Page 25 of The Witch They Crave

"I know." He kisses the corner of my mouth. My jaw. Comes back to it. "Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Hate me." Barely there. "Don’t hate me."

"You're a liar." I'm pulling him closer even as I say it, both hands fisted in his shirt. "You put me on that floor. You stand there every day like I'm nothing to you—"

"Everything I do down here is so they let you keep breathing." Fierce, against my lips. "If it looks like nothing, then I've done it right."

And the wall comes down.

The whole month of it—warden and asset, the cold I've kept my hands in so I wouldn't reach for him, the story I keep telling myself—it just vanishes. Because his mouth is on mine and my body knows the thing my head won't say, which is that this is right, every impossible dangerous wrong part of it. We fit together and ever fiber of my being recognizes it.

I get a hand in his hair and drag him back and stop fighting it. He goes where I put him, pressing down on me, kissing my skin, licking the tracks of fire he ignites inside me.

His hips settle into the cradle of mine and press down, and I gasp, and the sound of it pulls something loose in him. He does it again. Slower. Deliberate. I feel every inch of it, feel the hard line of him through two layers of clothes, and my body answers before I decide anything—my knees coming up, my hips lifting into his, chasing the friction of it. He groans into my mouth, low and wrecked, and I swallow the sound and want more of it. His hand slides up under my shirt, along my ribs, thumb dragging just under the band of my bra, and I arch into the cold of his touch.

The grip he keeps on himself is slipping, notch by notch, and I want it gone. I want to see what's under the last of it. I hook a leg over the back of his and pull him harder into me, and he lets his weight down and rolls his hips and I make a sound I'd be embarrassed by if I had a single thought left in my head—

Then he goes rigid.

His head comes up, sharp, listening.

Past the door, in the common room: a groan. A body dragging itself up off stone.

Zeva.

He's off me and on his feet in the space of a breath. Fast, clean, all the way, and the cold air where his body was hits me like a dropped floor. His face is already going back together—the mask sliding down over all of it—and it happens so fast I could almost swear I invented the last thirty seconds.

"She can't see you like this," he says. Level. Wrecked underneath, but level on top. "Or me. I’ll go."

Then he's gone, out into the common room toward Zeva and the wreck and whatever lie keeps us both breathing past tonight, and I'm left flat on the cot with my mouth swollen and my shirt shoved up and my whole body still humming where his was.

I lie there a while. I can't help it. I stare at the stone ceiling and I breathe, and under my skin the magic that had been sizzling right at the surface—lit up by him, by all of it—settles back down slow, banking low behind my sternum, the sun sinking back under the water. In for four. Out for four. My pulse takes longer to come down than the magic does.

I can still feel the shape of him against me. The weight of him. The sound he made when I pulled him closer, wrecked and low, a man coming apart on top of me. I wanted him. I wanted all of it, everything I'd have gotten if Zeva had stayed down another ten minutes, and the wanting is still there, banked like the magic, waiting.

And that's the problem. That's the whole problem, and I finally make myself sit up and look at it.

An hour ago I had my hands in Kage's collar and his blood on my tongue and I wanted him just as badly. I chose him at the worst moment of my life, in the one second I had nothing left to lie with. And I meant it.

I still mean it.

I don't get to want both of them. That's not a thing a sane person does. You pick. You feel a real thing for one and a passing thing for the other, and the passing one fades, and that's how it's supposed to go.

Except when I sit here in the dark and take an honest inventory of what's under my ribs—past the grief, past the fear, past the sun that wants to burn the world down—what I find for both of them isn't passing. It's not small. It's not the kind of thing that fades because I decide it should.

Kage, feral and certain and furious on my behalf.

Aamon, careful and wrecked and lying to the whole world to keep me alive.

I want them both. Not one now and one later. Both. At the same time, with my whole chest, and I have absolutely no idea what a person is supposed to do with that.

I pull my knees up and drop my head onto them.

The real question is: will I survive the inquest and get to tell them both how I feel? And if I do… what if one of them kills the other?

What if Leopold gets to me first?