“Chunky salsa. That’s trauma.”
I watched the exchange from the counter, arms crossed. “He’s being dramatic.”
“I’m being emotionally vulnerable.” Percy didn’t lift his head from where Mira had let him resettle against her collarbone.
Mira ran her fingers through his hair again and he practically melted. Solomon shook his head once, the barest movement, and returned to his coffee. He knew there was another person who was about to spoil Percy of his whims aside from us.
The domestic normalcy of the scene sat in my chest with a warmth I hadn’t earned and couldn’t stop wanting.
This.All of it.
The four of us in a kitchen, bickering over salsa and bad shifts, Mira’s fingers in Percy’s hair and her shoulder still warm against my arm where she’d leaned.
I diverted my mind away from the investigation scroll in Solomon’s back pocket and the threats that were still out there. Outside the confines of this cabin.
Not yet.
I needed to keep it this way.
Percy eventually peeled himself off Mira and disappeared upstairs to shower. Solomon left for the bookshop, muttering about buying supplies, and the cabin settled into the afternoon quiet that I’d come to associate with the hours when Mira read and the world stopped demanding things from me.
She’d settled on the couch, legs tucked beneath her, a paperback open on her knee. The light from the window caught the copper in her hair and the claiming mark on her throat, the single point where two signatures now overlapped.
My mark. Solomon’s.Layered, permanent, a testament to what she’d chosen.
Soon, Percival’s will be added too.
I reached into the drawer of the side table beside the couch. The box had been there for three days, waiting for a moment that felt right. I’d had it sent through the portal with the herbs for Percival, tucked between the leather pouches, small enough to miss.
“Mira.”
She looked up. Those mismatched eyes found mine with the unguarded attention she gave to everything now. Trusting, in a way that made my lungs ache because I knew what it cost her.
I sat beside her and held out the box.
She stared at it. Then at me. Then back at the box.
“If that’s a ring, we need to have a conversation about timelines.”
“It’s not a ring. For now.”
“Well, I’ve known you for a handful of months and you’re already a king and I haven’t even finished renovating my bookshop.”
“Open the box, Mira.”
She paused but took it and lifted the lid.
Inside sat a pendant on a fine chain.
The stone was obsidian, polished to a mirror finish, cut in an oval that caught the light and reflected it back in dark iridescence. Veins of deep blue ran through the black, natural formations from the volcanic shores of the Obsidian Sea.
It was delicate, woven metal that wasn’t gold or silver but somewhere between, a Veyndral alloy that didn’t exist in the human world.
Her fingers hovered over the stone without touching it.
“This is from your kingdom,” she said.
“From the Obsidian Sea. The stone forms on the volcanic cliffs where the lava meets the water.” I watched her face, cataloguing every micro-expression. “In Veyndral, obsidian is given to mark belonging. Not ownership. Connection.”
