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“Why?”

That had been two winters ago, with the river up and running black. I’d taken an arrow in the shoulder getting out of a storehouse at Blyth. I remembered dragging myself up the far bank with the shaft still in me and looking back to see him sitting his horse on the other side with twenty men behind him and the ford fifty yards upstream.

They had not used the ford. I had told myself for two years that they had not known it was there.

“Because you were bleeding.”

“I had a scratch.”

“You had an arrow through your shoulder.”

“I’ve had worse.”

“That doesn’t make it better.”

I folded my free arm across myself. “You’ve been going easy on me, Bisbane?”

“Never.”

“Then what do you call it?”

His gaze held mine without any hurry at all.

“Wanting you alive.”

The fire shifted. My heart was doing something undisciplined in my chest.

“And now?” I asked.

“Now I want considerably more than that.”

For once in my life, I had nothing clever to say to a man, and he had the decency not to make me find something.

The afternoon went on, and the thing I had been circling for two days finally sat down in front of me and refused to be walked around any longer.

Wanting is a storm that passes. By twenty-four, any Omega in this kingdom knew how to let the thunder roll through and leave the ground undisturbed.

What I couldn’t manage was that I trusted him. I had slept in a room with an Alpha for two nights beside a dagger I never once reached for. I had told him about my father’s voice going out of my memory, which I had never told Merry, who has known me since we were nine.

My suppressants were failing, and I was not stupid about it. The heat was coming and neither of us had said the word out loud, which meant I had a narrowing window in which whatever I chose would still be defensibly mine. If I waited until my head was no longer my own, I would never know which of us had chosen, and I would wonder about it for the rest of my life.

So I decided to stop being a coward.

He was standing at the window with one shutter cracked open, looking out over the valley where the mist was coming up off the trees.

I crossed the room and stood behind him, and he knew it, because the man knows everything.

“Last night,” I said, “you told me to tell you when I was certain.”

“I did.”

“Did you mean it, or was it a way of letting me down gently?”

He turned around. “Every word of it.”

“And today?”

His gaze moved over my face, slow and thorough, the way he looks at a thing he intends to remember.