And there was one thing I'd never have said out loud to anyone but the inside of my own skull.
I was obsessed with the fact that he was enormous. A seven-foot minotaur with horns and shoulders like a doorframe and a cock that would have sent a lesser woman running for the hills.
I was not a lesser woman. I was deranged about it.
I'd been the loud girl men found a little too much for twenty-seven years, and now I was in bed with something that could lift me off the floor with one hand, and instead of feeling small I felt like the most dangerous thing in the room. That entire massive creature went stupid and shaking when I so much as breathed on him.
Best of all, he liked that I liked it. He'd caught me staring at his horns one morning with what must have been an unhinged look on my face, and instead of getting weird about it he'd gone dark-eyed and said, low, "Go on, then," and let me do whatever I wanted.
A man who isn't threatened by a woman's appetite is rarer than a unicorn. A minotaur who isn't is apparently a thing that exists, and I had one.
Except I didn't.
Kazan had come by on the second day to tell us Zarcal was home in his own house again. Doing better, he said. Quiet, but himself. Resting at the orchard through the day and sleeping at home, and he wanted me to know he was sorry, still, that he'd never meant any of it.
I told Kazan to tell him I was fine, and that I hoped he got well, and I meant both. I did not tell Kazan what wasactuallytrue, which was that I was never going back to that house, and it had almost nothing to do with the night Zarcal came through a wall to get at me.
It had to do with the male a few feet away, beating something glowing into shape on his anvil, who had ruined me for every other man alive in seventy-two hours flat.
Minotaur. Whatever.
Here was where I actually stood when I made myself look at it instead of at him.
Zarcal had been my last chance. The third placement, no fourth option, those were the rules, and the third one had ended with me barricaded in a pantry.
There was no version of the paperwork where that came out a success. The ship was coming for me. It was only a question of when, and of how much it was going to cost me to climb on it now that I'd been idiot enough to fall headfirst into the best thing I'd ever had, in only three days.
I was playing house in a forge I had no claim to, with a male who wasn't mine to keep, and I didn't have the first idea how I was going to make myself walk away from him when the time came.
My only option was to find time.
Somehow.
I snuck down to the Agency office on the third morning while Lorkin was out hauling timber. I couldn't stand the not-knowing for another hour. Maybe if I could just see the date, if I knew for sure the transport was coming, I could brace for it.
Or I could get on my knees at Nezara's hooves and beg for more time with Lorkin.
The office was shut. Closed for the week, according to a paper nailed to the door. Urgent business at the courthouse, come back in seven days.
I stood there in the cold and almost laughed. Not even my own execution would happen on schedule. There was nothing to do. No date, no verdict, no countdown I could read, just the not-knowing stretched out in front of me with no end to it, and the dread that filled up every hour I wasn't actively distracting myself from.
Which I was, mostly. Distracting myself. With him. The cruelest part was how good it was.
Something had come loose in Lorkin.
I didn't have the history to know exactly what he'd been before, but I'd seen the careful, bolted-shut version at the supper and at the smithy, the one who'd handed me off and walked into the dark.
This wasn't him anymore.
This man hummed badly while he worked. He caught me watching and grinned, crooked and out of practice, like he'd only just remembered his face could do that. He still made knives. I thought he'd always do that. But he made them now like a man who had somewhere to be afterward. Like a man with a future.
And I lay awake at night with his arm heavy over me and his heart going slow against my back, and I wished, with everything I had in me, that I could be the future he'd started building toward.
I knew I couldn't.
He was waiting for me in the forge when I got back from town. I didn't tell him why I'd gone, and he didn't ask.
I came in expecting nothing, still wrung out and pleasantly sore from that morning, and found him at the cool end of the workbench with his hands behind his back and a look on his face I'd never seen there. It took me a second to place it. The look sat so wrong on a male of that size.
