Page 150 of Flames and Blood

“Because I love him, Mother.” It’s the first time I’ve ever said it out loud, and the words almost surprise me. “I sat in a cell for over a year, and when the door opened, it was because he opened it.”

“Gratitude isn’t the same as love. We spoke about this.”

“What I feel is so much more than that. My dragon knew that man before I ever even saw his face, Mother. She knew him, and she waited for him to open that door.”

“The dragon chose…” She exhales slowly.

“From the very beginning,” I say. “And she stopped caring about bloodlines when she made that choice.”

“Then it is done.” She straightens, as if settling on it. “But ask him properly, Kalli. Not as royalty but as a woman. He’s spent his whole life believing he has a place lower than others. I know because I said it myself. Treat him as your equal.”

I smile. “Gideon Crowe has always been more than equal to me.”

“Good.” She nods. “Then go and find him. Hesper is going to explode if I don’t let her come in and tend to this scratch.” She looks down at where blood has darkened her clothing.

“Thank you.” I do something I’ve never done before. I reach in and hug her. Then I spin away and leave the room, passing a startled Hesper as I dash past her.

I find him in the yard, standing against a wall with his collar turned up. There’s not much time before morning, but he’s waiting anyway.

“You should be inside.”

“Probably.” He’s frowning down at my shoulder, which is still bleeding through my shirt. He reaches for it. “We need to—”

“Not yet.” I need to do this before my courage runs out. “I’m going to ask you something, and I don’t want you to answer it.”

He frowns.

“I’m staying,” I say. “Not for the seat. But because this is my home…” My throat closes up, but I talk through it. “I want you here. On this mountain, in a place where people will probably need the next hundred years to get used to you, and nobody within two hundred miles who’s anything like you.”

He opens his mouth.

“Don’t.” I get a hand up against his chest before he can say anything. “Take a week. Take two. Go and sleep somewhere that isn’t here and think about it where I’m not standing in front of you asking. I’ve watched you say yes to hard things without blinking. This is the hardest one of all, and I want you to take time with it because this one means giving up everything. Forever.”

He looks at me for a long time.

“All right,” he says.

That’s all. Then he goes inside to where the Cravens are waiting, and I’m left standing in the yard with my arm throbbing and my mother’s blood still under my fingernails, and I have no idea what he’s going to say.

Chapter 36

Crowe

My office is exactly as I left it. Steel desk. Two chairs, one of them for people who come up here to ask me for things. A window over a yard where a man rebuilds transmissions and has never once asked what I do above his head at night. There’s a mug on the desk with an inch of something in the bottom that was coffee in another season. Sixty years of a life, and all of it fits in this room with space left over.

The system is still here too. Take the work. Finish the work. Don’t make it personal. Write it up, close the book, wait for the next name.

It’s a good system. It has never once failed me.

I sit down in my own chair and look at it and understand that it’s finished.

She told me to think about it somewhere she wasn’t, so I came here. They buried her cousin the morning after I left. Short ceremony, name read once, ground closed over him. I wish I could have been there for it, but I knew I’d only complicate an already complicated situation. So I came down off that rock and to the life I remember.

A name comes up on my phone on the third day.

It’s a man I’ve worked for twice, and the job is one I’d have taken without thinking a year ago. Somebody’s missing. Somebody else would rather they weren’t found. Good money, three weeks, and nothing in it that would have kept me awake.

“I’m out,” I tell him.