Color rises in her throat. She picks up her water glass and takes a deliberate sip, composure intact, but I've spent weeks learning her now and I see the breath she takes, the small recalibration. She didn't expect me to say it out loud, in front of everyone. She expected me to deflect.
I don't deflect. Not about this.
The ring sits against my hip and the rest of the dinner happens at a distance, like weather observed through glass.
The drive home is quiet.
She sits beside me in the back of the car with the city sliding past the windows, dark and wet, the streetlights smearing across the glass. Her hand is on the seat between us, and at some point I cover it with mine, and she turns her palm up and links her fingers through mine. Neither of us says anything about it.
"You meant it," she says eventually. "At dinner. About asking me tonight."
"I don't say things I don't mean. It's inefficient."
She laughs softly, but there's something underneath it. "You could have asked me anytime this week."
She squeezes my hand, and I feel it travel up my arm and settle in my gut. Calm. Peace. That’s what she brings to my life.
We get home and the house is quiet and gold-lit, the way I leave it now because she prefers warm light to the cold overhead fixtures my father installed. Kasimir has gone for the night. It's just the two of us in the hallway, and she turns to face me. I take the ring out of my pocket.
I don't kneel. She'd hate it, and it isn't who either of us are. Instead I take her left hand and hold it, looking at her, and I let her see all of it. The thing I keep behind the control, the thing that has only ever belonged to her.
"Katriona Bontoft," I say. "I have spent my life acquiring things. Companies, leverage, property, the kind of power that means no one can touch what's mine. None of it ever felt like enough, and I didn't understand why until you sat in a kitchen in a bathrobe and told me about the doctors like you were reading a weather report, and I realized I had spent thirty-six years building a fortress and never once thought about who I was building it for."
Her eyes are bright. She doesn't blink.
"I want to build it for you," I say. "I want to spend the rest of my life with you." I hold the ring at the first knuckle of her finger. "Marry me. Properly. Because I asked, and you said yes."
"You haven't asked yet," she whispers. "You've made a speech."
"Katriona."
"Yes." She's almost laughing, almost crying, entirely herself. "Yes. Obviously, yes. Put the ring on before I take it from you and do it myself."
I slide the ring onto her finger. It's a dark emerald flanked by diamonds. It looks like it was always meant to be there.
She looks at it. Then she looks at me, and the expression on her face is one I've been waiting for without knowing I was waiting.
"Take me upstairs," she says.
I go very still. "Katriona."
"I know. I'm still healing. I've read every page of Marsh's instructions and I know exactly what I can and can't do." She steps closer, and her free hand flattens against my chest, over my heart, which is not behaving the way I would like it to. "But I also know what I can. And I've spent a week listening to you tell me what you want to do to me, and I would like to collect on some of it."
"You're sure?"
"I'm a grown woman who knows her own body better than anyone alive, including the surgeon. Yes. I'm sure." Her eyes hold mine. "Nothing that risks the stitches. I trust you to know the difference."
I take her face in both hands and I kiss her, and for the first time since the hospital I let myself stop being careful with the kiss, because the kiss was never the danger. She makes a sound against my mouth that goes straight through me, and her hands fist in my shirt. I lift her, carefully, one arm behind her back and one beneath her, and she wraps her arms around my neck.
I carry her upstairs to my room. Our room, now, or it will be the moment she's well enough to climb the stairs without me counting each one. I lay her down on the bed with a care that has nothing to do with restraint and everything to do with the fact that I have never in my life held something I was more afraid of damaging and more determined to keep.
"Stop looking at me like that," she says.
"Like what."
"Like I might disappear."
"You spent years disappearing," I say, easing the strap of the green dress off her shoulder, pressing my mouth to the skin there. "While everyone told you the pain wasn't real. I watched you do it in a hallway the night we met. You will not disappear in this house." I move to her collarbone. "Not while I'm watching. And I'm always watching."
