His gaze drops to my mouth for the briefest second, then rises again. “No.”
That one word lodges low in my belly with an unpleasant amount of force.
I despise this. I despise him. I despise my own body most of all.
Because the thing is, I can hate him for what he did and still know he did it to save me. I can be furious that he took my choice and still know Thomas would have killed me eventually, whether by fist or fear or the slow erosion of every part of me that once believed I deserved kindness. I can resent the bond, resent how Varek’s violence remade my life in a single heartbeat, and still wake in the middle of the night aware of the room across the hall and feel safer because he’s in it.
That doesn’t feel fair either.
I shift the sack and try to step around him. He moves with me.
“Varek.”
“Pax.”
His voice when he says my name has changed over time. It’s less careful now. Less like he’s handling a fragile thing he doesn’t trust himself not to break. There’s warmth in it. Possession, too, though he tries to hide that part for my sake.
I hear it anyway.
“Move.”
“You are hurting yourself to prove a point.”
“And?”
“This is not strategic.”
“I’m not trying to be strategic.”
That almost-smile again, gone in a flash. “So I gathered.”
And there it is, the reason it’s so bloody hard to stay properly angry with him all the time. He sees too much. Says too little. And when he does speak, half the time it’s something so dry, I almost laugh before I remember I’m cross.
I lean in again slightly because I’m not small and I refuse to be physically intimidated by a male who looks like he was sculpted by a very horny war god. “Move, or I’ll bite you.”
His eyes flare brighter.
The air changes.
Damn it.
I feel it at once, that answering pull low under my skin, heat curling through me where there should be none. The bond stirs like it’s been waiting for any excuse at all. Varek goes utterly still.
I did that.
Fucking brilliant.
For a moment, neither of us breathes. Then, very carefully, he steps aside.
“Thank you,” I say with icy dignity, as if my heart isn’t trying to kick through my ribs.
I march past him with the grain sack on my shoulder and every nerve in my body lit up.
The warehouse opens out towards the back, where I’ve turned one corner into storage proper: shelves scavenged from abandoned shops, baskets, jars, hooks, the table where I sort anything worth keeping. Light spears through a high cracked pane and lays a pale bar across the floor. Dust drifts in it like lazy gold.
I dump the sack onto the table and flex my fingers. A second later, Varek sets the other sack beside it.
I whirl. “Where did you?—”
