"Colin left me for my cousin," she said quietly, not like she was asking for comfort. It was more like she was laying it down, and setting it on the floor between us to look at it properly. "He told me I wasn't his type. That I was sweet but not what he was looking for. And I believed him. I believed him for years."
"He was wrong," I said.
"I know that," she said. "I'm starting to know that." She looked back down at the glow spreading across my skin. "It's just a lot to hold at the same time. You and the scales and the nest and the..." She gestured at the tattered paperback sitting in the center of everything.
"I know," I said. "I'm sorry. For all of it. For not telling you who I was. For every morning I let you leave without saying what I should have said."
She was quiet for a long time.
Her fingers were still resting on my forearm. She hadn't moved them and I hadn't asked her to.
"The cardigans," she said finally, her voice very soft. "You didn't even know you were doing it."
"No," I admitted. "I just grabbed everything that felt like it should be there."
She looked at me with those warm brown eyes and something in her expression broke open in the best possible way. Like a window thrown wide after a long winter.
"Stay," she said. "Please."
I reached up and covered her hand with mine, her fingers still warm against the glow of my skin.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said.
And I meant it in every way a man could mean something.
12
KAEL
Everything seemed quieter inside of the nest, there was no rustling, there were no whispers.
Amara was sitting cross-legged inside it, the old burgundy cardigan pulled around her shoulders, watching me with those bright brown eyes that had been dismantling me one morning at a time for six months. The lamp in the corner cast everything in warm amber. Outside the heavy doors of the east wing, the gala had long since wound down to silence.
It was just the two of us inside of the nest that I’d built out of pure instinct. There were no secrets or titles or even bakery counters between us. It was truly just us, finally taking up the space, together.
I had moved from the floor to the edge of the bed when she'd asked me to stay, close enough that our knees almost touched. The scales on my arms still glowed softly, warm gold in the low light, and I watched her eyes track them the way they had been since I'd taken my shirt off. Like she was still getting used to the fact that they existed, as if she could’t get enough of staring at them.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Anything."
She picked at a loose thread on the cardigan cuff, not quite meeting my eyes. "How many people have you been with? Since Sabrina?"
I looked at her steadily. "None."
Her eyes came up. "None?"
"None," I said. "After Sabrina I just... stopped. It didn't seem worth the risk."
Something moved across her face. Recognition, maybe? The particular expression of someone hearing their own experience reflected back at them.
"Me too," she said quietly. "Since Colin. That was..." She stopped. Exhaled through her nose. "That was first time and the last time. I just closed that whole part of myself off and told myself it was fine."
"Was it?" I asked.
"No," she said simply. "But it was easier than getting it wrong again."
I reached out and covered her hand with mine, stilling the nervous movement of her fingers against the cardigan.
