Page 128 of The Witch They Fear

The magic doesn't claw for the exits this time—it coils. Low and slow, swirling in my belly, climbing through my chest, sinking into my thighs, heating me from the inside out like I've swallowed something lit. And it's reaching for him—not to burn him, to get closer. Everywhere we touch has gone molten. The power gathers at my palms where his fingers lace through mine, pulsing in time with a want I have nowhere to put. Sparks bead at my fingertips. He feels them. He has my whole interior cupped in his palms—he feels exactly what's happening to me, feels the magic change character, feels the want bleed into it, and a sound catches low in his throat that he doesn't let out.

His eyes have gone amber in the light. They drop to my mouth. Come back up. I watch him catch himself, watch the discipline grab the leash, watch his jaw lock around a centimeter of restraint.

"I should take you upstairs," he says, very quiet.

I swallow hard, pushing down all the traitorous heat rushing through me right now. "Then take me upstairs."

Neither of us moves.

This is the porch the night I drew the counter-rune—the night he tucked my hair back and then made me lock him out of my own house. Rescind my invitation. To protect yourself. From me. He built a wall that night out of nothing but will, and kept the distance. I’ve watched him put this away every time it surfaces. Put it away like it costs him.

But now I’m watching the wall come down.

He reaches for me. His hand comes up to the side of my face, his thumb at the hinge of my jaw, and he kisses me—and there's nothing careful in it. Nothing of the man who measures every word, who holds every door open a half-second and then shuts it. He kisses me like the restraint was the lie and this is the thing underneath it, like he's been starving the whole time, and his other hand closes in the back of my shirt and drags me flush against him.

My fists open against his chest. The careful foot of distance I've kept from this man since he ripped my magic out of me in a leather chair stops existing. I tip up into him and I kiss him back, and I'm not gentle about it, and neither is he. His mouth is cool and certain, and the cold of him isn't cold anymore—it's the only cool thing on a body that's been burning for a month—and a sound breaks out of me against his lips that I've never made in my life.

And then my magic answers.

It doesn't spike. It pours. Everything I dragged down those stairs—the flood Leopold cranked, the storm Kage caused, all of it with no exit—finds one, and it floods out of me into him through every place we touch, his mouth and his hand at my jaw and his fingers in my hair. He takes it. The overflow he can't catch fast enough lights the room: the sconces gutter, ozone bites the back of my throat, the wards ring one high pure note. Sparks crawl up his forearms over the ink and he doesn't flinch—just pulls me in harder.

And I feel it land—I feel the right size for the body I'm in.

I said that exact thing to Kage on the wet grass at the bonfire. Told him it was what my magic feels like going out clean, the only time I'm the right size for my own skin. I was wrong, or I didn't know yet. This is it. Not the power leaving me—the power met, held at the other end by someone strong enough not to break under it.

I’ve spent my whole life too big for the room. Here, in his lair, with his mouth on mine and my magic pooled safe inside his chest, I am finally enough to fit inside myself.

Then it lands, cold and flat in the middle of all the heat:

Wait. This is—

This is Aamon. My warden. The man with the device in his pocket, the man who logs me as a progress metric, the man assigned to decide whether I get to be a person—and I have my hands in his shirt and my own power humming between us like a live wire and a leather portfolio somewhere upstairs with my name on it.

I go still against him. Half a second.

He feels it. He has my whole interior in his hands. He'd feel the temperature of a thought.

He breaks the kiss. Not all the way—just enough to put air between our mouths. His forehead drops to mine. He's breathing hard now, actually hard, the manual control gone, and when he speaks the voice has come apart at the edges in a way I've never heard from him.

"Fuck."

I've never heard Aamon curse. Not in a session, not when I called the fail-safe a kill switch to his face. He says it like it's torn loose. Like it's the last brick.

"I can't keep doing it." Low. Wrecked. "Pretending I don't want that. Every time you walk in and drop onto that couch and look at me like I'm the worst thing in the room—" His jaw works. "I have wanted to do that longer than I’ll admit.”

He’s so wide open, so honest that I can’t breathe. All I can do is look in his eyes and hear him.

And every alarm I own goes at once. He's my teacher. He holds the thing that can drop me where I stand, and I just handed him my hands and my mouth and let him hold the most defenseless part of me inside his actual body. The council. Balcour's portfolio. A year-long audition for the right to exist. The body count goes up when you start to feel something—Leopold's voice, right there, neat as a coin into a palm. The soft ones have a way of stepping in front of you.

Except Aamon isn’t soft.

Apparently, he cares.

He reads it off my face, or off the magic still sitting in his hands. He takes all of it in, and then he decides—and I watch it cost him.

He gives my magic back. Sets it down inside me slow, careful, and pulls his hands away from me, and steps back. The loss of him drops the temperature in the whole room. My power settles into my chest, quiet, full—fed—and I lock my arms at my sides so I don't reach for him to do it again.

He rebuilds his face while I watch. The jaw. The mouth. The stillness sliding back over the wreckage like water closing over a stone. He drags his hand through his hair, fixing that strand that had fallen.