Six months ago, this would have been frost. Sharp. Controlled. Lethal.
Now I’m snowing on furniture like a lovesick fool.
Orion would never let me live it down if he saw.
I press my thumb against the silver-blue mark and let myself remember.
The way she looked at me in my quarters. Not afraid. Never afraid. She’d laughed at something I said, I don’t even remember what, and then stopped mid-breath. Stared at me like she’d just noticed I was bleeding.
“What?” I’d asked.
“Nothing.” But she kept looking. “You just...you have a nice laugh. I didn’t know you could do that.”
No one had ever said that to me. In three centuries, no one had ever noticed.
The sound of my name in her mouth when she stopped pretending she didn’t want me.Kieran. Not my title. Not my lineage. Just the name my mother gave me before my father taught me it was a weakness.
The exact temperature of her skin when I finally let myself touch her. Warmer than I expected. Warmer than I deserved.
I don’t deserve her.
But I can hope like hell I dream of her anyway.
9
Ash
Awareness doesn’t announce itself.It seeps through the veil of dreaming one soft breath at a time until I blink away the haze of sleep.
Darkness fills my vision. Then the heavy moon, hanging low and full, streaming silver through familiar windows.
Windows I haven’t seen in a month.
The Academy. My old quarters. The bed that was never really mine but felt like it anyway.
I’m dreaming.
But I know this moment, I lived it. The night Kieran broke into my room to drag me out of bed and spar at three in the morning. The night I wanted to kill him almost as much as I wanted to kiss him.
I look down at my wrist. Bare. No silver-blue glow. No pulse of connection.
The bond doesn’t exist here.
I turn to the corner where he should be.
He’s there. Shadow and moonlight and ice-blue eyes that see right through me.
“You sleep like prey, troublesome thing.”
The words drift through the air and land in my chest where his absence has been aching for a month. But this isn’t memory anymore. The Kieran I remember didn’t look at me like this, like I’m water and he’s been crawling through a desert.
Unlike then, I don’t reach for the weapon under my pillow. I sit up slowly, the sheet pooling at my waist, wearing the same nightshirt I wore that night.
Inch by inch he leans forward, elbows on his knees, fingers pressed to his lips. That look of mischief I remember. But underneath it,hunger. Desperation. The look of a man who’s been counting days.
My breath huffs out and even in my dream my eyes water.
I want this to be real so badly it hurts.
