The suggestion hits me like cold water.
"No—"
My fingers close around his wrist instinctively, and the contact freezes us both. His skin is smooth, firm beneath my fingers, colder than any living flesh should be, the tendons shifting subtly under my grip. But it is not lifeless. There is a strange solidity to him, a tension beneath the surface like coiled strength waiting.
For a suspended heartbeat, nothing moves. My fingers remain curled around him, though I no longer recall when I decided to hold him. His hand cradles my face. Our eyes hold, searching, as though each of us has stumbled into something neither expected to find, my mind now uncertain of what it was looking for—danger, hunger, cruelty.
What I find unsettles me more.
He softens.
"I would never," his thumb drifts against my cheek, not quite a caress, but near enough that my breath trembles.
"I would never hurt you so, enchantress."
A breath.
"You would not?" I ask, barely above a whisper.
His eyes hold mine.
"I would not."
The certainty in it feels immovable. Something inside my chest shifts.
The place where our skin meets burns with a strange awareness, every pulse of my blood answering the stillness in him.
"You came offering yourself," he says, his voice lowered until it seems to move through me rather than across the distance between us. "Yet not for the salvation of those who wound you. That is the falsehood you cling to."
My lips part. Denial rises, quick and instinctive, yet the words falter before they reach my tongue. Something in his gaze holds them there, suspended, fragile.
He lifts his hand from where I still hold him and lets his fingers drift upward, hover near my throat. "Tell me, witch," he murmurs. "What is it you truly want?"
The forest holds its silence around us. Moonlight pours through the branches, laying silver across his face, across my hands where they rest against him. I hear my own breathing, uneven, too loud, too aware of the way his eyes hold mine without demand.
Every prayer I have ever learned presses faintly at the edges of my mind, then falls away like smoke. The truth rises instead, terrible.
"I want you."
The words leave me on a breath. They hang between us, trembling.
His gaze deepens, heat flickering through the darkness of it.
"Then I shall be yours."
He closes the distance without hesitation. One arm gathers me against him, firm at my back, the other cradling the back of my head as his mouth finds mine.
The kiss strikes like flame.
Cold floods my lips first, then a sudden, burning pull that spreads through my chest and down into my stomach, tightening everything low in my body. I gasp against him, and the sound only deepens the contact, his lips parting mine, drawing me closer until there is no space left between us at all.
My hands clutch at him blindly, fingers tangling in the fabric at his chest, feeling the solid strength beneath. He tastes of night air and something darker, something that makes my pulse race harder.
Heat spills through me, blooming in my chest, my stomach, the space between my thighs. A sound escapes me—small, helpless, alive. He swallows it, mouth softening for a fleeting instant before the hunger returns, deeper now, drawing me with it.
He moves along my jaw, slow at first, before his fingers slide to my throat, tracing the curve there with careful attention, feeling my pulse leap beneath his watchful gaze.
My head tips back before I understand that I am letting it, throat arching open beneath the night. The air cools the skin he leaves behind, each place his mouth worships burning brighter in its wake. My hands slide upward, finding his shoulders, holding him there, offering what he seeks with a surrender that feels less like falling and more like finally standing where I was meant to be.
