She'd given him a way out, given him grace, given him the door propped open with her own hand, and he was refusing to walk through it. The wanting and the terror collided somewhere under her sternum and went hot, and she made the mistake before she could stop herself, surging across the rug until she was inches from him.
"You don't get to refuse," she snapped. "You don't get to tell me what to do." Her hands came up to shove him, but he wasfaster. His fingers closed around her wrists, gentle and absolute, and the heat of him traveled straight up her arms into her shoulders, down her spine, settling into her core and the tips of her aching nipples. She lost the next breath she'd meant to take.
"Get out!"
"Goddamnit." His voice cracked at the edges. He held her wrists like he was holding something he was afraid to break, and her body wanted this energy, this struggle. She wanted to straddle him, make him cry out, take him hungry and hard until she had him writhing and thrusting deep into her.
"No."
She knew it wouldn't do any good. She begged anyway. "Please. I can't. I won't risk you. Not you."
I can't lose you again.
The words rose unbidden. Her mouth was already shaping them. She’d spoken them before, in the way she was certain of her own pulse. On the heel of that thought came the heat. A flood of it across her palms where they pressed against his forearms, slick and hot and wrong, a wash of blood that wasn't there, his blood, the wet of it traveling up to her wrists, and her breath broke open in her chest.
His face contorted. His breath hitched.
"Quri Killa."
The name out of his mouth was strange. She didn’t know how to process it. Quri in Quechua meant gold and Killa was moon. Gold moon…was that some kind of sweet talk?
She tore out of his grip. Anger moved through her with such force that she stumbled, the rug slipping under her boot, her shoulder catching the corner of the bookshelf. He was on her in a step, hand reaching for her elbow.
She pushed him off. "Don't try using my own language to charm me." This was what he did, try to lighten the tensioninstead of sitting in it. But the name spooked her for reasons she couldn’t understand.
He let her go the instant she had her balance as if she'd burned him, his hands raising slightly, palms open, the universal sign of a man who knew how to back away from a frightened animal.
She reeled around the end of the couch and put it between them.
Clutching the cushion, her fingers sank into the softness of it. She made herself look at him through the light, made her face do what her training had built it for, and she had no idea what was happening to her. The wet on her palms was gone. The smell of copper she'd tasted in the hangar was gone. The almost memory that she held a blade against him and used it sat in her body like a stone she could feel but not see, and the certainty that she'd watched him bleed, somewhere, sometime, sat right next to it.
She glared at him because the alternative was sobbing.
He swallowed. Hard. She almost broke on the hurt in his eyes, the way he was looking at her like a man watching a door close on a room he'd just begun to enter.
"I'm here on behalf of the Guardian and the Keepers of the Veil." His voice came out rougher than before. He didn't move from where she'd left him, three feet between them, and he laid it out for her like the truth didn’t sound completely bonkers, the font her ancestor had sealed five centuries ago, the wards failing, the only crossing into the Veil shut to the Shadowguard who had to reach Chaos. She kept her face still and let him finish. "You're the lock. I'm the key. We have to figure out how we fit, or Chaos breaks his bonds and there's no Reality left to come back to. Only you can open the way."
She blinked.
The words registered the way words registered when she was concussed, the syllables arriving and the meaning trailingbehind them, none of it penetrating. It was nonsense. It was the kind of nonsense Eva used to spin out late at night when she was drunk on whiskey and grief, all gods and bargains and the old prayers of her grandmother. This was nonsense, and she opened her mouth to say so.
She couldn't.
The dreams she'd been ignoring even with her sheets soaked through. The waking nightmare in Caracas two months ago, the one where the air around her had thickened until she couldn't push her hand through it, the one she'd written off as dehydration and adrenaline. The visions she'd been seeing on the edge of sleep, smoke over stone, gold running molten, a man's face under a helm she couldn't quite see.
Her head snapped up. The blackout here in her hangar, the chakana on her ribs had started to burn, white-hot, the ink lifting off her skin like it remembered something her body had forgotten.
It had been tied to him.
She knew it the way she'd known the blade in her hand, the way she'd known the blood on her palms, the way she'd known his name was Jae before he'd ever told her. The knowing arrived without permission, and there was nothing she could do with it except stand and look at him across the light and understand that something had been trying to reach her, and she had not let herself listen.
She collapsed inside.
The training held the outside of her upright, the way it always had, but the part of her that had been running for six months and the part of her that had been running for even longer meshed, and all she could think was getting to him. Having him make everything all right.
"Jae." She barely heard her own voice. The cushion slid out of her grip.
He was already moving.
