Page 112 of Embers of Ruin

His eyes move over my face, then to my hair. The look is not possessive, not exactly. It’s worse. Reverent in a way that frightens me.

“Long enough.”

I laugh because if I don’t, I may throw something. “I hate that answer.”

“I know. You hate a great many things.”

“I hate that you keep saying just enough to make me want more.”

His gaze darkens. “So do I.”

The words steal the next breath from my lungs and for once, I don’t know what to say.

Thorin seems to realize it at the same time I do, because something in his expression changes. Not triumph. Not amusement. Something quieter. More dangerous.

As he reaches past me toward the torn page, his sleeve brushes my arm. The contact is slight. Barely anything. But my magic reacts as if he has pressed his mouth to my skin.

A roaring sensation fills my ears, moving through my veins and rushing down my arms before I can control it. The lamplight flickers and shadows under the table stir. Thorin’s hand pauses beside the page, close enough to mine that our fingers nearly touch.

I should move but I don’t. Neither does he.

“The rest is in the restricted archives,” I say, though my voice is lower than I intend.

“Yes.”

“And you’re keeping it from me.”

“Yes.”

“Because I’m not ready?”

“Because once you read it, you cannot unread it.”

I look up at him but he is already looking at me and I notice that the space between us has become unforgivably small.

“You don’t get to decide what breaks me,” I whisper.

His eyes sharpen, and for a moment I think I have angered him. But the emotion that moves across his face isn’t anger. It’s pain.

“I know what breaks people,” he says quietly.

The words should sound arrogant. But they don’t. They sound like memory.

My anger falters slightly.

“Is that supposed to make me trust you?” I ask.

“No.”

“Then what?”

His gaze drops to my mouth and everything inside me goes still. Perhaps the entire cursed continent stops moving, for all I know. It feels possible in that moment. It feels as though the world has narrowed to the small space between us, to the warmth of him, to the cedar-and-smoke scent that always clings to his skin, to the dangerous softness entering his face as his hand lifts slowly.

He touches my hair first. Not my face. My hair.

A single silver curl has fallen forward over my shoulder, and he gathers it between his fingers with such unexpected gentleness that my throat tightens. His thumb moves over the strand, not like he is admiring something pretty, but like he is touching proof of something he has been afraid to believe.

I should step away and slap his hand aside for keeping things from me. I should say something clever and vicious enough to carve distance between us. Instead, I stand there like a fool while the Shadow King touches my hair in the middle of the archives, and every part of me that should hate him goes terribly, dangerously quiet.