For a long moment they are suspended, frozen in the aftermath, breathing hard, Evran's hands flat on Vaike's heaving chest and Vaike's hands bruise-tight on his hips. The fire crackles. The room pulses with heat and the smell of them together.
Then Evran leans down and kisses him.
Sweetly. Softly. The barest brush of lips, tender beyond measure. He kisses Vaike's mouth and his jaw and the corner of his eye and his forehead, careful of the stitches, and Vaike's hands release his hips and come up to cradle his face and hold him there, close, their foreheads pressed together.
They breathe.
I would do anything to keep you,Evran thinks.
He doesn't say it out loud. He doesn't need to. He said it with his body, with his hands, with the open vulnerability of making himself seen. Vaike heard him.
They lie tangled together in the firelight, and the night deepens outside the window, and Evran holds his husband and is held by him and counts the minutes until Vaike's breathing deepens into sleep.
Because tonight, he has somewhere to be.
Chapter 19
Evran waits.
He waits until Vaike's breathing changes, until the deep, slow rhythm settles into the cadence of true sleep, the kind that will not surface at the creak of a floorboard or the shift of a body on the mattress. He waits until Vaike's arm, heavy across his waist, goes slack with the boneless weight of unconsciousness. He waits until the fire has burned down to embers and the room is dark and the stronghold beyond the door has gone quiet.
Then he moves.
Slowly. Incrementally. He eases out from beneath Vaike's arm one precise motion at a time, pausing between each to listen for a change in breathing, a shift in weight, any sign that the sleeping body beside him has registered the absence. Vaike does not stir. His face is turned into the pillow, his dark hair spread around him, and the steady rise and fall of his chest continues uninterrupted.
Evran's feet find the cold stone floor. He stands, naked, and does not breathe for three full seconds.
Nothing. Vaike sleeps on.
He dresses in the dark. His hands know where everything is, the clothes he laid out earlier, folded on the chair by the window, chosen for ease of movement and ease of removal and the balance betweenI dressed for youandI can run in these if I need to.Dark trousers. A loose linen shirt. Soft-soled boots that make no sound on stone.
The dagger.
Evran straps it on. The leather sits snug against his skin, the weight of the blade a constant, grounding pressure. He takes a step, then two. The dagger does not shift, does not catch, does not announce itself.
He crosses to the door. His hand is on the latch when he pauses, one last look over his shoulder at the bed, at the dark shape of his husband sleeping in the embers' faint glow. Vaike's hand is stretched across the space where Evran was, fingers curled loosely around nothing.
I'll be back. I will always come back to you.
He opens the door. The corridor beyond is dim, lit by a single torch at the far end, and the guard posted outside is at the junction, far enough that Evran can slip out without being seen if he times it right. He waits for the guard to turn at the end of his route, then steps into the hallway and pulls the door closed behind him with a sound so soft it barely exists.
He moves.
Three doors down. Bran's room. Evran raises his hand and knocks, one rap, low and quick. The signal they agreed on.I'm going.
He does not wait for a response. He knows Bran is awake, knows the big man is sitting in the dark behind that door with his boots on and his sword within reach, listening, ready. Bran will give him ten minutes and then follow.
Evran turns and walks the other direction. Away from the Drakkari wing, away from the safety of his own people, throughthe corridors of the Keep toward the southern wing where the Windfar delegation sleeps.
The Keep at night is a different creature. The corridors that were warm and busy during the day are cold and shadowed now, the torches spaced far apart and burning low, their light creating pools of orange that alternate with stretches of near-darkness. Evran moves through them with a deliberateness that feels unhurried and inevitable, each step measured, each turn calculated, his ears attuned to the smallest sound.
His mind is clear. Clearer than it has been in days, perhaps because the decision has been made and the time for doubt has passed, perhaps because the fury that has been building since Delia told him about the horse has burned away everything extraneous and left behind only the essential. He knows the plan. He knows the dagger on his thigh and the knock that will come in ten minutes and the man counting them three corridors behind him. He has run through the sequence so many times in his head that it has taken on the quality of something rehearsed, muscle memory for a performance he has never given but knows by heart.
He passes one guard, then another. Neither stops him. He is a delegate, he has the right to walk the corridors, and his pace is unhurried enough to suggest a man going for air rather than a man going for a throat. He nods as he passes. They nod back.
The southern wing. The corridor narrows here, the ceiling lower, the torches fewer. The Windfar banners hang on the walls, pale blue and grey, colorless in the dim light. The doors are heavy oak, identical, spaced evenly along the left wall.
No guards posted outside. Evran notes this and files it away. Torsten dismissed his guards for the night, or never had them, and either way the hallway is empty, just Evran and the torchlight and the silence and the door at the end of the corridor that is, as promised, unlocked.
