hand twitches like he wants to reach for me. He doesn't.
I keep walking. Don't look back.
But I feel his eyes on me until I turn the corner, and my hands are shaking by the time I reach my chambers.
The bond hates the distance between us.
That invisible thread between us pulls taut every time I sense him nearby, demanding I close the distance. My body remembers what my mind is trying to forget—his hands on my hips, his teeth in my shoulder, the devastating fullness of his knot locking us together.
I ignore it.
He watches me train sometimes. I feel his gaze from the shadows, that weight of attention that makes my skin prickle. He never approaches. Never speaks. Just watches, then disappears before I can decide whether to acknowledge him.
Some nights I feel him outside my door. Standing there in the dark, not knocking. The bond singing between us like a plucked string.
I pretend to be asleep.
He pretends not to be there.
We're both good at pretending.
But pretending doesn't change what I feel through the bond—his guilt, his want, the careful distance he maintains like penance. Doesn't change the way my body responds to his proximity, heat pooling low in my belly even when my mind is screaming at me to stay away.
Doesn't change the fact that I want him.
Hate that I want him.
Can't stop wanting him.
I throw myself into training instead. Push Carter harder, spar until my arms shake and my lungs burn, until I'm too exhausted to think about golden eyes and scarred hands and the memory of being so full I couldn't breathe.
