"Yes."
Her palm lands flat over the worst of it—the deep place where the burn pulled the skin together wrong. She lets it rest there until I feel her warmth through what I should not be able to feel anything through, and then she traces upward, slow, no special carefulness, the same attention she gave the courier marks at the table.
"I used to see fire when I looked at you," she says, low. "The first weeks. Every time I looked at this side of your face I was back in the courtyard with the powder going in. I told myself I deserved to see it."
"And now?"
"Now I see you." Her fingers move along the ridge at my collarbone. "Survival. Stubbornness. The man who keeps choosing people in the dark when no one is watching. The one who's tired. The one who doesn't know what to do when being looked at." Her eyes lift. "I don't see the fire anymore. I haven't in a while. I wanted you to know before dawn does whatever it's going to do."
Something in me goes quiet that has not been quiet in a long time. I lift my hand to her jaw because anything else I might do with it would break. Her pulse is in her throat under my thumb.
"I stopped hunting you for revenge years before I admitted it." The words come without preparation. "I told myself it was justice. Then answers. Then a debt I was owed. None of those were true. They were ways of not saying that you were the only one left who understood what the fire had taken, and if you vanished, that part that could still feel anything went with you. I didn't want you dead. I wanted you near enough that the hollow place had another voice in it. I just didn't have a name for that yet."
Her eyes close once. When they open, she leans up and kisses me. Nothing like the cabin. Slow. Closed at first. A kiss that asks, and waits. I answer.
I work the laces of her tunic open without hurry. She lifts her arms and lets me draw it off, and I set it on the table beside the armor instead of letting it fall. I have looked at her burn before and not been allowed to look long. I do now. I bring my mouth to the edge of it and her fingers tighten once against me, and her hand comes to the base of my head and stays there.
We undress each other in pieces. A touch, then a long look. The bed is a folded cloak on the floor and we make do. When I lay her down she doesn't let me cover her at once. She pulls me onto my side facing her and puts her hand back over the burnat my ribs and keeps it there while she studies my face. Not the scar. The face above it.
"Stay with me here," she says.
"I am."
I move down her body the way I want to learn it—mouth following hand, hand following the marks she has carried longer than she has known me. The old blade scar near her hip. A pale stretch at her knee from some ordinary injury. The thin ridge at her ribs I have not earned the right to ask about. I kiss each one in turn. She watches me through every inch of it, propped on one elbow, her breath audible in the low room, her other hand fisted loose in the cloak beneath us as if she is keeping herself from reaching too soon.
When I lower my mouth between her thighs she goes quiet. Her hand finds my hair and rests there without pulling. I take my time. I taste her, slowly, and the small sound she makes is not for performance and not bitten back; it is simply hers, and it goes through me like nothing has in years. Her thighs tense at the sides of my face. I press my palm flat to her belly to hold her steady and feel the muscle there go tight under my hand. When I work two fingers into her she breathes my name once, not as instruction yet, as something closer to surprise.
"Leoric—"
I keep her at the edge longer than is fair, because I want her to know I see her. Every guarded piece of her. Every place she has refused to be known. I want her to feel watched in the way she has spent years refusing to be. When she finally goes against my mouth it is quiet and full-bodied, her back arching off the cloak, her grip tightening in my hair without cruelty. I do not let her come down alone. I stay with her through the aftershocks, my mouth gentler now, my hand smoothing along her thigh until her breathing changes.
She pulls me up by the shoulders. Her mouth finds mine wet and unembarrassed, tasting herself on me, and the kiss undoes something I had not located before. Her hand goes between us and closes around me. The sound I make is not dignified. She doesn't smile—this is not that kind of room tonight—but her eyes hold mine while she strokes me once, slowly, learning the weight of me in her palm.
"Now," she says.
I brace above her. She guides me to her and I push in slowly, and her whole body goes still beneath mine—not from pain, from the weight of being met with nothing between us. I hold there, fully seated, and feel her pulse around me, and the heat of her, and the way her hands settle at my back as if to keep me exactly where I am. Her eyes are wet. She doesn't blink them clear, and I don't pretend not to see. I bend my forehead to hers.
"Look at me." I say.
"I am."
"Stay."
"I'm staying."
I begin to move. Slow. Deeper than fast. Her hips lift to meet mine without urgency, finding a rhythm that belongs to us instead of to need. Her fingers lock with mine at the side of her head and she keeps looking. So do I. I feel every inch of her around me, the slick heat, the small involuntary clench when I angle just so, the way her breath breaks open against my mouth on each stroke. She is wet for me and warm and entirely present, and I have never been inside another person and known their face this completely at the same time.
"There." She tilts her hips, finds it. "There, don't—don't change it."
I don't. I keep that angle and that pace and watch her come apart by degrees—the flush spreading down her throat, the small sounds she has stopped trying to control, the way her free handfinds the burned ridge of my shoulder and presses there as if to hold both of us together. My own restraint is going. I feel it leaving the way I felt the armor come off—piece by piece, deliberately, in front of her, because she asked.
"I'm close," she breathes.
"I know."
"With me."
"Yes."
