Page 154 of Feralheart

But the magic didn’t lie. I felt it clearer than Selira’s heartbeat.

Attraction so strong it made the air between us vibrate. Want that he’d been hiding, shoving down, trying to ignore.

For me.

Heat flooded my face so fast I got dizzy. My stomach dropped, then swooped back up, then dropped again.

If he was seeing and knowing what I was seeing and knowing, then he knew everything I felt for him. All the stupid, embarrassing thoughts I’d shoved down, from the way I’d watched his hands on Aristus’s neck, to how his voice went rough when he was trying not to show emotion. The moment in the kitchen when he’d stood close enough I could smell leather and him. All of it was pouring through this fucking magical connection like I’d been stripped naked and stood in front of him, fully exposed.

His wanting flew through me the same as his grief had, except this wasn’t old and buried.

And now I knew about the heat that ran through the frame I was wearing every time we passed the pearl from mouth to mouth.

He wanted me. The real me. The commons stable hand, the stubborn scarred truth of who I truly was, wanted like a man who’d been starving so long he’d forgotten hunger had a name.

My belly dropped, and not from the cold.

Because if I could feel his want…

He knew I wanted him just as much.

Confusion slammed through me. Why would he want me? I was commons. Dirty and exhausted and wearing yesterday’s blood on my leathers. I worked in the aerie. Stole things. Had magic I shouldn’t possess.

Was this trial a test for him or for me? Because there was nothing about me that made sense for him to want.

Denial came next. I was reading this wrong. The magic was showing me something else, and I was interpreting it through my own…

Oh, fuck, no.

My own attraction?

The realization tried to crack me open from the inside. I’d been noticing him, sure. The way you notice the sunrise after a week of rain. The way he held his shoulders when he stood outside his tent last night, backlit by faelights. How his voice changed when he talked to Aristus, going soft and tender. The exhaustion he wore like armor that I wanted to soothe or erase.

Fates help me, I was noticing him the way a woman does a man, and I’d bet anything this trial was showing him everything I’d been determined to hold back.

The thought made my blood boil.

But it was undeniable. The magic stripped everything bare, leaving nothing behind but his craving.

I’d spent my life sorting the world into them and us. The boot and the neck under it. Fenian had sat at the top of the pile since the day I first saw him, a beautiful weapon in a hunting party. I’d used his crown to keep him at arm’s length because distance was easier than the truth.

The truth was drowning in my body that kept giving me what was left of the air.

He wasn’t my enemy.

The realization settled in my chest like a balm.

The elite court was the true villain here.

The moment the thought solidified, something inside me clicked. A lock releasing.

The magic of this place recognized the shift.

A knot I’d carried since childhood came loose.

I knew what he knew now. It had bled into me along with the rest of him.

I found his gaze and lifted my hands—his hands—and blue fire crawled off the knuckles, the killing color that had never once been mine. My own hands came up wreathed in red. My mother’s gift, in a prince’s keeping.