"By the time she was your great-grandmother's age, seventy, eighty, I barely remembered what the bond used to be. I'd forgotten I ever had choices. Forgotten I was ever anything but a weapon." His voice drops to a whisper. "She didn't make me hollow overnight, Iris. It took decades. But she was thorough."
"I'm so sorry." The words feel inadequate. Pathetically small against two hundred years of systematic dehumanization.
"Don't be. You're undoing it." He turns his head, and suddenly his face is very close to mine. Our eyes level, his breath cool against my water-warmed cheek. "You're giving me back what she took. I didn't know it was possible until you."
"Cadeon..."
"I need you to understand." His hand comes up to cup my face, and I can feel the fine tremor in his fingers. "When I choose to stay, when the bond transforms, it won't be because I'm conditioned. It won't be because I don't know any better. It will be because I remember now. What the bond can be. What I can be. And I want that. I want you. More than I've wanted anything in two centuries."
I turn my head and press a kiss to his palm. "Then take what you need."
His eyes darken. "Iris... "
"I mean it. Not emotionally... physically too." I shift in the tub, turning to face him more fully. "You're hungry. I can feel it through the bond—this ache. Let me feed you."
"You're in the bath."
"I noticed."
"Your throat." His gaze drops to my neck, and I watch his control fracture slightly. "You're offering your throat."
"Yes."
The word hangs between us, weighted with significance. The wrist is tradition. Clinical. Safe.
The throat is trust. Intimacy. Surrender.
"I could hurt you." His voice is barely a rasp.
"You won't."
"You can't know..."
"I know you." I reach up and pull him down toward me, not caring that I'm dripping water onto his shirt, onto his perfectformal clothes. "I trust you. Now stop arguing and get in the tub."
"I—what?"
"You heard me."
He stares at me like I've lost my mind.
"Are you going to make me ask again?"
Something shifts in his expression. The hunger is still there, but now it's tangled with something else—wonder, maybe. Or disbelief that this is his life now. That someone wants him like this, clothes and all, complications and all.
He stands. Removes his boots, sets them aside. Then, holding my gaze, he steps into the tub.
The water surges around us as he sinks down, his clothes immediately soaked, clinging to every line of his body. He settles against the opposite end, his legs tangling with mine, and the intimacy of it, the absurdity and the tenderness, makes something bloom in my chest.
"This is ridiculous," he says, but he's almost smiling.
"This is perfect." I move toward him through the water, climbing into his lap, straddling his thighs. His hands find my waist under the water, steadying me. "Now stop being proper and feed."
"You're very demanding."
"You like it."
"I do." He pulls me closer, until I'm flush against him, the wet fabric of his shirt rough against my bare skin. "Gods help me, I do."
