“Have you noticed that you’re more stable around her?”
He stopped.
I let it sit.
“Think about it,” I said. “Not right now, not this week. Before we found the tower, how long had it been since you slept more than a couple of hours at a time? How many times in the past month did I have to talk you down from a decision you would have made wrong because you were running on nothing?” I watched his jaw set. “Two days in this tower with her nearby and you slept. I watched you do it. You were under the same roof as her and you slept six hours without waking.”
“That’s not?—”
“It matters. It shows that she means something. To both of us. My magic is more settled, more controlled. Our bond is strengthening, expanding to let her in. I can even feel your magic rising to the surface. She could break your bond.”
The silence that followed had a different quality than the ones before it.
Malric looked at me. He struggled with words, wanting to argue with me, yet he had sensed the same things I had and had nothing to say.
“Only my mate can break the curse,” he said. His voice was careful. “That’s not necessarily?—”
“She could be. We know that we’re not fated mates. Or at least we’re not complete. Maybe she’s showing us what it was always missing.” I stood up. “We already think she amplified the king. That his power has been running partly on hers for years.” I crossed toward him. “What if that’s what she does? Not a weapon that destroys. A bond that makes what’s already there stronger, more stable, more complete.” I stopped a few feet from him. “Imagine what you could do if you weren’t white-knuckling your own control every hour of every day. Imagine what I could do if my storms had an anchor that actually held.”
“So you want her because she’s useful,” he said flatly. “That’s your argument.”
The deliberate misreading of it was so characteristic that I almost laughed.
“I want her because she feels like another part of my soul. Like you do.” I held his gaze. “The way you felt the first time I understood who you were underneath all of that. Like something I hadn’t known was missing until I was standing next to it.”
His expression shifted fractionally, tightened around the eyes, and immediately shut down.
“Three days,” he said, but it was quieter than before.
“I knew in less than one,” I said. “You did too. You’re just better at pretending you didn’t.”
He turned back toward the window. He was tense, his shoulder set rigidly, like a man standing in a strong wind who refuses to lean into it.
I thought about Aveline sitting on the edge of her nest with her hands flat on her knees, looking at the darkening window. The way she’d said when you know what you want, you can tell me, with her voice absolutely level and her eyes reflecting hurt. She’d been managing her own hurt alone for years, and it had been one of the hardest things I’d watched, and I had seen some hard things.
“She asked us what we wanted,” I said to his back. “She asked because it mattered to her. Because she is, for possibly the first time in her life, trying to make a choice that belongs to her, and she wanted to know if what she was considering was real or if she was alone in it.” I paused. “You left her alone.”
“I didn’t say no.”
“You didn’t say anything, Malric,” I snapped. “You sat there. You weighed it. You calculated the risk and you said nothing. So she stood up, wrapped herself in linen, and sent us out. She was very composed about it, and that’s somehow worse.” I shook myhead. “She’s been managed by people who said they love her all her life. She knows exactly what that looks like.”
He was quiet for a long time.
Outside the window, the wind had picked up, whipping through the trees at the perimeter of the tower’s grounds. I sensed it in a peripheral way—my magic was always more active when I was restless. I reached for the thread connecting me to Aveline, the weak and tenuous bond, and slowly calmed. The wind outside also gentled to a breeze. The action wasn’t lost on Malric, who glanced at me, a dark look on his face. Once, I would have reached for our bond. Choosing Aveline was telling him something. Now it was his turn to make a choice.
“You need to decide. Not for the rebellion. Not for me. And not because the timing is right or the tactical logic holds. Decide what you want, and then go tell her, or don’t.” I picked up my jacket from the back of the chair. “But do it before you lose us both. Because I won’t watch her go through what’s coming alone because you needed another week to be certain about something you’ve already been certain about since the moment you heard her voice through that wall.”
I moved toward the door.
“Thane.”
I stopped but didn’t turn around.
He didn’t say anything for a moment. I could hear him breathing, steady and controlled, the breath of a man keeping himself in careful order.
“I know,” he said finally. Quiet. A concession he hadn’t meant to make out loud.
It wasn’t enough. Not yet.
