“I freed you,” I say. My brain is not at full capacity, and this seems like the most important thing to establish.
“Yes,” Dis says.
“Why haven’t you left?”
He sets the kettle down. He looks at me with those blue eyes, steady and present and completely untroubled by this line of questioning.
“There is nowhere else I would rather be,” he says.
I open my mouth. Close it.
“But,” I say. “You said. You told me I needed to free you.”
“Yes.”
“So you could leave!”
“So I could protect you,” Dis says patiently, “and defend myself. There is a difference.”
I think about this. It requires more processing power than I currently have available. “What about your enemies?” I say. “The ones who were sending Wraith?”
Something shifts in Dis’s expression. It’s a shift I find extremely attractive and slightly terrifying, one that reminds me that underneath the futon and the Bake Off and the Scrabble, there is something ancient and genuinely formidable.
“They were circling because I was bound,” he says. “Vulnerable. Now that I am free, they will not dare.”
He says the last two words with a quiet certainty that resonates somewhere in my chest and also in several other places I’m not going to mention before I’ve had tea.
“But,” I say, trying to stay on track, “But I thought the circle was protecting you?”
Dis watches me calmly, waiting for me to pull myself together enough to start making coherent sense.
“Before.” I blurt. “You backed me up. When Adam came and wanted me to free you. You wanted me to keep you.”
“I still do,” Dis says quietly and with great sincerity.
“I mean in the circle,” I reply, because, nope. If I register what he just implied, my brain would melt.
“I know what you meant.” His eyes hold mine. “I wanted to stay with you.”
The kitchen is very quiet.
“Oh,” I say. “I thought you needed the protection. Of the circle,” I repeat, as if saying it again will make everything make sense again.
“No,” Dis says. Simply. Completely. “I needed you, Little Witch.”
I stare at him.
He sighs. It’s a patient sigh, the sigh of someone who has considerable reserves of patience and is accessing them now. “Is it really so hard to comprehend,” he says, “that someone wants to stay with you?”
“Yes!” The word comes out before I can stop it, loud and honest and completely unguarded. “Yes, it is extremely hard to comprehend, actually, yes!”
Dis looks at me for a long moment. Something moves across his face that is neither amusement nor frustration but something that contains both and goes beyond them.
“I see,” he says quietly. “Then I must teach you that this is not remarkable.”
I narrow my eyes. I’m not sure what I’m about to receive, but I have the instinct that I should brace for it.
Dis sets down the kettle. He turns to face me properly, and the quality of his attention shifts into something total, something that makes the kitchen feel smaller and the morning feel more significant. He’s looking at me the way he looks at things he considers important. He’s looking at me the way he looked at the Great British Bake Off whenhe was deciding the fate of each contestant’s honour and glory. Except more so.
