The awareness of being watched so intently, so continuously, had made her movements feel exaggerated. She had nearly stumbled once beneath the sensation, suddenly conscious of how small she must look against the endless dark.
And after a while, Lyssena found herself growing accustomed to it. Somehow.
It was like the silence of The Void. Overwhelming at first, then gradually folding into the background of her awareness until it became part of the landscape itself.
When she finally reached him, she slowed her steps. Up close, he looked exactly as he had before she left—posture straight, shoulders relaxed, hands at his sides, darkness curling faintly around his form as though it breathed with him even when he did not visibly breathe. Had he truly not moved once?
“Did you just . . . stand here?” she asked, tilting her head slightly as she studied him.
If she had not known better, she might have believed him to be a statue erected in the mouth of the cave like some guardian figure carved to oversee the realm beyond.
Lyssena hesitated, her fingers fidgeting lightly at her sides. She wanted to ask him whether he was bored. The question hovered on her tongue.
On one hand, he was a god—or a demon—or something that blurred the boundary between the two so completely that the distinction hardly mattered. He shaped air and stone and shadow; he bent objects as though they were cloth. The concept of boredom might be too small and too human to apply to him at all.
But on the other hand, she could not help herself.
Curiosity rose in her, and she had begun to understand something about Erevos . . . something quite certain.
He did not get angry easily. In fact, he did not seem to get angry at all.
She had questioned him repeatedly. She had touched him boldly. She had stepped into his realm and asked whether she was caged. And he had never punished her.
The absence of wrath had made her braver.
“I was gone for . . . a while, I think,” she said slowly, glancing back over the dark field as though it might offer some clue. “Were you bored?”
There it was. The word felt almost absurd in this place, where time did not pass the way it should.
She searched his face carefully for any flicker of offense, any tightening of shadow.
None came.
In truth, she had begun to suspect something that made warmth coil unexpectedly in her chest. She thought Erevos might enjoy her questions.
The way his purple eyes focused when she asked them. The way his voice shifted, subtle but noticeable, when he explained something to her.
Sometimes she wondered whether he found as much pleasure in answering as she did in asking.
And that thought—that a being as vast and ancient as he seemed might take enjoyment in her curiosity—made her feel both powerful and impossibly small at the same time.
Lyssena stepped closer, peering up at him through the shadowed eyes of her mask.
“You watched me the whole time,” she added, blinking her eyelashes at him, though through the mask he probably couldn’t see them.
“I will never be bored with you, Lyssena,” her god answered her, and she smiled widely at that. Lyssena felt her chest flutter, her cheeks warm, and the need to hug him as hard as she could.
She was not yet certain whether that realization should comfort her or unsettle her all over again.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
He Was Already There
Erevos
Erevos felt a flicker of sweetness, particularly between Lyssena’s legs.
Now that her entire body was covered in him, he realized that human females likely possessed what female hertas did—a hole meant to receive. For some reason, that thought had never crossed his mind before. His songbird could probably feel pleasure just as he could. That realization filled him with joy.
