“I was never—sure,” he said, forcing the words out through his pain. “I thought—no. I couldn’t. But Mehr, I know now. I would rather die than hurt you.”
Tears pricked her eyes.
“I’m not even a little afraid of you hurting me. You’ve tried so hard …” She swallowed back tears. “You were trying to buy us time. And you did. You have.” She covered their joined hands with her own. “I trust you more than anyone I’ve ever known. All will be well.”
“I thought time would be enough. But that was before I knew you.”
“And now you know me?” Mehr asked softly.
“Now …” He exhaled, shaky. “I think about the boy I used to be. I think about what kind of man he would have become, if the world had been kinder. If the Maha hadn’t found him. That man would have … he would have courted you. In the Amrithi way. He would have told you how he admired you, for your strength—your beauty. Your heart. He would have left his clan for yours.”
“I don’t have a clan, Amun,” Mehr said, finding her voice somehow. Somehow.
“I would have been your clan, then,” he responded, so soft. “I would have loved you without vows or seals. Just my heart for yours, as long as you willed it.”
“Ah,” she whispered back. Words seemed too far away, too hard to grasp when there was no air in her lungs.
This, not her past, was the perfect dream, the mirage hovering on the horizon, always out of grasp: a love given freely, without vows or seals, chains or guilt. She ached for it. What he dreamed of was all she’d ever wanted, and could never have.
If she could have been free. If she could have been born a woman without duties to bind her, if she could have chosen anyone in the world to love …
“Mehr.” He said her name in that low, solemn voice she’d come to know so well. “You must know that I love you. I know you can’t love me in return, but—”
“Then you know nothing,” Mehr said, more harshly than she’d intended. She bit down on her lip, hard enough to sting.
“Please go, Mehr. I can’t …” His voice was a sudden rasp. He winced, closing his eyes.
Mehr lifted her free hand and touched one sigil at his wrist. She could feel the heat rising from it, burning him from the inside. He was so brave. Brave to have survived, brave to have shown her kindness, and braver still now to keep fighting the Maha’s orders, even though it clearly hurt him beyond belief to do so.
“If I had been born a free Amrithi woman, I may have loved the man you described, that free man, without vows or fear,” Mehr said, carefully shaping the words even as her insides shook. “But this is the only life I have, Amun. The only one, and I can’t … I can’t simply pretend I might have met you in another, kinder life.” She swallowed hard, searching for words. “But in this life, this one I have … perhaps because we are trapped together, you and I—or perhaps because you’re so kind and gentle, and difficult, and sly and …” The few words she had caught in her throat.
Amun said nothing as she tried to muster up the dregs of her courage. He waited patiently for her to speak. That was the kind of man he was—the kind who waited for her to find her small, inconsequential words even as a pain far greater than she could understand tried to eat him whole. A good man. The best man she’d ever known.
“I love you.” She said it like a confession, and with the words a burden she hadn’t even known she’d been carrying eased from her shoulders. In its place was nothing but relief: relief and a sweet lightness that almost brought tears to her tired eyes. “I love you. And if I had my free choice, if we were simply man and woman in this room together, no vows on us, then I … I would choose to love you as a wife, in body and in soul.”
“Mehr.” He breathed her name, looked up at her with those pained midnight eyes, dark and sweet. “We don’t have a choice. You know that. You know he’s taken our choices away from us.”
“We always have choices,” she said. “You taught me that. When you obeyed the word, not the spirit of the Maha’s words, when you chose pain, over and over again, instead of hurting the both of us in … in a different way. When you decided to help me perfect a way to use the Rite of the Bound to save ourselves, even though you knew our hope of success was small and our risks were huge. Youshowedme what choices really mean.”
“I can’t see,” he said hopelessly. “I just can’t see what choices we have.”
The blankness was encroaching on his eyes. She cupped his face in a hand, willing it away. “You were thinking of the boy you were, and the man you could have been. Think instead of who you are now. Push back the pain if you can,” she pleaded, “and listen to me.”
“I’m trying,” he whispered, his skin burning hot beneath her touch.
“You just as you are now—scars and vows and sigils and all—you are the one I trust,” Mehr said fiercely. “Not some imagined version of you.You.If you esteem me as you claim to do, Amun, then trust yourself as I do. You can let the Maha turn you into an animal, or you can choose to take the love offered to you freely. Look beyond the pain and the blood and tell me: What choice do you want to make?”
He looked at her, looked through the pain, as if he saw her and only her. His grip on her hand relaxed, fingers uncurling slowly to let her free. She pulled back her own hand, just a little, but remained still. Waiting for him. He rose up on one arm, shaking with the effort. She watched, holding her breath in her throat, as he reached a hand out, and cupped her face.
Then he kissed her.
The kiss was tentative—just a bare, brief touch of his mouth against hers, the fleeting pressure of his warm skin. They parted. Then Mehr leaned forward, into his hand and his lips, and kissed him back.
This kiss was gentle, but not tentative. Mehr marveled at that—that something so new and so alien could feel so perfect, and so much like coming home. Something hot flared under her skin as the kiss deepened, as Amun’s hand moved from her cheek to tangle in her hair. Every inch of her skin felt suddenly, startlingly alive.
They were on the precipice of—something. There was a yawning pit in her stomach, a sense that if she touched him in return they would move to a place beyond fear to utter sweetness. She brushed her fingers over the line of his jaw. Amun made a noise against her mouth—and then pulled back sharply.
He got off the bed, even as his legs shook from the pain of it and his sigils stood out bright and livid on his skin. As Mehr tried to gather her thoughts, tried to quell her hammering heart, he slapped a hand against the wall and leaned his weight against it, his back to her. She could hear his ragged breath.
