“No,” she said at last, and set the stone back on the desk.
“Roslyn — ”
“No.” Her voice was steady enough, but there was something beneath the steadiness he recognized. It was the same thing he’d heard in it three weeks ago, when she’d refused to stop healing him during the Gibson scout incident. Not defiance, just certainty. “I’m not leaving.”
He stood. The chair scraped back against the floor, the sound far too loud. He was aware that he was using his height — such as it was, diminished by weeks of depletion — as a tool, a maneuver that should have been beneath him but apparently wasn’t beneath the version of himself that was losing this argument.
“This isn’t a negotiation,” he said. “Victoria Van Horn will come here with her best offensive talents — people with fireball talent, her uncle Karl with his sleep magic, possibly others I don’t know of, those who might have come to that kind of magic during the past seventeen years. The Gibsons control this territory and can marshal a dozen witches and warlocks within an hour. Between them, they will breach these wards, and when they do, anyone inside this house who isn’t me will be a liability.”
“‘A liability,’” she repeated, brows drawing together. She stood as well, and he realized with a kind of distant surprise that she was angry. However, this wasn’t the controlled, clinical anger she’d deployed during their previous disagreements — the flat voice, the crossed arms, the professional restraint — but something rawer and much closer to the surface. “That’s what I am to you? A liability?”
“In tactical terms — ” he began, but she cut him off immediately.
“Don’t.” The word was sharp enough to draw blood, and he felt it. “Don’t you dare reduce this to tactics. You didn’t bring me here as a tactical asset, and you’re not sending me away as a tactical liability. You brought me here because you were dying and you needed a healer, and now you’re sending me away because — ”
She stopped there. He watched her catch herself, watched her pull back from whatever she had been about to say with an effort that mirrored his own. In the silence that followed, the study seemed filled with things that neither of them was willing to name.
“Because what?” he asked. His voice had become quiet the way it did when his control was at its thinnest, when the formal structure of his speech began to show its cracks.
“Because you’re scared,” she replied at once. “Not of Victoria Van Horn, and not of the Gibsons. You’re scared of what will happen if I stay.”
The accuracy of that observation made him want to wince. He could feel it deep within him, in the place where the void scar wrapped around his heart and where her magic had spent three weeks slowly and carefully undoing the damage. The sensation was so acute that for a moment, he couldn’t speak.
She saw it. Of course she saw it — she was a healer, and she was her mother’s daughter. Jenny Campbell had raised a woman who listened for the words behind the words, who heard what people couldn’t say the same way Jenny, in her worst moments, had heard what people wouldn’t say.
“Malachi.” Roslyn had stepped closer. She wasn’t touching him, not quite, but she was still close enough that he could feel her warmth, the quiet pulse of her magic at rest, a presence that had become so woven into the texture of his days that he couldn’t imagine the house without it. “I’m not leaving you here to die alone.”
“I am not asking you to — ”
“Yes, you are. That’s exactly what you’re asking.” Her eyes were very blue in the lamplight, and very steady, and he thought then that she was the bravest person he had ever met, a warrior queen in jeans and a silly sweatshirt designed for tourists. “You’re asking me to walk away from a patient who needs me, and you’re dressing it up in logistics and tactics because you can’t bring yourself to say the real reason, which is that you care about me and it scares the hell out of you.”
The hallway was behind them. He wasn’t certain when they’d moved from the study; the argument seemed to have acquired a kind of gravitational pull that drew them both toward the door, toward the narrow corridor where the lamplight didn’t quite reach. But they were standing in it now, and the distance between them had closed to something that wouldn’t survive much more.
“I’ve lost everything,” he said. The words were stripped of formality, bare as he’d never allowed himself to be in front of another person. “My clan, my mother, a year in the void. Everything I’ve built has been taken from me. I have endured it because endurance was the only option available. But I cannot endure — ” His voice faltered there. He heard it happen and couldn’t prevent it, as she stood there close enough to touch. “I cannot endure losing you. Not because you’re my healer, or because you’re useful, or because you represent a tactical advantage. But because you’re Roslyn, and you’re the only — ”
He stopped himself, mainly because he could not finish…would not finish. The sentence was too large and too honest, and it contained everything he’d spent the past three weeks refusing to feel. Saying it out loud would be the end of every defense he had left.
Roslyn’s hand came up and rested against his chest over his heart, in the place where her magic knew him best. Not healing, though.
Just touching.
“I know,” she said softly.
He bent to kiss her, or perhaps she lifted her face to kiss him. Later, he wouldn’t be able to determine the exact sequence of events, since the distance between them had been disappearing in increments for three weeks, and the last of it vanished in a single moment that he didn’t so much decide as surrender to. Her mouth was warm — that detail again, as specific and memorable as before — and her hand was still on his chest. His own hands came up to frame her face with a tenderness that would have alarmed him if he’d had any capacity left for self-assessment.
This wasn’t the kiss from the study. That kiss had been an argument that ran out of words, fierce and sudden. This was something else entirely. It was slow, and deliberate, and it held within it the weight of a decision that had been made a very long time ago. Not in the heat of a moment, but in the quiet hours of a week spent being very polite and very careful and very aware that politeness and care were simply the names they’d given their fear.
When she pulled back, her hand was still over his heart, and she looked at him with an expression that had no professional detachment in it at all, full mouth slightly parted and cheeks flushed with need.
“Upstairs,” was all she said.
He nodded because speech wasn’t something he thought he was currently capable of. Then he followed her up the stairs and into the room where she’d been sleeping since her arrival. There, the narrow bed with its iron frame and the thin mattress waited, while the room’s single window showed the last gray light of evening fading to dark.
She turned to him once they were inside. Her hands went to his waistcoat buttons with the same steady competence she brought to everything, unfastening them one by one while he stood there and let her. The alternative would be to stop her, and stopping her was no longer something he was capable of doing. The waistcoat came off, and she folded it over the back of the straight-backed chair with a care that made something tighten inside him.
It was the kind of thing you did for someone whose belongings mattered to you.
Then her hands were on his shirt, undoing the buttons, and his hands were on the hem of that ridiculous sweatshirt. Beneath it, she was warm and bare, and the sight of her made his breath catch and his blood race through his veins. No amount of intellectual discipline could have prepared him for the simple reality of Roslyn Campbell standing in front of him with lamplight on her smooth skin and no defenses left.
