Just once. Something shallow.
She could blame it on adrenaline.
He closed the distance, setting his palm on the column above her head. He didn’t trap her, yet his nearness thinned the air between them. That caught her off guard.
“Admit it, you missed me.”
Evelyne swallowed hard, her gaze faltering—unsure where to rest, and far more unsure where not to. “Like a fever.”
Alaric tilted his head. “A fever consumes you.”
“Then I look forward to the cure.”
“Is it lethal?”
Her heart was pounding traitorously loud in her chest. The kind of rhythm that made rational thought feel optional. She hated how being near him made her want to do something reckless—say too much, feel too much, want too much.
Cedric whistled a tune, spun on his heel with exaggerated interest in a nearby bookshelf, and allowed Vesena to catch hissleeve and pull him into the far shadows. Their footsteps faded down the chamber.
Evelyne exhaled and pressed her back against the column to at least be a few centimeters away.
“You keep fleeing every time I try to understand you,” he dropped his voice to a near-whisper. “Is that how queens are taught to win their wars? By retreat?”
“You’re unbearable,” she muttered, scanning the spines of ledger books with far more intensity than necessary.
“I’ve been called worse,” Alaric replied. “Though usually not with this much affection buried under the irritation.”
A lock of his hair shifted from the draft and she watched it fall on his forehead.
“Don’t flatter yourself. My irritation stands alone. Your presence here is irrelevant. I'd still be irritated just knowing you exist somewhere in the world.”
“So you would think of me. And miss me.”
She stepped toward him before she could think better of it. “You think I miss this? You, skulking around in my investigations, getting smug every time you breathe correctly?”
“I am an excellent breather,” he said. “Decades of practice.”
“Somewhere, a bard is weeping over how misused your talents are.”
He stopped smiling. He leaned in, just slightly, but it was enough.
“Evelyne.”
A name was just a name, a collection of sounds she had heard a thousand times before. But in his mouth, it became something else entirely. Smooth as aged bourbon, deep as a nivalen hearth—his voice didn’t speak so much as sink into her skin and settle there.
“You think everything’s a game,” she snapped. “That it’s all just witty remarks and poetic little turns of phrase. But this isn’ta chessboard, Alaric. People have died. Are dying. And I feel you just want to be right.”
“I smirk because if I don’t, I might start screaming,” he admitted. “Or worse—start believing everything they tell us to swallow.”
“Oh, please—spare me the rebel prince act,” she scoffed, pointing her finger at him. “You play the charming dissenter, but you still signed every treaty, bowed at every ceremony, wore every polished shoe handed to you.”
He stepped in and the space between them collapsed like a breath held too long. Her fingertip brushed the fine weave of his doublet, and she snatched her hand back like she’d touched flame.
“Don’t,” she warned.
He didn’t back away. Of course he didn’t.
“Don’t what?” he asked, voice velvet-smooth.
