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“You’ve been alone a long time.”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you look at me like that?”

He turned to face her fully, the fire throwing warm, moving light across features that had stopped controlling what showed on them somewhere in the last minute.

“I look at you like that because of what you are. Not because of what I am.”

He reached over and pulled her chair closer to his without asking, the scrape against stone loud in the quiet, until her knees bracketed his and there was no meaningful distance left between them at all.

“That’s a very smooth answer for a man who claims he doesn’t perform.”

“It isn’t performance. It’s simply true, and it happens to also sound good, which I recognize is suspicious, but I’ll let you decide whether to trust it.”

“I’m deciding to trust it, provisionally, pending further evidence, which you’re welcome to keep providing at your own pace.”

“I’ll provide as much evidence as required. Indefinitely, if that’s what it takes, for as long as it takes.”

She studied him a long moment across the firelight, looking for the seam where the line would reveal itself as practiced. She didn’t find one. That, more than anything he’d said tonight, was the detail that landed hardest.

He told her the rest of it slowly, taking his time, a man handing over a thing he’d never once handed anyone outside his own claw.

He’d been young — young for a dragon, which still meant older than her by centuries — furious about a thing he could no longer fully reconstruct the shape of, and he’d lost the shift. Not chosen it. Lost it, the way you lose your footing, control gone before he’d registered it slipping. The training ground hadn’t survived. Worse, a cousin standing too close hadn’t fully survived it either — not badly hurt, he said, twice, like the repetition might make the fact smaller than it was, but hurt, because of him, because for one uncontained minute the thing underneath the discipline had been running the show instead of the man.

“That’s the exact moment I understood what it costs to hold something like that shut. Not the deciding — the deciding was easy. The holding, every day since, in a body built to eventually stop holding anything.” He said it unadorned, no bid for sympathy anywhere in the delivery. “I’ve never told anyone outside the claw. I’m not entirely certain why I’m telling you now, except that I seem to have run out of interest in keeping anything from you.”

“What happened to him. Your cousin.”

Her hand found his on the table without her deciding to send it there, an instinct that arrived faster than thought.

“He healed. Physically, within a week. He’s never once brought it up since, which I’ve always suspected was its own kind of kindness — letting me carry it alone instead of making him carry the memory of it with me.” Norden’s jaw worked once, the only visible crack in the telling. “I haven’t shifted fully in anger since. Not once, in centuries. I made certain of it.”

“That’s a long time to hold a door shut on yourself.”

“It felt like the only responsible option available. Still does, most days.” He looked at her, raw honesty sitting under the composure now. “You’re the first person who’s ever made me wonder if the door needed to stay shut quite that tightly.”

“I don’t think the door needs to disappear altogether. I think it just needs to know it’s allowed to open for the right reasons, occasionally, on purpose.”

“That’s an alarmingly reasonable thing to say to a man who just confessed to nearly killing a family member.”

“I contain multitudes too. We’ve established this is apparently a running theme between us, one we’re both determined to keep proving.”

He caught her jaw in one hand, tipped her face up to his, and kissed her hard enough that the joke died somewhere between her mouth and his — not gentle, not asking permission, an entire dragon’s worth of a month spent pretending he wasn’t watching her every second finally breaking loose at once.

“Say something else funny. I want to see if I can make you stop again.”

“That’s a terrible incentive structure and I fully support it.”

Her guard came down. Not all at once, not with any ceremony — it simply didn’t rebuild itself, the way it always had before, brick by automatic brick, the second any conversation threatened to matter too much. Tonight the bricks stayed wherever they’d fallen.

What happened next had none of the alley’s urgency in it.

She reached for him first this time, in no hurry, and he let her set the pace for as long as she wanted it before his own control began, gently, to give. He pulled her out of her chair and into his lap instead of standing, tucked against his chest with the fire throwing gold across both of them, and kissed her like a man with nowhere else in eight hundred years he’d rather be.

“Here?”

“Here.” He said it against her mouth, certain. “Nobody comes up here without my permission, and I’m not granting it to anyone tonight.”