“Hi,” he says back.
His forehead drops to mine. Neither of us moves. Neither of us speaks. There’s nothing left to say that the bond isn’t already saying.
“I should tell you something.” His voice is rough, wrecked. “I catalogued forty-seven separate data points during that experience.”
“That’s creepy.”
“Almost certainly.”
“Do it again.”
He laughs against my hair—real laughter, surprised and warm—and I let myself have this moment. The cold water and the warm body and the gold bond blazing between us like something holy.
We take our time.
I don’t run.
Somewhere beyond the grotto, beyond the waterfall’s constant song, the forest holds its breath. Waiting for something I can’t name yet.
I ignore it.
I’ll regret that later.
24
Kieran
I don’t think.
Thinking is for situations where there are options.
My shadows are already in the water before I reach the bank, not the careful controlled extension I use in courts and corridors, but the full release, every shadow I carry exploding outward with one directive.Find him. Now.
The pool goes dark. My dark. The siren shrieks somewhere below the surface and I follow the sound.
I hit the water.
Cold. Wrong cold. The kind that has intention behind it, that wants things from you, that has been waiting in this particular pool for exactly this kind of mistake. It hits me like a decision.
I make a different one.
I cannot believe I am swimming toward a man I’ve known four days in a death pool in a dark forest and I am not thinking about that. I am thinking about the bond at my wrist that went strange when he went under. I am thinking about the sound Whispen made on the bank above me. I am thinking about my mother’s chambers sealed and everything of hers removed and the reaching for things that weren’t there.
I am not losing someone else to dark water.
My shadows find the siren’s throat.
Then they find Orion’s wrist.
The warmth is still there.
Still there.
I pull.
The siren loses interest in him when my shadows find its throat. I don’t stay to watch what happens after. I get Orion to the surface. I get him to the bank. I get him onto his back and I do the things I watched a battlefield healer do once, three centuries ago, during a border skirmish that Moros declared a training exercise and I declared the worst day of my life up to that point.
The ranking has since changed. The memory stayed.
