Page 24 of The Witch They Crave

The heat lifts behind my sternum, my magic rolling over, and I breathe it back down, in for four, because I am not giving this room another crater tonight. When I speak again it comes out low and mean, because who the fuck does Aamon think he is right now?

"You don't get an opinion on that." I close some of the distance between us. "You made sure of it. Warden and asset. You say it to everybody like a prayer that will save you. You said it to everyone’s face at the Revel with your thumb on the fail-safe button. So no—you don't get to stand in my cell jealous. You don't get both."

"He had his mouth on you." It's not a question. It comes out of him low and it has heat in it now, real heat, the flat gone out of it. "His teeth on your lip. His blood in your mouth. He had you against a wall in a room I'm chained to, and you were going to let him."

"Jealousy doesn't suit you."

"Don't." A muscle jumps in his jaw. "Don't make it small."

"Then don't make it yours." I round on him. "That's the part I can't get over, Aamon. You. Only minutes ago you stood in this room and told him there's no visitation, I'm under sentence, I'm a prisoner and you're the guard and that's all this is. You put me in a box in front of him, same as you put me on that floor in front of two hundred people. And now what—now he touches me and suddenly you've got something to say about it?"

"Yes."

"You can't have it both ways!" My voice climbs and I let it. "You don't get to look at me like an assignment when the council's watching and then look at me like this the second we're alone. You don't get to decide I'm nothing to you every time it's convenient and then be furious when someone treats me like I'm more. Pick one. Warden or—" I stop, because I don't have the second word, because he's never let me have it. "Pick one and stand in it."

"You have no idea what I'm standing in." Rough now, ragged. "None. You think this is easy for me? You think I chose one wall between us for a punishment? I would take a hundred inquests before I'd—" He cuts it off, teeth clicking, and drags in a breath he doesn't need.

"Before you'd what?"

"Calypso."

"What?" I'm close now. Close enough to see it—the wreck under the still, the effort it's costing him to hold his face together. "Say it. For once in your entire existence, just—"

"You think I don't want to?"

It comes out of him rough and low and it stops me cold, because it's not the warden. There's nothing measured in it.

"Want to what?" I ask, feigning ignorance to force him to speak.

He doesn't answer.

"No. You started it." My hand closes in his shirt. I did the same thing to Kage less than an hour ago, and Kage took it and gave it back doubled—but Aamon has never let me touch him outside the mirroring, not once, and he lets me now. "Finish it."

"You are the most blind person I have ever met." Barely a voice. His eyes come off the wall and land on me, and there's a whole life in them, none of it careful. "After everything. You still haven't—"

He stops.

An inch between us. His chest is moving. Vampires don't need to breathe, which means he's forgotten to hold it, and the thing he almost said is right there, so close I can nearly read the shape of it, and I want it so badly my hands hurt.

"Haven't what," I whisper.

He doesn't say it.

His eyes drop to my mouth instead, and his hands come up and take my face, and whatever he can't tell me, this is the closest he'll get to telling it—

I don't know which of us moves. Maybe the inch between us just gives.

He kisses like nothing else about him. Kage burns; Aamon drowns. Slow, deep, deliberate, a hand sliding into my hair and the other flattening at the small of my back and pulling me in, and a whole month of held breath goes out of him at once and into me. I make a sound against his mouth. He answers it with my name, muffled, like it hurts to say.

My back finds the wall. He follows. Careful even now—he can't switch it off, the care—a knee coming between mine, a hand skating down to my hip and stopping there like he needs to be told. I pull him in to tell him–yes, yes, yes. I get my hands under the torn shoulder of his shirt and his skin is cool and the muscle jumps under my palm and he shudders, this old controlled thing shaking because I'm touching him, and that undoes me more than the kiss did.

Then his hands drop to the backs of my thighs and he lifts me off my feet.

Like I weigh nothing. Like he's done deciding to be careful. My legs go around his waist and he carries me like that, still kissing me, out of the wreck of the common room and through the ruined doorway into my little room. The world tips as he lowers me down onto the cot and follows me onto it, his weight coming over me, his forearms bracketing my head.

"Calypso." My name against my jaw. My throat. My mouth again, like he can't stop saying it, like it's been building in him for a month and now that it's out he can't stop.

"I hate you," I breathe against his mouth.