He’d been waiting forher.
The understanding moved through her like the first drop of warmth in something that had been cold for years.
He kissed his way back up her body—her stomach, her ribs, the curve of her breast again, the hollow of her throat, the arch of her cheekbone. By the time his mouth reached hers she was trembling and desperate and she pulled him down against her with both hands.
“Now,” she said against his mouth. “Please.”
He braced himself above her. The blunt, insistent pressure of him notched against her. She felt the heat of him and all the contained power that had been coiled in him since the first night when he’d stood at her door and told her she was welcome in his bed whenever she chose.
She’d chosen.
He paused, holding himself still with what she now understood was tremendous effort. His forehead dropped to her temple, his breath warm and unsteady against her cheek. “Look at me,” hesaid.
She did.
“Tell meagain,” hesaid.
“Yes.” No hesitation. No performance. Just the truest word she’d ever spoken. “Yes, Magnus.”
He pushed forward.
There was pain—sharp and sudden, and he stilled immediately, completely, his whole body arrested as though her gasp had thrown a circuit. He held himself motionless above her, the effort of stopping visible in every line ofhim.
“Elia.” Her name now carried an emphasis she didn’t have languagefor.
“Don’t stop,” she said. “Don’t you dare stop.”
He moved again, careful now, giving her body time to adjust to the unfamiliar fullness of him, and the pain softened under each unhurried stroke until it dissolved into something else entirely. Something that built with an inexorable pressure that made her dig her fingers into his shoulders and pull him closer instead ofaway.
Her hips rose to meethim.
He made a sound against her neck that stirred her blood.
After that, careful left theroom.
He moved over her with a focused, driving intensity that consumed everything, her composure, her carefully maintained sense of herself as someone who didn’t need anything from anyone. She neededthis.She needed him. She needed the weight of him and the warmth of him and the specific, devastating way he said her name when shearched up beneathhim.
She’d been trying to explain to herself why Magnus unsettled her in ways that had nothing to do with fear. She understood it now with total, irreversible clarity. He saw her. Not the servant. Not the debt. Not the inconvenient blood tie or the overheard conversation or the leverage someone might someday manufacture from her existence.
Her.
And he’d refused to touch her until she’d stopped trying to offer herself as currency and started reaching for him instead.
The tension inside her built again, sharper now, overwhelming, and she buried her face in his neck and held on as it crested.
When she fell apart, it wasn’t soundless. It wasn’t the careful, contained version of herself she’d constructed over years of surviving in someone else’s house. It was loud and helpless and honest, and his name tore out of her on a broken exhale that he absorbed, that made him shudder in response. His self-control finally, finally fractured as he followed her over the edge with a harsh, unguarded sound of his own that she would carry with her for the rest of herlife.
He collapsed against her. Not heavily. Even now there was care in how he held himself. But close, his face pressed into her hair, his breathing as wrecked ashers.
They lay like that for a long time withoutspeaking.
She didn’t have words. She wasn’t sure she had anything left that could be organized into language. What she had instead was the steadying weight of him beside her, and the warmth of his hand finding hers in the dark, and the knowledge—absolute and irrevocable—that she’d just left behind the last version of herself that had ever believed she didn’t deservethis.
Chapter 16
MAGNUS WOKE BEFORE ELIA.
That wasn’t unusual. He hadn’t slept past five in the morning in fifteen years, and his body didn’t ask permission before pulling him back to the surface regardless of what the previous night had held. What was unusual was Elia against his side. The warmth. The even rhythm of a heartbeat that wasn’t hisown.
