“The one with the goodnight texts.”
“You remembered that?”
He remembered everything she told him. The boyfriend’s texts. Trish’s collar theory. The name of the Fae engineer’s daughter. The fact that Kirsten took her coffee with two sugars and no milk. Every detail Zia shared was catalogued with the same precision he applied to intelligence briefings, because they came from her, and anything that came from her mattered.
“Saturday.”
“Really? You don’t have...”
“Saturday.”
A pause. When she spoke again, her voice was smaller. Warmer.
“Thank you.”
She thanked him for things like this. For making time. For remembering. For small, ordinary acts of being present that she treated like gifts because someone had taught her that presence was rare and attention was expensive. Someone had taught her that love came with conditions and availability was a luxury.
He would unteach her.
It would take time. He had time.
The evening unfolded with a rhythm that felt less like something they were building and more like something they were remembering. She sat on the kitchen counter while he cooked. She stole basil. She told him about a conversation with Maryah, they spoke daily now, their friendship forming with the speed and intensity of two women who had recognized something essential in each other, and he listened while the pasta boiled and the humming started in his chest.
The humming.
He had not hummed before her. The stallion’s signal, the deep vibration that meantsettled, content, home,had been dormant his entire life. He had assumed it was vestigial. A relic of a race that no longer existed. A sound meant for someone he would never find.
She had woken it on the third day of their marriage, and it had not stopped since.
He let it.
“You’re humming again,” she told him, grinning over a piece of stolen basil.
“Am I.”
“It’s my favorite sound.”
He looked at her. Sitting on his counter, in his kitchen, in a fortress that had been silent and empty and his alone for as long as he could remember. She was swinging her legs and eating his basil and looking at him like he was something wonderful, and the feeling that moved through him was so large and so unfamiliar that for a moment he couldn’t speak.
On the couch, later. Her body against his. A novel in her hands. His arm around her shoulders, his fingers tracing patterns on her skin. She had wanted a fire, so there was a fire, and if she had wanted the moon he would have found a way to get it down for her because the wordnohad been quietly removed from his vocabulary where she was concerned.
Her scent was extraordinary tonight. Warm and layered and shifting through emotions as she read. Amusement, then suspense, then the particular warm note that meant she’d reached a romantic scene. He could read her novels through her skin. Every plot point, every twist, every moment of tenderness or tension written in the chemistry of her scent.
She set her book down.
She turned to face him.
And her scent changed.
Not to desire. Not to the dark, rich bloom that preceded her wanting him. To something rarer. Something vast and tender that he had only caught once before, on the morning after their wedding, when she’d woken up and looked at his hand on the pillow and something had moved across her features that he hadn’t dared to name.
She was about to say something. He could smell it building. Could feel it in the shift of her heartbeat, the quality of her stillness, how her lips parted around a word she hadn’t spoken yet.
She opened her mouth.
Her phone buzzed.
The screen lit up on the coffee table. A notification. Visible for one second.
