She doubled down, because doubling down was a survival skill she had cultivated very deliberately.“We are trapped in a sentient book that wants to emotionally eviscerate us.This is not the time for you to revisit unresolved feelings like you’re working through a centuries-old diary entry.”
“Unresolved,” he repeated.
Her stomach did something deeply uncomfortable at the tone he gave the word, low and considering, as if he were turning the syllables over in his hand to see how they caught the light.
“Very unresolved,” she said firmly.
“Interesting,” he said slowly.
“It isnotinteresting.”The words came out fast.“It is inconvenient, and rude, and, and, and effing irritating.There is a difference.”
Shade studied her with an intensity that made it very clear he had stopped listening to her words a sentence or two ago.He was reading everything underneath them now, and she knew that look intimately.She had used it herself, on prey far less aware than she was being right now.
“Oh no,” she muttered.
Shade shifted from one foot to the other, becoming a little more alert.“What?”
“You're doing thatthing.”
His brow drew into a deep ‘v.’"What thing?"
“That infuriating thing where you stop listening to what I’m saying and start paying attention to what I'm not saying.”
His expression did not change.“That’s because what you’re not saying is considerably more honest.”
Her eyes narrowed to slits.“I am being perfectly honest.”
“No,” he said, calm and unhurried, “you're being defensive.”
“I am not.”
He laughed.
She stepped forward without thinking, the movement sharp and instinctive, the way she always closed in on a fight she intended to win.He did not retreat.Which meant, she realized half a heartbeat too late, that she had just closed the distance herself.Again.Fantastic.Excellent.Truly inspired strategy from the woman who had somehow survived battles without her djinn magic, endured judgment from the djinn council, and received mercy from the Great Luna that she did not deserve.
“I am not defensive,” she said, jabbing him in the chest with one finger because apparently touching him had suddenly become acceptable, despite the warning sign in her mind flashingabort, abort.“I am making a very reasonable request that we not further complicate an already extraordinarily complicated situation.”
“With what?”he asked.
Her mouth opened.Closed.Opened again.
She had to name it.That was the trap.He had set it cleanly, the way he set everything, with patience and a long view, and now naming it would make it real, and real was a problem she was not equipped to manage at the moment.
Shade waited.Of course he did.He had always been very good at waiting.She had always, unfortunately, been less good at it.
“With this,” she snapped finally.
He did not look confused.He did not look surprised.If anything, the slow change in his expression suggested he had been waiting a long time, possibly several centuries, for her to land exactly there.
“And what,” he asked quietly, “do you think this is?”
The question landed harder than it should have.It landed harder than the oath had.It landed harder than the future the book had shown her, the white space and the unraveling power and the male watching her from too far away to reach.Because she did not have a single answer for him.Or rather, she had several, and none of them were anywhere near safe to say out loud.
Her throat tightened around all of them at once.
“Don’t,” she said, more softly this time, and the word came out before she had decided to release it.
Something in his expression shifted.Just slightly.A loosening at the edges of his mouth, a fractional dip of his lashes.It was a small movement, but she caught it, because she had spent a long time learning his face, whether she wanted to admit it or not.
