I should leave. Should back away slowly, pretend I’d never climbed these stairs, never rounded this corner. Give them this moment of stolen privacy in a castle where everyone had eyes everywhere.
But I couldn’t move.
Couldn’t look away.
Because Lincatheron was kissing Fenric again, slower this time but no less intense. Like he was trying to memorise the taste of him. Like this might be the last time.
“Tomorrow,” Fenric murmured against his mouth. “Tomorrow, we stop. We go back to being professional. To pretending this isn’t?—”
“Destroying us both?”
“Yeah. That.”
“Tomorrow.” But his hands tightened on Fenric’s thighs. “Just give me another minute. One more minute where I don’t have to pretend.”
Fenric made a sound, broken and beautiful and utterlywrecked. Then he was kissing Lincatheron like he was dying, like Lincatheron was air and he’d been drowning, like tomorrow didn’t exist and they had all the time in the world instead of stolen minutes in a dark corridor.
My heart was hammering so hard I was surprised they couldn’t hear it. My pulse roared in my ears, blood rushing with something that felt dangerously close to recognition.
Because I knew that desperation. Knew what it felt like to love someone you couldn’t have, couldn’t claim, couldn’t keep. Knew the particular torture of stolen moments.
Lincatheron pulled back just enough to speak. “We should?—”
“Don’t.” Fenric’s voice was wrecked, desperate.
“Someone will see—fuck—Fen?—”
Teeth sank into the line of Lincatheron’s throat, not gentle, not even a little. And whatever protest had been forming behind Lincatheron’s clenched teeth shattered into a moan that made my knees wobble.
I needed to flee. I needed to vanish through the stone, disappear, die, something.
I tried to back away, to pretend I’d never seen the way Lincatheron’s hands shook as they traced Fenric’s face.
My boot scuffed against the stone.
The sound was small.
It might as well have been a war horn.
The pair broke apart like they’d been burned.
Lincatheron released Fenric so abruptly that Fenric stumbled, catching himself against the stone wall with a gracelessness that would have been almost funny if my heart wasn’t trying to claw its way out of my chest.
For a moment, no one spoke.
No one evenbreathed.
The silence was absolute. Suffocating. The sort of silence that existed in the space between a blade leaving its sheath and finding flesh.
Fenric’s face was white as moonlight against shadow, his steel-blue eyes wide with primal panic. His mouth opened, words trying to form and dying before they could take shape.
“I—” he started, then stopped, running trembling fingers through his hair. “This isn’t?—”
His eyes closed briefly, and when they opened again, there was something broken there. Something that made my chest tighten.
“Shit.”
Lincatheron had gone predator-still, but there was nothing cold about the way his teal gaze fixed on me. Fire burned there, feral and protective, like he was calculating exactly how much violence it would take to keep his secrets buried. His massive frame blocked Fenric partially from view, an unconscious shield that spoke of instincts deeper than thought.
