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The ugliest part was that I understood far too well what it meant to build a life around the conviction that your mother's death belonged partly to you.

Ash knew my mother had killed herself. I'd told him that much, although I'd given him the fact without everything wrapped around it: her begging me not to leave, my father explaining afterward what being lifebound could do to the people closest to me, and fifteen years of wondering whether she'd still be alive if I'd understood what I was before I walked out that door.

Last night, Ash had given me everything.

He'd told me about the fire escape, his father's drinking, the video, and the seven-year-old boy he'd spent most of his life believing was responsible for his mother's death. Meanwhile, I'd held him and said nothing about the seventeen-year-old boy who'd been carrying his own version of the same guilt.

I could tell myself the situations were different, because they were. Ash believed his hands had physically sent his mother down those stairs, while my guilt was tangled in something far less tangible and considerably harder to prove. Yet grief didn't seem particularly interested in technical distinctions. Somewhere along the way, both of us had taken the worst thing that had ever happened to us and built the same terrible sentence around it.

My mother died because of me.

The realization made my arm tighten around him before I consciously stopped myself.

I wanted to tell him.

Not about being a dragon, not yet, and certainly not about being lifebound when I still didn't fully understand what Ignatius had begun explaining to me. But I wanted to give him something more than the bare fact I'd thrown at him in Vegas. I wanted to tell him that I knew what it was to look backward at one moment until every possible version of your life began with if only I hadn't.

The problem was that I couldn't explain my guilt without explaining what I was.

And after everything Ash had told me last night, that silence felt less like privacy than it had yesterday.

It felt like a secret.

I looked down at the man sleeping against me and felt something settle inside my chest that had been fighting for space there for longer than I wanted to admit.

I loved him.

There wasn't even any panic attached to the realization anymore, which probably should've concerned me more than it did. Fifteen years of my life had been built around the belief that loving someone—or allowing them to love me—was dangerous, and now I was lying in Ash's bed after spending half the night holding him while everything I'd believed about myself developed cracks.

Not in the way you think.

I'd spent hours turning Ignatius's words over in my head, trying to decide whether they were supposed to reassure me when he'd very deliberately refused to explain what they meant.

There were other lifebound dragons.

There were records.

Some of them had found their mates.

That was all I actually knew, and it wasn't nearly enough when the man asleep against me mattered more than anyone had in fifteen years.

Even before Ignatius, I'd known I was in trouble with Ash. I'd known it every time I tracked him across the ice without meaning to, every time he smiled and something inside me settled, and every time he'd walked away and I'd had to stop myself from following.

Yesterday he'd finally told me why.

He hadn't pushed me away because he regretted Vegas. He'd done it because his father had discovered I mattered, and Ash had been trying to protect me.

He hadn't said he loved me.

Part of me desperately wanted to take everything he'd said while drugged and arrange it into the answer I wanted, but that would make me exactly the man I never wanted to be with him. Ash deserved to tell me how he felt when he was completely sober and knew exactly what he was saying.

I could wait for that.

For the first time in my life, waiting for someone didn't feel like something I needed to fear.

Ash stirred against me, his fingers tightening briefly in my shirt before relaxing, and I felt the exact moment consciousness returned because his entire body changed.

He went rigid.