Yoslyn took a mug from a tray in the center of the table and raised it in my direction, her eyes alight with the glow of the bone-and-candle chandelier, as well as the triumph of survival. Then she veered across the room, presumably to take advantage of the drunken goodwill of our classmates.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come.” Wilder leaned in to be heard over the crowd.
“I had no plans to,” I admitted. “You can thank Yoslyn for dragging me from the Dormitory tower.”
“I certainly shall.” His gaze held mine. “You were amazing in there today.”
“I most assuredly was not. I accomplished the bare minimum required to pass—to survive. Literally the bare minimum. And I very nearly didn’t, truth be told.”
“But youdid. And Yoslyn can attest that it was far more than the bare minimum. How did you know you’d have enough for her as well?”
I had no answer for him. None at all.
“You didn’t.” His smile faded. He seemed suddenly, blisteringly sober. “Amber, you could have—”
“I’m fine.”
“Yes, but you could have…” He cleared his throat and set his mug on an unoccupied stool, unbothered when it wobbled on the weathered wood. Then he placed his hands deliberately on my knees and boldly parted them so he could step closer, his body warm between my thighs. Straining the material of my skirt.
“I could have lost you,” he said, and I caught my breath as his hands found my waist. “Losing any member of our cohort is bad enough. Losing Petyr is…awful. But Ican’tloseyou. Amber, I don’t care whose life is in danger. I don’t care if it’s the Bluehelm herself, or an entire carriage full of mewling kittens and chubby babies. Don’t youeverdo that again.”
He kissed me. Gently. Softly. Slowly, as if he had all the time left in eternity to explore this connection.
As if he had every right to do so.
As if this were expected, and no one at all should be shocked, least of all me.
“We’re not supposed to be back here,” I whisper as his lips trail down my throat toward the expanse of skin exposed above my bodice. My head falls back, and I revel in the heat of his mouth as my gaze finds the bone-and-candle chandelier. It’s unlit, and the empty tavern back room swims in darkness.
I hardly hear the din of voices from out front. I hardly smell the stew, or the bread, or the ale. All I can see—all I can hear, and taste, and smell—is him.
“Wait,” I moan, my thighs clenching around his hips as the stool rocks beneath me. “Don’t stop. Just…wait.”
His lips disappear from my throat, and I sit up as he looks down at me. In the light spilling into the dark room through the cracked open door, I see his coppery-brown eyes, his irises dilated with lust, his lips damp and slightly parted.…
I shoved Wilder back, and his blue eyes widened.
“Amber? Are you okay?”
No one else noticed. They were all lost in their own drunken revelry.
I didn’t know how to answer. Panicked, I slid from the stool and rushed into the crowded front room, around the professors’ table and into the kitchen.
A rough voice shouted for me to get out, but I kept pushing forward, past a large pot bubbling over a fire and a sweaty woman scrubbing metal ale mugs in a wooden tub full of cloudy water.
I burst through the door into the cold, quiet alley, and only once I stood there with the wood-paneled wall at my back, shivering even as I welcomed the frigid air against my overheated face, did I realize I still held my mug, and that some of its contents had sloshed over the side to run down my hand.
I lifted the mug and drained the ale in several long gulps.
“Amber?”
My eyes fell closed at the sound of Desmond’s voice. His footsteps echoed toward me from the open kitchen door.
The tin mug hung from two of my fingers, its bottom edge scraping the wall at my back with every deep breath I took.
I did not open my eyes until he stood in front of me, so close I could feel his warmth.
“You’re shivering.”
