Page 110 of May: Bloom & Bane

“This,” I say, fighting to keep my voice level, “is from him. The male you saw at the marsh. I can smell him on it.” I make myself meet her eyes. “I need you to tell me everything that happened out there. Please.” My hand trembles at my side.

She covers herself with her hands, and guilt bleeds through the bond.

“I didn’t think it was important,” she says quietly. “You were in so much pain and I just⁠—”

“I am not in pain anymore.” I cross the kitchen and stop in front of her, close enough that her knees brush my stomach. “Tell me. Please. After the Horsemen, I need to make sure he’s not a threat.”

She tells me about the hunched figure on the root, talking to no one—to two no-ones. The voices trading places. Three souls in one stitched body, falling apart at the seams.

“Did he see you?” I ask.

“Yes, I tried to help him.” Her arms tighten around herself. “He was in so much pain, Sage. There were so many wounds. I offered him the hushroot, and told him I could pick more for you, but when I touched his hair, he screamed like I’d burned him and then he was just… gone. Into the water. The thread was all that was left.”

She touched him, Ashán says, very quietly.

“He has someone,” she adds. “A woman he loves. He kept saying he wanted to hold her again, but he wouldn’t let her see him. He asked how she could ever love him, looking the way he does.” Her eyes come up to mine. “So I told him about you and Ashán. Two souls in one body, and how one of you wouldn’t be my mate without the other.”

“You told a stranger,” I say slowly, “about our bond.”

“Would you rather have let him think I didn’t have a mate?” she counters.

“I would prefer to demonstrate our mating right in front of him,” Ashán growls.

“Does he know he said that out loud?” she murmurs.

I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose. “If he didn’t, he does now.”

“We will not be demonstrating anything, ever again, if the two of you keep acting like this.” She jumps down from the counter and snatches the towel out of my hand.

She does not mean that, Ashán says.

She might mean that.

… Fix it.

I grab her wrist before she can storm past me, pulling her back into my chest.

“Saevúra, wait⁠—”

“I am wet, sticky, and exhausted,” she says, poking at my chest with a peach-stained finger. “And I just spent ten minutes being held hostage on a counter because you two couldn’t handle a piece of string.”

Tell her she is radiant when she is angry, Ashán urges.

Do not, I warn him. I look down at her, softening my grip on her waist. “I’m sorry. We’re… protective. Dangerously so. But you came back to us, and you brought the hushroot, and I am being a fool.”

She narrows her eyes, but the tightness around her mouth softens. “And your accomplice?”

Tell her I am also a fool, Ashán grumbles. A very hungry, very sorry fool.

“He says he is also a fool,” I relay. “A very sorry one.”

She studies me for a long moment, her finger still pressed into my chest.

“Fine. I forgive you.” She steps back and stretches. “I’m going to shower off and then⁠—”

“No.” The word comes out of both of us at once.

Eden raises an eyebrow. “No?”