"If you want to go back to Earth,” his voice held steady, "I could go with you."
Her breath stopped.
"I would leave Evergleam." Each word was deliberate. "I would happily follow you through tours and recording studios and whatever your dream requires. Because my home is not just this planet anymore." His eyes didn't leave hers. "My home is you."
The man whose rootedness another woman had called a cage was standing in front of her, offering to tear those roots out.
"You mean that?" Her voice came out broken. She didn't fix it. "You'd leave all of this?"
He touched her jaw with his cold fingers, his thumb tracing a line along her cheekbone, his palm cold against her flushed skin. The contact, after days without him, sent a shock through her body so sharp that her eyes closed before she could stop them. His cold settled into her skin like water into cracked earth. Every nerve she owned lit up at once, her body remembering in a single second of contact what it felt like to be touched by him.
Her eyes burned.
"The coldest place I have ever been," he said, "were the days I spent without you." His thumb moved across her cheek. "I will not do that again. For any duty. For any planet."
Phoebe Calloway was not a crier, but the tears came, and she let them fall unchecked, hot and wet against her cheeks.
She opened her mouth to answer him, and for the first time in her life, her voice failed her.
twenty-one
. . .
Her words caughtin her throat.
Thorne watched it happen. Watched her mouth shape the beginning of something and stop, her breath visible in the cold air between them.
The community was still gathered at the edges of the clearing. Frost coated the Pine's lower roots, the stones, and the ground in a white sheet that caught the bioluminescence and threw it back in pale green-gold.
Thorne reached into his pocket.
His fingers closed around the folded page that was creased, crossed out, and rewritten. The paper was soft from how many times he'd handled it on the walk to her apartment before the emergency button had been pressed. He pulled it out and opened it in front of her. His hands were shaking, and no security protocol, no Mentharian discipline, could stop them. He didn’t try.
"I wrote something for you." His voice came out deep and rough, the formal precision stripped from it, leaving only the raw bass underneath. "I need to say it out loud." He looked at the page. "I am going to be bad at it."
He read the first line and his voice cracked exactly where he knew it would, oncold, the word splitting open in his throat like ice fracturing. He did not stop.
"I learned cold the way others learn to breathe, so early it felt like all I was."
The Pine's bioluminescence pulsed above them. Flakes of vanilla snow fell from the branches.
"You arrived warm. Not gently. You arrived like a door I did not know was there, banging open in a wind I could not name."
His hands shook. The page trembled. He kept his eyes on the words because if he looked up at her face, he would not be able to finish.
The frost on the page was spreading from his fingertips, delicate crystals forming along the creases where he'd folded and unfolded it too many times, silver-white lacework crawling across the paper like his body was annotating the words with everything his voice couldn't carry.
"I was the coldest thing on this planet until you taught me what I was missing." His voice dropped. "Not warmth. You. Not the singer. Not the stage."
He made himself read the next lines. They were the ones that had taken him four attempts to write, the ones where every crossed-out version sat underneath the final words like a palimpsest of cowardice.
"The woman underneath. I want her. I wanted her first. I will want her last."
The silence in the clearing was absolute. Not even the wind made a sound. The Pine's light pulsed slow and gold overhead, and the snow fell through it in soft spirals, and Thorne read the last few lines with his voice broken open and nothing left to hide behind.
"I am not asking you to stay if that is not what you want. I am asking you to know that you were never the one leaving. I wasthe one who pushed you to go. It was the biggest mistake of my life.”
He stopped.
