It wasn’t even Absolution. To act on thiswanting?
It was utterly forbidden.
But then she dug her elbow into his side, and every part of him felt like it had been struck by lightning at that steady press. The joke had backfired, because now...
Now, he wanted her to touch him again, to press against him harder.
More.
He needed more.
“And you smell like ashes,” she said.
They fell silent, the crackling fire—hisfire, because of her—still blazing.
“Your magic came back,” Ezer said softly. “Six showed me. You started the fire. Arealflame, not just a candle this time.”
He took a deep breath.
Because how could he explain to her, the way she made him feel? How could he ever give her the words she deserved, the truth that was slamming against his heart like a war hammer?
Tell her.Every beat of his heart echoed it.Tell her, the way you never told Soraya.
He tried to shove those words, like intrusive thoughts of their own, into the castle he’d forged in his mind.
But...he found the doors locked.
As if he didn’t reallywantto hide them away.
“You...” He swallowed, giving himself a chance to hold back. To not give in and take that plunge over the edge. But...gods. He needed to. He’d never needed anything more than to tell Ezer the truth. “You have done something to me, Minder. Something I have not felt before. Something...that scares me.”
Her head was on his shoulder now.
He relished the weight of it.
His heart was beating too fast, right against her ear, and heknewthat she knew. He felt that she could sense it too, that fire that was burning inside of him again...and it was all forher.
“Why?” she asked.
He took an unsteady breath. “When I found you in the woods, I thought you were dead. And it broke something loose inside of me.”
She looked at him.
It was almost the tipping point.
“What sort of something?” she asked. He could see the way her hands had curled into fists. The way she was leaning, leaning, pressing harder against his side as if she, too, was holding herself back.
And he didn’t want her to anymore.
He wanted no walls between them.
No shields.
No bars.
“Something I’m not supposed to feel,” Arawn said. “Something forbidden.”
He’d said it.
