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"I've had reports to review."

"You've had the same three reports for three days. I know because I dust this room, Kavan. Nothing on that desk has moved since Tuesday."

I didn't answer. There wasn't a good answer, not one that didn't require admitting something I'd been avoiding admitting even to myself.

Murdette settled into the chair across from my desk without waiting for an invitation, folding her hands in her lap with the patience of a female who'd raised me from a boy too stubborn to cry when he skinned his knees and had never once let that stubbornness win. "This is about Leila."

"It's about the harvest reports from the eastern district."

"It's about Leila," she repeated, like I hadn't spoken at all. "You've been avoiding her for days. I know avoidance when I see it. I watched you avoid your studies for a solid month when you were eleven, and it looked exactly like this. Restless. Short-tempered. Unable to sit still in a room for longer than ten minutes without finding some urgent errand that took you somewhere else."

"I'm not eleven anymore."

"No," she agreed. "You're worse. At eleven, at least you admitted you were avoiding your letters. Now you've decided you'd rather lie to my face."

Her gaze sharpened. "And don't think I haven't noticed that you took Leila flying. Hell, the whole city noticed. You don't invite someone onto your back and carry her over the mountains as a casual gesture, Kavan. That is mate behavior, whatever excuse you gave yourself."

"It was a diplomatic courtesy."

"Of course it was." Her expression made it clear what she thought of that explanation. "Just as what happened at the training grounds was apparently a lesson in military protocol. The whole castle is gossiping. I don't know the details and I don't think I want to, but I do know Lord Verrater was furious about it."

"Verrater has no say in my private affairs."

"No, he doesn't. But his anger tells me the matter wasn't as private as you'd like, and your face tells me the rumors are closer to the truth than you want me to believe."

I dragged a hand through my hair, feeling the strands catch and pull. The gesture accomplished nothing beyond giving my hands something to do besides curling into fists. "It's complicated."

"Everything with you is complicated. You've made an art form of it." She studied me with those sharp gray eyes that had seen eight centuries of Drakhoni foolishness and had apparently decided mine ranked somewhere near the top. "Tell me what's complicated about a male who lights up like a boy on his name day whenever a particular female walks into a room, and then hides from her in his office."

"I don't light up."

"You absolutely light up. It's embarrassing, actually, for a male your age." A ghost of a smile touched her mouth, there and gone. "What are you so afraid of?"

I turned back to the window rather than answer. The honest answer sat too close to the surface and I wasn't ready to hear it out loud, not even in my own voice. Below, the gardens breathed in the dark, bioluminescent petals opening and closing along the paths like slow heartbeats. Somewhere out there, in one of the guest wings, Leila was probably reviewing her own reports, or sleeping, or thinking about anything other than me. The thought hollowed out my chest.

"I don't know what to do about her," I said finally, to the glass rather than to Murdette. "I don't know what I'm supposed to feel, or what I'm allowed to feel, or how to want something without it feeling like a betrayal of everything I thought I understood."

Behind me, I heard the soft rustle of Murdette shifting in her chair. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its edge of teasing. "There. Was that so difficult?"

"Yes." I turned to face her. "It was exactly that difficult."

"Sit down, Kavan."

I didn't want to sit. Sitting felt like agreeing to a conversation I wasn't sure I could survive. But I sat anyway, because Murdette had a way of making requests that weren't really requests, and because some small, tired part of me wanted to say the words to someone who might understand what they cost.

"I remember how you were after Marion died," Murdette said, without preamble, the way she always did when she'd decided a thing needed saying. "Do you remember what you were like, those months before the Alliance put us into hibernation?"

"I remember rage." The word tasted like ash even now, seven hundred and fifty years later. "I remember burning villages I can't fully account for, knowing the humans I killed and thinking it would never be enough to avenge her. I remember Sanyra having to physically restrain me more than once."

"You do remember, then. Good. Because I want you to think carefully about what you're remembering, and tell me honestly what you find in it." She leaned forward, her hands still folded, her gaze steady on my face in a way that made me feel eleven years old again, caught out in some lie before I'd even finished telling it. "You were angry. Angrier than I'd ever seen a male, and I'd already lived on Drakhone two hundred years by then, so that's saying something. You raged for months. You very nearly burned yourself out along with half the countryside. But tell me, in all that rage, in all those months, did you grieve?"

The question landed somewhere I hadn't braced for. "Of course I grieved. She died because of me. Because I was too slow, too arrogant to believe anything could touch a dragon king."

"That's guilt," Murdette said gently. "That's not the same thing, and you know it isn't, if you're honest with yourself for one moment. I've buried my own mate, Kavan. I know precisely what heartbreak looks like, and I never once saw it on your face. Not in all those months. I saw fury. I saw guilt eating you alive from the inside. I never saw a male mourning the loss of the other half of his soul."

I opened my mouth to argue and found I had nothing to argue with. The observation sat in my chest like a stone dropped into still water, sending out ripples I didn't know how to stop.

"I know what real heartbreak looks like," Murdette continued, quieter now, and there was something old and grieving in her own voice that made me go very still. "Your mother had it. You were still young when your father died, I didn't know if you ever registered how much she grieved him."