“No?”
“No.”Firmer this time.Almost convincing.“It doesn’t.”
The book shifted again around them.He felt it as a low pressure change in the air, the way the gray gathered itself differently, leaning.
The world cracked open.
Not into memory this time.He’d learned the difference between the two in the last several pages.Memory had weight.Memory smelled of ink and old blood.This had a cleaner, thinner quality to the air, the strange clarity of something that had not yet happened and might not ever.
Possibility.
They saw it together.
Myanin stood alone in a vast white space with her arms wrapped around her ribs, her hair lifting in a wind he couldn’t feel.Power flickered around her in ragged bursts, the patterns of it unstable, the edges of her magic tearing free of her like a banner with no pole.There was no warlock or djinn at her back.There was no grounding presence threaded through her sigils.The bond he could feel burning at the base of his throat in this moment was simply absent in that one, and her power did not know what to do without it.
And there, in the vision, stood another version of himself, watching her from the far edge of the white space.Hands at his sides.Too late.Either too early or too late.It seemed like he couldn’t get the timing right for them, and yet he still knew she was the one for him.He’d stake his life on it.
The vision snapped away.
The silence after it had a charged, electric quality, the kind that rose along the back of his neck and settled at the base of his skull.
Myanin swallowed.He watched her throat work with the motion.
“That’s not real,” she said.
“No,” he agreed quietly.
“It’s manipulation.”
“Yes.But not mine,” he assured her.
She turned to him fully, her eyes lifting to his, and the careful armor she’d been holding around herself thinned visibly at the edges.
“Then why does it feel like it matters?”
That was the crack.
He stepped into it before she could pull it closed again.He moved cleanly, the way he moved when there was something on the line, closing the distance between them in one smooth, unhurried stride.Close enough that he heard her breath hitch.Close enough that her body answered him before her mind had time to assemble its objections.
He lifted his hand.Slow and deliberate.He moved as if he meant to touch her face, his palm rising along the line of her jaw, his fingers curving in a shape they already knew by heart, but he stopped an inch from her skin.
He could feel the warmth of her against his fingertips.He could see the small flutter of pulse in her throat.He held his hand exactly where it was, because the choice to close that final inch belonged to her, and he had spent centuries learning the bitter difference between wanting and being welcome.
“You want the truth?”he asked, and let his voice drop low enough that she had to feel as much as hear it.
Her chin came up.Always defiant.He loved her for it.He had always loved her for it.
“Do I ever not?”
His mouth curved despite him, and he knew that smile too well to pretend he didn’t.He had worn it on the worst day of his life and the best, and she’d been the cause of both.
“Fair.”
He leaned in just enough that his next words found her at the soft place under her ear.
“That oath wasn’t about claiming you.”
Her brows drew together.“Then what?”
