“You can’t know that.”
“I can. Because I know what rewriting looks like. I did it to Perin. I took a woman’s memory and replaced it with nothing, and the guilt has been eating me alive for seven months. That’s rewriting. That’s taking a piece of someone and replacing it with what you need.” I put my hand on his arm. “You carved me a shelf. You didn’t take anything. You gave me a place to put my vials.”
His jaw works.
“If I do this,” he says. “If the bond changes you. If your body reorganizes and you lose things you didn’t expect to lose…”
“Then we deal with it. Together. The same way we dealt with the soldiers and the gland damage and the fact that you can’t cook.”
He almost laughs. Not quite.
“I’m serious,” he says.
“So am I.”
He looks at me, the gold eyes, the angular face, the crest of bony ridges I’ve traced with my fingers in the dark, the creature who spent two thousand gold on the last lot of the night because he saw something in me I couldn’t see in myself.
“When?” he says.
“Now.” I tilt my head and bare the left side of my neck, the place where he’s bitten me every morning for three weeks. “Full load. Don’t hold back. I’m ready.”
His hand comes up and rests on the side of my face, his thumb against my temple, his fingers in my hair, the same gesture from the first time we kissed, the same tenderness, the same care.
“You’re sure,” he says.
“I’ve been sure since you held me while I cried about a woman I hurt and a life I broke and a punishment I built for myself. I’m sure.”
He leans down and kisses me, soft, the scales around his lips, the taste of him. Then his mouth moves to my neck, and I feel his fangs rest against the muscle, his breath on my skin, his hand firm in my hair.
Not the micro-dose. Not the careful morning bites. Not the measured restraint that has been his answer to every question I’ve asked with my body for three weeks.
He opens his jaw and presses his fangs in deep.
The venom enters at a concentration I’ve never experienced. Full load. Everything he has. Everything he’s been holding back. It goes through me like sunrise, not a wave, not a crash, but a complete warmth that starts at the bite and fills my entire body at once.
Every muscle releases. Every joint unlocks. Every cell in my body recognizes the compound and saysyes, this, finally, this.
My heart rate doesn’t drop. It shifts. Locks to his. Not matching anymore, integrated, one rhythm between two bodies.
My immune system reorganizes, and I feel it happening, a deep internal shift, the nineteen tolerances I spent nine years building releasing their hold one by one: the blackfin scorpion, the marsh viper, the crimson asp, the blue-ringed compounds that cost me a tremor. And in their place, him, his chemistry filling the spaces they leave.
The last tolerance to release is the blue-ringed, the one closest to his bonding chemistry, the one that held longest because it was already half his. It releases, my left hand goes still, and the tremor that has been my companion for five years stops.
Not suppressed. Not silenced. Gone.
The venom took it; the same chemistry that quieted it during every micro-dose bite has now permanently replaced the damage that caused it. My hand is still. Both hands are still. He pulls back, and I hold them in front of me and watch them not shake.
“Oh,” I say. “Oh.”
He’s still holding me, his mouth still at my neck, the bite closed, his lips pressed to the mark, his arms around me.
“Ruelle,” he says against my skin. His voice is gone, down to nothing. “Ruelle.”
“My hand,” I say. “Sirath. My hand.”
He takes my left hand in his and holds it, both of us watching my fingers, steady, still, the tremor gone. He didn’t know. He didn’t know the bond would do that. Neither did I.
The steam from the vent rises around us. The mountain is quiet. The afternoon light falls across the sulfur crystals and the flat rock and the two of us, one holding the other’s hand and watching it not shake, and the notebook is in the cave and I don’t need it and I don’t want it and I’m not reaching for it.
