He stopped.
“What,” Sabine said.
“It gets harder to remember why I am supposed to keep distance.”
The admission hung between them, raw and destabilizing.
Sabine’s pulse hammered under his fingers. “You think distance will save either of us.”
“I think proximity will ruin us both faster.”
“Then you are already failing.”
His grip tightened. “Sabine—”
She stepped closer.
Close enough now that she could feel the heat coming off him, could see the way his breath had gone uneven, could smell leather and cold stone and something darker underneath that her body recognized even if her mind refused to name it.
“I went into the garden,” she said quietly. “I saw what it showed me. I survived. I came here looking for truth, and I found evidence that the rite is designed to break women who resist it. None of that changes because you warn me to be silent. None of that becomes safer because you keep me at arm’s length.”
“I am trying to keep you alive.”
“I know.” She looked up at him, close enough now that if either of them moved the wrong way this would become something neither of them could take back. “But I think you are also trying to keep yourself from wanting something you are not allowed to trust yet.”
Lucien went very still.
Then his free hand came up and braced against the shelf beside her head, caging her between his body and the archive wall without quite touching her.
“You do not know what you are asking for,” he said.
“Then tell me.”
For three seconds he said nothing.
Then he leaned in, and Sabine’s breath stopped.
He did not kiss her.
Not yet.
He stopped with his mouth a breath away from hers, close enough that she could feel the heat of him, close enough that when he spoke the words ghosted against her lips.
“I am asking for you to survive this. To pass the Trials. To let me figure out how to break the rite from the inside before it consumes you the way it consumed Isolde.” His voice had gone rough and low and utterly without the control he used everywhere else. “And I am trying very hard not to want you in ways that will make me useless when the final vow comes.”
Sabine’s hands curled into the front of his coat.
She should step back. She should remember that this man was politically dangerous, ritually bound, and wrapped in a dead bride’s memory. She should remember that House Corvyr needed her focused, not distracted by a prince whose control was fracturing around her.
She kissed him instead.
Not soft. Not tentative.
She closed the last breath of distance and pressed her mouth to his hard enough that he made a sound low in his chest, surprise or relief or hunger, she could not tell which and did not care.
For half a second he went rigid.
Then his control shattered.
