“No, Mehr.” She got to her feet as he spoke. “Don’t come here. I don’t want to hurt—”
“Hurt me? You won’t hurt me. What the Maha does, that isn’t you, Amun. I know you.” Her heart hadn’t stopped hammering, but the fire in her blood had burned her despair away and left her feeling alive again.
The fire he’d ignited in her body had woken something in her heart: a small, fragile light, a thing beyond the hunger and pull of the body. It wasn’t quite hope. It felt like a door opening, a narrow road not leading to the vast freedom she’d so long yearned for, but to something more possible. More real.
Something to hold on to in the dark.
She said his name again, once. But she didn’t move. She’d told him he had a choice. She had to let him make it.
“Vows,” he said abruptly. He turned to look at her, all his sigils feverish and bright on his dark face. “If—if we must be bound byhisvows, I want us to make our own vows to each other.” A spasm of pain crossed his face. “I want to vow true things. Things that we choose to bind us.”
“Vows,” she repeated. She nodded. “I can do that.”
Vows. True things. Their lives had been shaped by vows layered upon vows: vows of service, vows of marriage, vows of ownership. Amun gave a gasp, doubling over, all his weight on the arm he had planted against the wall.
He couldn’t speak, so she had to. She mustered up all her courage.
“I vow that I trust you. That I will keep trusting you,” she said tentatively. “I vow to … to continue seeing you as the man that you are, not what other people have tried to make you.” A deep breath. “I vow to know you.”
He slumped a little further. Afraid he would collapse, she ran to his side and caught hold of him. But he wasn’t falling. He turned in her arms, pressed his forehead to her own, as if her body gave his strength. She felt his breath soften as his pain eased. His fingers touched her face, light as dust. She shivered.
“I vow …” A laugh. “I want to vow not to harm you, but how can I do that?”
“You promised true vows,” Mehr said quietly, measuring her words as best as she could. “You can’t promise to protect me from the Maha, or from the mystics. But you can vow that you will never choose to hurt me. You can vow that.” She touched his face in return. “I trust you. More than anything, I’m sure of that.”
He let out a breath. A smile shook his face.
“I vow to be the man you trust,” he said softly. “Choices and all.”
Their mouths met. The touch felt sharper somehow, like the harshest midday sunlight concentrated in the press of their lips, the touch of their fingertips. Then his hand was in her hair, and her body was arching into his, consumed by the fall of his shadow, the shaking strength of him.
“I vow to love you,” he whispered, when they parted. “Always.”
“You can’t vow that,” she told him.
“I can,” he said, low and reverent, and kissed her again.
She noticed how her touch flushed the pain from his body, restoring his strength. He moved easily back to the bed with her, never quite letting her go. His touch was gentle, a question in every brush of his fingers. Like this? Or this? She took his wrists in her hands, strangely sure of herself, despite her hammering heart. With her guidance, he slipped off her tunic, her shawl, leaving her bare to his eyes and touch.
“Oh, Mehr.” His voice was full of light.
She hadn’t been ashamed of her own skin before coming here, before her body had been marked indelibly as property. She felt some of her new shame fade at the look on his face, all wonder and want. She felt exhilarated, unafraid, even as his sigils glowed, even as the Maha’s compulsion ran through his blood.
To be unafraid—that was a choice too.
She touched the sigils on his face. When he gave a shake of his head, she moved her fingers to the seal etched onto his chest instead. In the mark she saw her history—all the men who had made her, an old and illustrious bloodline that had defined Mehr, like it or not. In the mark she saw herself.
“I vow to hold these vows higher, more sacred than any vows that have been forced from us,” she said. She drew him closer still, the bed firm beneath her back, his skin warm and glowing with sweat and life. “I vow that I am your tribe and your clan and … I vow that I choose to belong to you.”
He touched her seal-marked skin in return, a back-and-forth touch, so tender it nearly brought tears to her eyes. “We belong to each other,” he said. “That is a true vow, Mehr.”
They touched each other compulsively, curiously. She learned the language of his body and her own, as new and strange and holy as a rite, but one that needed no name, no laws. The brightness inside her grew as whispered vows gave way entirely to touch. She was sure, so sure of him. The feel of him against her, inside her—even the clumsiness of it all, the brief pain, the heat of his breath on the slope of her shoulder—all of it only made her more sure.
I vow that you’re my choice, the only right choice I’ve ever made, she thought, feeling the vow bloom open in her heart, red as blood.No vow, no matter what it compels from me, will be more important than the one I’ve made to love you.
Maybe she spoke the words. Maybe she didn’t. But in the dying lantern light, after his sigils had dimmed and he lay beside her in the growing glow of dawn, she looked into his eyes and saw the light in them, the softness of it. He knew her, heart and soul. He knew.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
