She had pressed her lips against another smile and something shone in her eyes. “You are not supposed to want that,” she’d whispered. But she had not stepped away.
The dance had slowed until it was barely movement at all. A swaying. A breathing. His heart creating its own rhythm entirely. He had pressed his brow to hers, and the world had narrowed to the space between their mouths—an inch of air that felt like the most important distance in the world.
“Kazrian.”A whisper. Her breath against his mouth. “This is … perhaps the very worst idea.”
A small laugh at that. His hands had come up to cradle her face. His thumb brushed across her cheek. “How can that be,” he’d asked, “when you are the very best thing in the entire world?”
He heard the unsteady catch of her breath. Her hands found the front of his coat, fistfuls of it, gathering the fabric tight. “You will be ruined,” she’d said in a shaky voice, even as she’d pulled him closer.
“I will not. Nor will I let anyone ruin you.”
Her hands had slid up and around his neck, her fingers tangling in his hair, and his blood had rushed hot and heavy through his veins. “Your … your family?—”
“They adore you.”
“Not likethis. And my family—society—you do not understand how cruel?—”
“I will never let anyone hurt you.”
He pulled back just enough to look at her. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes half closed, and he thought, with a helpless, aching certainty, that he had never wanted anything so much in his life as to close the last small distance between their mouths.
He took her hands gently from around his neck and held them, clasped, between both of his. He could feel her unsteady breath. He was not entirely steady himself.
“I know we are too young for this at present,” he said quietly. “But I want you to know, because we have only ever skirted around the edges of this, and I have never said anything outright …” He looked down at her hands in his, then back up at her. “There is no one else for me, Lucie. There never has been. And if you will have me, I will gladly wait for you.”
Something in her face shifted, a small, helpless movement. “You cannot say things like that. It simply is not possible. There are—there arerules, and I have always known what I may have and what I may not.”
And Kazrian had opened his mouth to tell her that he wanted nothing in this life so much as to give her every single thing she had ever been told she could not have when Evryn’s voice had come ringing through from the front of the shop. Calling his name. Asking, with a laugh in it, whether Kazrian had got himself thoroughly lost looking for Grandmother’s mask.
And he’d dropped his hands from hers, and Lucie had stepped back, and the moment had closed like a door.
He had gone back the next morning. He was not certain what exactly he’d expected—only that the night had felt like the beginning of something, finally, and he had wanted to say so plainly, in daylight, where there could be no mistaking him for a young man carried away by an evening.
They had spoken in the pantry—there were people about, and neither of them wanted to be overheard—and she had told him, with her hands folded and her face very still, that she did not care for him in that way.
He remembered the confusion more than anything else. Not hurt—not yet. Only the strange, tilting sense of a floor that had ceased to be where he’d put his weight. He had thought back to the previous night, to her hands fisted in his coat, her fingers tangled in his hair. He had started to say something, to point out that he had not imagined any of that.
But her gaze had gone just slightly past him—not quite meeting his eyes—and she had said that if he recalled, last night she had been the one to name every reason it could not work. That she had not been as clear as she ought to have been about the most important reason—that she did not feel for him the way he did for her.
He had left, not fully accepting it yet, and when he’d quite literally run into Aurelise, clearly distressed about something, he’d welcomed the distraction.
“I cannot do it any longer.”
Kazrian opened his eyes. The garden was deepening into dusk, the light nearly gone, and Rosavyn had turned bodily toward him, her chin propped on her drawn-up knees, watching him with an expression caught between exasperation and concern.
“I have just sat in silence for what I believe may be the longest unbroken stretch of quiet I have managed in the whole of my natural life,” she said. “It has been agony. And the entire while you have been sitting there with your eyes shut and the most devastated expression I think I’ve ever seen on your face, and I cannot bear another moment of not knowing why.” She poked his arm. “I am not Aurelise. I cannot simplyknow itout of your head.”
He frowned. “She does notread my mind.”
“She may as well. The two of you have always had that—that twinbusiness, the long looks, the saying nothing and meaning everything.” She waved a hand. “But she is at the palace, and I am here, and I am not her, so you shall have to do me the very great inconvenience of using actual words. What is it? Is it The Honeycomb? Is the wretched building still besting you?”
A breath of something almost like a laugh escaped him. “The building is still besting me, yes.” He let his head fall back against the bark again. “But that is not what occupies my mind tonight.”
“Then what?”
He was quiet a long moment. The fountain murmured. The first proper star had come out above the garden wall, pale and small.
“I still love her,” he said.
