Page 76 of The Witch They Fear

"Again."

Fourth try. I hold my palm over the flame. Close my eyes. And this time I don't push. I open. Like unclenching a fist. Like releasing a breath I've been holding for twelve years.

The magic flows. Down my arm. Through my palm. Into the flame. And the flame takes it—gently, steadily, drinking from my power the way the resonance stone drinks from it, except warmer, wilder, alive in a way stone can never be.

"There," Aamon says. Barely a whisper. "Hold that. Don't chase it. Just hold."

I hold. The flame climbs—not spikes, climbs, a steady ascent from orange to gold to white to—

Blue.

The flame turns blue. A single, impossible second where the fire on the bone-colored candle burns the color of the sky just before dark, and I feel the ward lock—a click, a catch, a bolt sliding home somewhere in the magical architecture of the door. The counter-rune on the inside of the door blazes once—bright, hot, the chalk lines glowing white—and then settles. Dims. Goes dark.

But it's alive. I can feel it. A second pulse in the door, beating in opposition to the anchor on the other side.

My magic, standing guard.

I pull my hand back. The flame drops to orange. The candle burns normally. The ward holds.

"It worked," I breathe. Smile. Holy shit. It worked.

"It worked," Aamon confirms. His voice is low and rough and there's a crack running through it that sounds dangerously close to pride—the quiet, fierce kind. The kind a man tries to swallow before it shows.

I turn around. He's closer than I realized—three feet away, maybe less, standing in the middle of my cottage with his hands at his sides. The candlelight catches him from below, throwing amber across the hard planes of his face, pooling in the hollow of his throat, gilding the dark red-brown of his hair where it falls across his forehead. His hazel eyes have gone full amber in this light. Warm. The warmest I've ever seen them. The sharp line of his jaw is softened by the flickering glow and for the first time since I met him he looks less like an institution and more like a man.

The silence stretches. The ward hums behind me. The candle flickers. And Aamon looks at me in the amber dark of my cottage and I watch his composure thin—the edges going soft, the professional mask loosening the way a hand loosens on a rope it's been gripping too long. His lips part. His breathing changes—slower, deeper, his chest rising and falling with a deliberateness that tells me he's controlling it manually.

He steps forward. One step. Close enough that I can smell him—cedar and old paper and the delicious thing underneath that I've been pretending I don't notice since the first time I sat on his couch and breathed it in.

His hand comes up. Slow. Deliberate. Those long fingers—the same ones that wrapped around mine during the mirroring, that pressed into my biceps on the porch, that gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles went white. They find a lock of hair near my temple—damp from the heat, curling against my skin—and tuck it behind my ear.

Gentle. Impossibly gentle. His fingertips graze the shell of my ear and trail down to my jaw and I feel it everywhere—in my throat, in my belly, in the soles of my feet.

My heart is slamming against my ribs. My magic is reaching for him—not the spike, not the surge, just a pull, warm and steady, and my whole body is angled toward him without my permission, tilting like a plant toward light.

He is standing in your home because you invited him. He is touching your hair and you are not pulling away. Your body has turned traitor and your pulse is in your ears and you need to stop looking at his mouth.

I don't stop looking at his mouth.

His fingers linger at my jaw. One second. Two. Then his hand drops. His eyes go sharp. Resolved. A man yanking himself back from an edge he didn't mean to walk to.

"Rescind my invitation," he says.

I blink. "What?"

"My invitation. To your cottage." His voice is steady but the steadiness is costing him. I can hear the effort in it—the careful construction of each word, the control being applied like pressure to a wound. "Rescind it."

"Why?" I search his face. "I might need your help again tomorrow night. With the ward—"

"Rescind it, Calypso."

"Why?"

He looks at me. And the mask falls.

His brow creases. His jaw unclenches. The careful, composed architecture of his face rearranges itself into something raw and unfinished—a man standing in a woman's cottage at midnight with candlelight on his skin and the taste of a line he's about to cross sitting on his tongue. I can see the want. Fuck, I can almost feel it.

It's in the set of his shoulders, in the tendons of his neck, in the way his eyes drop to my mouth for a half-second before he drags them back. He wants to stay. He wants to step closer. He wants to finish what his fingertips started at my jaw.