Page 154 of Legacy Elite

"It's how I was raised."

"Corvin was shot. My friends have been questioned twice. And now you've handed your House a stick to hit you with, and if you did that because of the bond, or because you thought you owed me—"

"Stop."

I stop.

"You can have most things," Soren says. "Not that."

"Not what?"

"You're about to take a decision I made and turn it into something you did to me." His hands are still on my back. "I sat in that room for half an hour listening to a man get the order of events wrong. I knew what it would cost before I opened my mouth. Then I did it anyway, because I decided to."

A breath.

"That's mine. Don't take it."

"Damn you," I say.

"My decision, not yours."

"I'm still going to feel bad about it."

"That's allowed."

I let go of him, which takes longer than it should, and sit down on the arm of the couch.

"Why, though?"

Soren doesn't sit. He puts his hands in his pockets and looks at the fireplace.

"I've spent my whole life doing things because somebody else decided I would. So at some point, I made a rule. If someone else chose it for me, I wanted nothing to do with it." He shrugs. "Then the bond happened, and I did what I always do. Fate chose you, so I tried to refuse you."

"And?"

"And on Friday I sat in a chair and listened to Voss describe a net." He turns to me. "And I realized I'd done it again. I let someone else make the decision."

I stare at him. "Fate?"

"Fate." His mouth twists. "Saying no just because fate said yes isn't much of a choice."

"So what did you choose?"

"You," Soren says.

Nothing after it. No clause. No qualification.

"I'm not asking you for—"

I cross the room and kiss him.

For a second he's completely still, the way he was in the doorway.

Then he isn't. His hand comes up into my hair and the other spreads flat across my back and he kisses me like a man who's been thinking about it since a dining hall in September of my first year.

And then he stops. Both hands on my face, his forehead against mine, breathing like he's been running.

"Say it properly," he says.