Lyssena dabbed at the corner of her lips, though there was nothing there, and decided to play with fire.
“I was three,” she said. “I also once prayed for a wooden horse to come alive.”
Her gaze lifted to meet his then. “Did you plan it?” she asked. “Everything that happened after?” She did not specify what everything meant.
Her marriage, the betrayal, the timing of his appearance.
Her heartbeat had grown louder in her ears, though she kept her shoulders relaxed and her expression composed.
If he had orchestrated her suffering . . .
She cut into the meat again, though she did not immediately eat it.
Erevos’s voice, when it came, was calm. “No.”
Lyssena held his gaze for several seconds longer, as though weighing the word, measuring it for cracks. She finally took the bite.
The food tasted the same as before, but her throat felt tighter.
“You could have shown yourself sooner,” she said after a moment, her tone softer now, less sharp but no less intentional. “If you were watching.”
There it was. Not an accusation, just the shape of it.
She set her knife down and folded her hands neatly together on the table, the posture almost prayer-like without meaning to be.
“I need to know,” she added, “whether you are someone who waits . . . or someone who intervenes.”
Her eyes did not leave his.
And for the first time since sitting down, she allowed the silence to become heavy on purpose.
“I intervene, and I wait, Lyssena.”
At the sound of her name in his voice, Lyssena felt her eyes sting as though something sharp had slipped beneath her lashes, and her skin began to crawl in a slow wave that spread from the back of her shoulders to the tips of her fingers.
She could not hold her composure any longer.
Lyssena rose abruptly from her chair and planted her trembling fists against the edge of the table, her knuckles paling as her fingers curled into the dark, shadowy wood.
“What does that even mean?”
It was the first time she had ever raised her voice. She had never—not once in her life—spoken above a measured tone to anyone, not to her parents, not to her friends, not even to those who had wronged her.
It was not a scream, nor a true shout, but the force of it vibrated through her chest and left her shaking, because the sound of her own defiance felt foreign in her mouth, and because Erevos was, after all, something far greater than a man.
“When I first began watching you,” Erevos said, “it was curiosity. I wanted to understand why you delighted in honey, and what compelled you to offer it to me.”
Lyssena’s gaze flickered between the twin violet lights that marked his eyes, searching desperately for anything that would resemble emotion. She wished she could see his expression fully, read the language of muscle and breath.
But Erevos rarely moved at all.
He did not lean. He did not sigh. He did not click his tongue in disapproval, nor shake his head, nor let impatience show in the set of his shoulders. He simplywas, immense and composed and impossible to decipher.
“When have I ever offered you honey?” she demanded, though her voice had dropped again.
She could not remember a single time she had offered honey to anyone. It had always been her favorite—thick and golden and clinging sweet—ever since she first tasted it when??—
Oh.
