“Yes.”
He paused at the mouth of the passage and looked back at her.
She was still standing where he’d left her, small and pale in the crystal light, and the fear was still on her but so was a kind of fierce fragile hope that made her look, for just a moment, like the female she was becoming instead of the female she’d been. He wanted to cross back to her. He wanted to cup her face in his hands and tell her she was extraordinary and that watching her grow was the highest privilege of his life and that he would burn the whole Empire to ash before he let anything hurt her again.
He didn’t. He turned away instead, because she needed to do this on her own terms and his wanting could wait. It would keep waiting, as long as she needed it to.
He was halfway down the passage when he heard her footsteps behind him.
“Njkall.”
He immediately turned back towards her. She crossed the distance between them in three quick strides, and then her hands were fisting in the fur at his chest, and she was pulling herself up on her toes, and then?—
She kissed him.
Not tentatively but enthusiastically, her mouth opening against his, her fingers tightening in his fur, and her body pressing against him like she was trying to burn the shape of herself intohis body. He felt the heat of her through his pelt and heard the small desperate sound she made against his lips. His control cracked like ice in the spring thaw.
His hands found her waist and drew her closer before he could stop himself, and gods, she fit against him like she’d been made for the space, like his arms had been waiting his whole life to hold her. She was still kissing him, deeper now, hungrier, and his blood was roaring in his ears and his claws were sliding out and he wanted?—
He wanted.
He pulled back.
It took everything. Every year of discipline. Every hard-learned lesson about patience and restraint and giving someone room to become themselves. He pulled back, and he watched her as he did, her face flushed and her eyes dark with something that matched the burning in his own chest, and he made himself let go of her waist even though his hands screamed at the loss of her.
“Polly.” His voice came out wrecked. He tried again. “If you do that again, I’m not going to be the one who stops, little one. And you have somewhere to be.”
She stared at him, her chest heaving. Her fingers were still tangled in his fur and she seemed to have forgotten they were there.
“I know,” she said. “I know. I just needed?—”
“I understand.” He reached up, gently, and unhooked her fingers from his pelt. He held them in his own for a moment and let his thumb trace across her knuckles in a tender promise. “And I willgive it to you. Everything you want, anything you need. But not right now. Not when you’re about to walk into the hardest thing you’ve done in a year.” He released her hands and stepped back, letting the cool cave air fill the space between them. “Right now, you’re going to Port Eyeja. And I’m going to be right beside you. And when we come home?—”
He let the sentence hang. Let her fill it with whatever she wanted to imagine.
Her cheeks were still flushed. Her mouth was still swollen from his kiss. But she was nodding, slowly, and underneath the desire he could see her pulling the scattered pieces of her courage into something she could carry.
“When we come home,” she repeated quietly.
“Yes.” He smiled at her, and it was the hardest thing he’d done all day, letting her see the gentleness instead of the hunger when the hunger was burning him alive. “A quarter-hour. Main entrance. Don’t be late.”
She huffed out a breath that was almost a laugh. “Don’t tell me what to do.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
She held his gaze for one more heartbeat—long enough for him to see all the want and fear and wild uncertain hope—and then she turned, and walked back towards the healer’s cave, and he watched her go and did not follow.
The sleigh. The message. Baralt. A route that would keep them away from the worst of the crowd. A dozen details that needed his attention, and he seized on them now like a drowning male seizing driftwood, because if he let himself think about hermouth on his for even one more second he was going to chase her down that passage and pin her against the nearest wall and show her exactly whatwhen we come homemeant.
Later. All of it, later.
He turned away and went to ready the sleigh, and his hands did not shake, because he was a clan leader and a warrior and he had spent forty years learning to master himself.
But gods, she made it difficult.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Polly’s heart beat too fast in her chest as the sleigh runners hissed against the packed snow. She sat in the middle of the bench with Tess on her left and Njkall’s solid warmth at her right. The wind bit at her exposed cheeks above her fur-lined hood, carrying with it the first distant sounds of Port Eyeja. Each sound tightened the knot in her stomach a little more.
