He walked three more steps. Processing.
"The food is important?"
"It can be."
"And the talking."
"Usually."
"And the destination. The place you go."
"Yeah. Somewhere nice, ideally. Somewhere that means something."
He stopped.
Not gradually—the way he did everything, with a directional certainty that made stopping and starting feel equally deliberate. He stopped, and he turned to face me, and the black glass plain reflected us both from below—him, enormous, dark, rimmed in the red of the sky; me, small, pale, wearing his domain's colorswith an imp in the middle distance and a bond humming gold between us.
"I took you to see the most beautiful place in my kingdom." His voice was level. Factual. The military-briefing register, except the briefing had gone sideways into territory no general had ever charted. "I told you something I've never told anyone. And I've been thinking about your mouth since we left the citadel."
My blood reversed direction. All of it. Every drop I owned abandoned its assigned post and reported to my face with the urgency of a five-alarm response, and the heat that engulfed my cheeks and my throat and the tips of my ears was so total, so comprehensive, that I was briefly concerned about hemodynamic stability.
"Are we on a date?" he asked.
The bond transmitted my reaction before I could moderate it—a flare of heat that was not embarrassment, or not only embarrassment, something darker and lower and more honest than the blush on my skin. I felt his awareness of it through the connection. A pulse. A tightening. The particular quality of attention that meant he was tracking my response with the precision of a predator, except what he was tracking was not my fear.
The ghost of a smile. There and gone. The hard line of his mouth shifting a fraction of a degree, the barest crack in a façade that had held for centuries, and the crack was more devastating than a full smile from any other man would have been because I knew what it cost him.
"What else have you been thinking about?"
The words came out of me in a voice I almost didn't recognize—lower than my usual register, steadier, carrying a heat that had nothing to do with the Scourge's atmosphere. The boldness surprised me. The old Lydia would have deflected—laughed, changed the subject, asked about the moonmetal or the geography or literally anything that wasn't an invitation for a seven-foot demon lord to tell her exactly what he wanted to do with her.
But the old Lydia's jaw had been clenched shut. Mine wasn't. Not anymore.
He looked at me. Into me. The slit pupils were blown wide, the gold irises narrowed to rings around black, and the ember-veins along his forearms flared bright—a surge of light that pulsed once, twice, three times before he brought it under control with visible effort, the tendons in his hands jumping as his fingers spread wider at his sides.
"I want you." Each word was placed with the same precision he'd used to lay the contract's clauses into dark parchment. No performance. No seduction. No artifice. Facts, spoken the way he spoke all facts—directly, completely, without qualification. "In a way that has rearranged everything I knew about myself. I have ruled this domain for centuries. I have fought wars. I have held my father's gaze and not flinched. And I lie awake at night feeling you through the bond, and it takes every law I live by not to come through your door."
My lungs stopped. Just stopped.
"When you stood on my training yard and told me I didn't get to decide things for you—" His voice dropped. Lower. Rougher. The register that cost him something to reach, the one that lived beneath the commands and the briefings and the stripped-down declaratives, in a place that was not authority but something more dangerous. "—I wanted to put you on your knees and worship you."
The bond detonated. Heat—his and mine, tangled, indistinguishable, feeding back through the connection in a loop that amplified with each circuit—flooded every nerve I had. My wrist blazed gold. My sternum burned. The space between myhips clenched with a suddenness that made my knees buckle, and I locked them through sheer force of a will that was rapidly running out of force to exert.
He started walking.
Just—turned and resumed walking toward the Teeth as though he hadn't just dismantled me with five sentences and a ghost of a smile. The same directional certainty. The same unhurried stride. The broad dark expanse of his back moving away from me across the mirrored plain, the ember-veins dimming to their idle glow, the fire banked, the devastation delivered and the delivery complete.
I followed him on legs that did not work.
They carried me. Mechanically, one in front of the other, the boots he'd given me solid on the black glass. But the muscles had no structural integrity. The tendons had been replaced with something warm and liquid and entirely unreliable. I walked like a woman who'd been told the thing she wanted most and hadn't had time to build a container for it—all spillage, all overflow, all heat.
He didn't look back. But through the bond, steady and warm and devastatingly unhurried, I felt it—his awareness of me behind him. My pulse. My heat. The exact quality of what I was feeling, transmitted through the shared nerve of the bond like a frequency he was tuned to receive.
And beneath the awareness: satisfaction. Dark, deep, patient. The satisfaction of a man who had said what he meant and meant what he said and was content to let the meaning do its work.
The Teeth rose ahead of us. The citadel beyond. And every step I took toward the fortress was a step toward a door that locked from the inside, a bed of dark furs, and a wall of stone that was not nearly thick enough.
Sootwasgone.
