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After a moment his forehead came down against her shoulder. He let her look.

She traced the seam with one finger. He breathed in once, sharply, then steadied. She didn't rush. She held still. Her mouth touched the place where the brass entered him, and she held it there.

"Idonea."

"Yes."

"You don't have to —"

"Lysander. I want to." She traced the brass again. Memorising.

His hand came up and tangled in her hair, and held her there a moment longer than she'd meant to stay, as if he couldn't yet let her stop.

When she lifted her head, his eyes were closed.

She turned in his arms and pulled him down on top of her.

His mouth came back to hers, and she made a helpless sound, and he answered it with his own.

His two hands were different. She hadn't understood, until now, how much he'd been telling her with that difference.

His hand was warm at her ribs, his thumb stroking the soft skin beneath her breast. The metal one settled at her hip, holding her down against the mattress where his hand was moving. She understood without being told. He used the metal to brace her and the flesh to know her. Every place he wanted to feel her, he reached for with his hand.

Then his hand found the ink along her spine and stilled.

He didn't ask. He didn't have to. The question sat in his caught breath. In the way his fingers traced the lowest mark, then the next, then the next, learning the order Nellith had drawn them in.

He lowered his head and pressed his open mouth to the small of her back, to the youngest mark, still tender beneath his lips.

Something inside her broke.

The mouth he set against the ink her mother had carved into her year after year undid her in a way no touch ever had. Her eyes burned. Her throat closed around a sound—relief and hunger and recognition braided into one—she'd no name for. She didn't cry. Neither could she breathe.

He stilled against her skin. His breath caught.

"Idonea."

"Mm."

"They —" His voice was rough. "They answer me."

The warmth spread through the marks again. This time she couldn't pretend it was imagination. Her stomach tightened. Nothing about that should be possible.

The Eitr in his blood. The dragon-thing the Order had been distilling into him since he was a boy, drop by careful drop. It recognised what her mother had folded into her spine. Nothing loud. Nothing either of them could have explained to a stranger. Two strings tuned to the same note, humming when one was struck.

She turned her face into the pillow. She pressed her cheek there and held still until she could speak.

"I didn't know that was possible," she said into the linen.

"Neither did I."

He pressed his mouth to the youngest mark again, and this time it was something else. Two things in the world made to be apart, finding each other anyway. Eighteen years of his Order trying to shape him into a weapon. Twenty-five years of her mother shaping her into a door. Neither working had quite held.

She rolled beneath him until she saw his face. His hair had fallen forward. His gaze was on her the way it had been at the doorway, and it did the same thing to her chest it had done then, only now there was nowhere to look away to.

"Don't memorise me." Her voice cracked. Because if he did, it meant some part of him believed there might not be another chance.

"Too late."