I hadn’t. Because she hadn’t asked. Because I was playing a long game, earning her trust inch by inch, waiting for her to come to me.
And then the fire had taken everything.
The hours passed slowly and the cabin settled around me. Lucian appeared at the end of the hallway sometime around three in the morning, checking on me without words.
I nodded. He nodded back, disappeared again.
Percy came by an hour later, two cups of coffee in hand. He didn’t say anything, just handed me one and sat down on the floor across from me, his back against the opposite wall.
“You should sleep,” I said.
“So should you.” He took a sip of his coffee. “We’re both going to ignore that advice.”
We sat there together until the sky started to lighten.
Just before dawn, the lock clicked.
The door opened.
Mira stood in the doorway, hair tangled, eyes swollen from crying. She was wearing one of Percy’s shirts this time, the hem falling to her knees, and the sight of her bare legs made my mouth go dry. I could see the shape of her thighs beneath thefabric, the soft curve where hip met waist. My fingers twitched against the floor.
She stared at me. At Percy. At the fact that we were both still there, exactly where we’d been when she’d closed the door hours ago.
“You stayed,” she said.
“You asked.”
Her expression shifted. Not trust, not yet. But the hairline fracture in her walls, the first sign that maybe, someday, she’d let us through.
She didn’t say thank you or anything else at all.
Just looked at me with those mismatched eyes and I saw an emotion in them that wasn’t just fear.
Recognition.Faint and confused, buried under layers of trauma and lost memories, but there.
I held her gaze and let her look. Let her see whatever she needs to see. Let her see the hunger I couldn’t quite hide, the want that burned beneath centuries of practiced control.
Then she stepped back and closed the door. The lock clicked into place.
Percy looked at me across the hallway, his coffee growing cold in his hands.
“That was something,” he said quietly.
Yeah. It was.
It was astart.And a start was all I needed.
After all, I am a very,verypatient man.
5
— • —
Mira
I woke up and my instinct was to immediately catalog the exits.
Two windows, both large enough to climb through. One door lock engaged. Drop from the second floor to the ground, survivable if I rolled right. My shoes sat beside the bed, laces untied, ready to slip on.
