“What you heard.” He straightens. Not far, just enough to look at me, the waterfall throwing light across his face in patterns that make his amber eyes unreadable. “Everything I said. I remember all of it.”
I wait.
“I need you to know—” He stops, something working in his jaw. “I need you to know that I’m aware of what the venom does. That I understand if those words land differently now that I’m…that I had no control over?—”
“Finnian.”
He goes quiet.
“You told me you counted my heartbeats.” I say it simply. “Back at the Academy. When we still thought we had time. With your walls fully up. You told me you’d memorized the exact pitch of my voice.”
A beat.
“The venom didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know about you.”
Something moves through his expression. The horror of exposure slowly changing shape into something else. Something more fragile and more real.
He’s waiting for me to pull away.
I can feel it, the held-breath quality of him, three centuries of having things taken, standing in cold water after the worst kind of vulnerability and bracing for the cost of it. I know that feeling. I’ve been standing in it for twenty-eight years. The bracing. The waiting for the thing you said out loud to be used against you.
I put my hands on his face.
He flinches. Not away, just the involuntary response of someone braced for something that doesn’t come.
“I heard you.” My thumbs on his jaw. Making him look at me. “All of it.”
“Ash—”
“I’m still here.”
The waterfall drowns the sound he makes as I close the distance.
But his hands come up to meet me before I get there, cupping my face with the specific reverence I remember from the Academy, like I’m something worth memorizing. Like he’s already taking notes.
His mouth finds mine.
It’s different from the first time.
The first time was desperate. Controlled for exactly two seconds and then not, walls down, three centuries of want detonating all at once.
This is the opposite, slow, deliberate, the kiss of someone who has already said everything and is choosing this with his eyes open. He kisses me the way he reads. Thoroughly. Like there’s no detail too small to catalog. His thumb traces my cheekbone, the line of my jaw, the corner of my mouth, like he’s cross-referencing against something he already memorized and finding it accurate.
It undoes me more than the desperate kind did. I wasn’t braced for careful. I don’t know what to do with being handled like something worth taking time over.
“You’re doing that thing,” I say against his mouth.
He pulls back half an inch. “What thing.”
“The cataloguing thing. I can feel you taking notes.”
Something shifts in his expression. The composure cracks into something that’s almost a smile but isn’t quite, warmer than that, more private than that. “Would you like me to stop?”
“Absolutely not,” I say. “Just wanted you to know I know.”
The almost-smile becomes something else entirely. “Noted.”
“Show me,” I whisper. “The crown. Just where it is.”
