Her scent — not perfume, not manufactured, but justher— lingers in the air: warm dust and salt and the faint, feral tang of her own body heat. It drives my senses to distraction. Where instinct once screamed threat, now it hums something else, unfamiliar in its intensity and rawness.
I try not to want to touch her.
Gods know I’ve tried.
I tell myself there are rules. Codes. Old words engrained under flesh and bone — that I am not meant to intertwine with another, not meant to share warmth with another soul, not meant to let something as fragile and unpredictable asfeelingtake root in me again.
But her presence has pulled at something deeper than muscle and memory, something primal and ancient.
Jalshagar.
The word curls in the back of my throat like a knife I cannot unsheathe.
Her breathing changes ever so slightly — softer, deeper — as though she sinks farther into sleep, or perhaps into dream. Her eyelashes cast tiny shadows on her cheeks, delicate and fragile like the wings of some snowbird I once knew on a world with seasons. Her lips part a little; I see the faintest hint of vulnerability there — not fear, not hesitation, just ease.
I inhale.
And suddenly that —that ease— is unbearable.
My claws clench against the stone beneath me, not in violence, but in clenched restraint. The need tomove— to justreach out, brush a hand lightly across her arm — thrums in my muscles like a pulse I can no longer silence.
Not to harm.
Not to claim.
Just totouch.
To confirm she’s real.
To confirm that I’m real.
My ancestors would call this weakness. A folly. A breach in armor no warrior should allow.
But there she is.
I inhale again — slower this time — and the scent of her overwhelms me. Sand and heat and breath and life. Her presence is warm enough to melt the cold from the rocks under my knees, and I find myself shifting closer before I realize I moved.
Just an inch.
But it’s an inch charged with centuries of denial.
Her eyelids flutter at the sound of that movement. Not open — not awake — but loosening, as though she edges toward consciousness, not away from it. She murmurs something inaudible, a whisper caught between dream and wake.
My muscles tense.
My breath catches.
My mind stops.
And then, she speaks — but she doesn’t open her eyes.
“Maug…”
Just the sound of his name on her lips makes something deep inside mequake. Not shock. Not fear. Not anger.
Something else.
Somethingunnameable.
