She stepped closer now, not away. “Étaín sees something in you. Not charm. Not handsome shadows. Something else. I can feel her circling it, and I hate that she may reach the truth of you before I do.”
“Aingeal --”
“No.” The word broke sharper than she intended. “I have stood beside you. Defended you. Needed you. Wanted you. And still you leave me outside the locked door of your life while everyone else begins finding keys.”
He looked as though she had struck him.
“You have made yourself matter,” she said. The words broke loose now, and she could not stop them. “You stand too easily at my side. You move through this castle as if you were built for it.Men trust you. I trust you when I do not mean to. And every time I remember that you still mean to go, it feels…” She stopped.
His voice was rough. “Feels like what?”
She looked at him. If there had been mercy left in the world, she would have turned away. Instead, she said it. “Like you have made leaving unbearable.”
The words hung between them.
Donal looked as though she had struck him straight through the chest. He caught her face in his hands, not gentle, not rough, but with the force of a man who had held himself back too long. “Aingeal,” he breathed, half warning, half surrender.
Then he kissed her.
This kiss was nothing like the first. The first had come out of closeness and tenderness and the dangerous quiet of candlelight and blood-stained linen.
This came out of pressure. Out of accusation, silence, and need sharpened until it hurt.
Aingeal kissed him back before she could think better of it. Fiercely. As though all the frustration and jealousy and hope of the past days had been waiting for exactly this crack in the world. Her hands came up to his shoulders, then into the front of his tunic, gripping hard enough to crease the cloth.
His mouth was hot and demanding. There was no caution in it. No pretense that either of them had stumbled into this by mistake.
He made a rough sound low in his throat when she moved closer, and his hands slid from her face to her waist, pulling her hard against him. The force of it stole her breath.
This was no revelation. This was everything they had refused to say, finding its own fierce language.
For one blinding instant, she wanted everything. Not only his mouth. Not only his hands.
All of him.
She wanted him to stay. She wanted him to choose her. She wanted the silence broken, the danger gone, and the whole world remade around the impossible thing standing between them.
The force of that wanting terrified her. The old fear rose with it, swift as cold water.
What happens when hurt becomes anger, and anger becomes ruin?
Aingeal tore herself away.
The break was sudden enough to leave them both breathing hard. She stumbled back a step, then another, one hand pressed to her mouth.
Donal moved instinctively toward her.
She recoiled.
That stopped him as surely as a blade. “Aingeal,” he said.
She shook her head once, then again. Not because she did not want him. Because she did. “Do not,” she whispered, though she no longer knew what she meant. Do not touch me. Do not look at me that way. Do not make me want this more. Do not leave. Do not stay unless you are true.
He did not move.
She backed toward the stair door.
His face in the torchlight was still, but not cold. She saw too much there: desire, yes, and pain, and something deeper that might have been love if she were foolish enough to believe it.
