And Runes doesn't ask a question he already knows unless he wants to watch your face when you answer it.
He's going to ask me who she is to me.
And I'm going to have to tell him the truth, out loud, to my president, with no patch, and a woman asleep on my chest who I've known for two weeks and already said she’s mine.
I look down at her in the dark.
The cold thing I put away at dinner is back, and I let it sit there now, level and clear, because she's asleep, and there's nothing left tonight to protect her from.
Tomorrow, I answer to Runes.
Tonight, I pull the blanket up over her shoulder, and I keep my hand where I can feel her breathing.
I stay awake a while longer just to savor this feeling.
This peace.
CHAPTER NINE
Sophie
Waking up being watched should feel like something to flinch from.
It doesn't.
I come up slowly out of the deepest sleep I've had in weeks, and the first thing I know, before I know the light or the hour or my own name, is the weight of his eyes on me and the back of his fingers moving slow down my bare arm.
Njal's propped on one elbow, watching me like I'm a Greek goddess.
His knuckles graze from my shoulder to my wrist and back up, light as anything, like he's got nowhere in the world he'd rather be than tracing the same six inches of my skin over and over.
"Mornin'," he says, his voice low and rough with sleep.
"How long have you been awake?" I turn my head on the pillow.
"A while." His knuckles don't stop their slow track up my arm.
"Watching me?"
"Watching you." He doesn't apologize for it. He turns my arm over and runs his thumb along the soft inside of my wrist, where the skin's thinnest. "You sleep like somebody who hasn't been allowed to in a long time."
I should feel exposed, lying here in the gray morning light with the marks he left on me last night gone tender and visible on my chest.
I press my hand flat over one of them, low on my collarbone, and I wait for the thing I've waited for my whole life to arrive.
The shame. The drop. The certainty that I've done something that's going to cost me with God and everybody.
It doesn't come.
The sky out his window is just the sky, pale and ordinary, holding itself up the way it always has.
"What're you doing?" he asks.
"Waiting for the bad part." My mouth goes soft at the corners without my say-so. "It's still not here."
He catches my hand, the one pressed over the mark, brings it to his mouth, and kisses the knuckles like a man who means it.
"How do you feel about last night?" he asks. "And don't give me the polite version. Give me the truth."
