But now it was stronger, and now it bloomed.
The sensation gathered at the center of him and opened outward, petal by petal, as though some ancient and dormant thing within his being had decided at last to awaken.
His claws flexed gently against her back, careful, so careful, as though she were made of glass and breath and something far more fragile than mortal flesh.
She nuzzled him again, and Erevos felt the bloom deepen.
Lyssena slowly pulled back just enough to lift her hands to her face, brushing at her damp cheeks with the heels of her palms, her lashes still clumped together from tears. She sniffed once. A single tear clung stubbornly to the curve of her cheek.
Erevos watched it.
He did not understand why he watched it, only that he wanted to.
He lowered his head, drawn by need rather than reason, and before she could brush it away, he extended his tongue, tasting the salt of her grief directly from her skin.
Lyssena gasped. The sound was sharp and startled and delightful.
“You have a tongue!”
Erevos stilled.
Slowly, he withdrew, studying her wide eyes as though she had just revealed something deeply perplexing.
“Why would I not?” he asked, genuine confusion threading through his ancient voice.
She stared at him, her lips parted, her cheeks flushing into a deeper shade of pink beneath the remnants of her tears.
“I don’t know,” she breathed. “You’re . . . you.”
“I speak,” he said after a moment, as though explaining something obvious to a child. “Speech requires a tongue.”
Lyssena blinked at that. “I never saw it.”
“You did not look inside my mouth.”
Her breath hitched again, though this time for an entirely different reason.
The blooming inside him intensified at the change in her scent, at the subtle shift in her pulse beneath his hands. The warmth coiled lower within his body, less innocent, less purely tender.
“I did not think you would . . . taste things,” she murmured.
Erevos considered that. “I taste many things,” he replied. “Fear, devotion, desire.” His gaze lowered to her lips. “And now,” he added, quieter, “I have tasted your sorrow.”
Lyssena swallowed. “They were only tears.”
“They were yours.”
That seemed to affect her more than anything else he had said, because now she smelled sweet again.
A silence stretched between them. Lyssena’s fingers curled once more into his shadows, but this time the gesture was slower, exploratory even. She studied him openly, curiosity took hold of her thoughts, and there was something almost playful in the way her gaze danced over his face.
“So you do have a tongue,” she said again, as though confirming a fascinating discovery.
Erevos’s shadows shifted behind him. “Yes.”
“And teeth.”
“Yes.”
