“Wait,” I gasp, pulling back. “My magic.” I look at my hands, then his body. “What if I hurt you?”
“Not in the dreaming.” He runs his thumb across my forehead. “It’s a form of shadow walking. Dream walking. The magic is the dream itself.”
“So it’s really you.”
“Yeah.” His mask slips, just for a breath, and I see the fear beneath it. The twenty-three nights of reaching and finding nothing. “It’s really me.”
I shove him onto his back and straddle him, pinning his wrists above his head exactly like that morning he woke me to spar. My magic held him then.
I hold him now.
“Then where the fuck have you been?”
His eyes darken. “Exiled. Blocked. Trying to reach you every?—”
“Wrong answer.” Hovering over him, I reach down with one hand, freeing his cock by tugging on the tie.
“Ash,” he warns.
Clearly I ignore him as I sink down onto him in one slow, devastating slide.
His head falls back. A groan tears from his throat, raw, wrecked,mine.
“I wasn’t wearing panties,” I remind him, rolling my hips with excruciating patience. “Remember?”
“I remember everything.” His voice is gravel. “Every sound you made. Every time you said my name. I’ve been replaying it for a month while trying not to snow on everything I touch.”
I still.
“You’ve been snowing?”
“Don’t.” His jaw clenches. “Orion already mocked me for it.”
A laugh bubbles up, genuine, surprised, the first real one in weeks. “The fearsome Unseelie prince. Leaving snowflakes everywhere because he misses me.”
“I will flip you over and make you pay for that.”
“Promises, promises.”
He breaks my hold on his wrists and sits up, ripping the dream-shirt from my body and closing his lips around my nipple. It’s like running an ice cube across heated skin, amazing and stinging in all the right places.
“Oh.” I jerk my hips as he bites down.
“Two can play this game, Ash.” He grips the back of my neck, pulling me closer. “You think I wouldn’t come for you?”
I hesitate.
It’s barely a breath. But in that breath I’m eight years old, waiting by a window for a father who never came. I’m eighteen, watching my unit leave me behind because the mission mattered more. I’m twenty-six, deleting voicemails from cousins because I stopped trying.
I’m every version of myself who learned that waiting is just disappointment with a longer timeline.
He sees it. Of course he sees it, he sees everything.
The hurt that flashes across his face nearly breaks me.
He goes still. Completely still, even though he’s inside me, even though we’re both shaking with want.
“Ash.”
