The fighter’s question. Perimeter first.
“I don’t know.”
She looks at me. Her shoulders drop. Her hands relax at her sides.
The light is on her face and her shoulders and her hands, and I’m looking at her in sunlight for the first time.
She’s watching my face. Reading it. Her expression softens. A stillness settling where tension held. The field is quiet. I lift my face to the light.
I haven’t forgotten what sunlight feels like. I’ve remembered it every single day. In the dark hours. In the dormancy that pulls me under at dawn. In the particular cruelty of knowing that the world continues in light and I’m sealed away from it.
I hold my hands up. Turn them in the warmth. Watch the light move across my knuckles, the tendons, the scars that have been there for centuries and never seen daylight.
My throat tightens.
She’s watching me.
She sits down in the grass after a while. Cross-legged, face tilted up, eyes closed.
“This is what you lost,” she says. Quietly. Not looking at me. “The mornings.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Maximus.”
“Don’t be. You just gave it back in this dream-world, or whatever it is.”
I sit beside her. The grass is cool and real beneath my hands. The light falls across both of us equally. Her breathing is slow. Mine matches it without trying.
I can't say how long it lasts.
The bond eases without effort, the way a muscle releases when the work that held it tight finishes. The warmth on my forearms thins. The grass under my feet loses its weight. The sky overhead pales out of itself.
The last thing I feel in the field is her hand finding mine.
Then I am lying in the dark with her hand on my chest and the crescent mark pulsing beneath her palm and the feel of sunlight still on my skin.
I lie very still.
Her hand rests on my chest. It rises and falls with my breath. The mark beats beneath her palm.
The warmth hasn't left my forearms.
I close my hand over hers.
Her breath is slow and even against my throat. I lie in the dark with my woman asleep on my chest.
She showed me the sun.
Chapter
Seven
Iwake up to him watching me.
The sheets are under me. The wards are humming through the walls. The room is dark and quiet. The bond carries his attention across the inches between us.
Maximus is awake. His eyes are already on mine.
