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The honest answer was everything. Criss set another log on and stared at it, axe resting on his shoulder. "I've known her for a month and a half. We've been together, actually together, for less than a week. Any rational person would say this is insane."

"Is she rational?"

"Painfully."

"Then she's already thought about it." Kieran split another log. "Steph doesn't do anything she hasn't analyzed from six angles first. If she moved into your cabin, she'd already decided where this was going."

"That's the thing. I know she'll probably say yes. Through the bond I can feel how she feels about me, which should make this easier and somehow makes it worse." He swung and missed the center of the log, the axe biting into the edge and sending it spinning off the stump. "I've never asked anyone for anything that mattered. Not like this. Every important thing in my life I've either charmed my way into or walked away from before it could go wrong."

"And this one you can't walk away from."

"Don't want to. That's the problem. I want this so badly that the idea of asking and having it be real, having someone actually choose to stay, permanently, on purpose..." He retrieved the log and set it back on the stump. "I don't have a reference point for that. Mom stayed because she's my mother. You tolerate me because we're family. This is different. This is someone choosing me when she has every reason not to."

"She has plenty of reasons to."

Criss looked at him. Kieran met his gaze steadily, the axe at rest, his eyes holding none of their usual reserve.

"You challenged an elder to protect her work," Kieran said. "You spent two weeks gathering evidence instead of running your mouth. You shifted in a public square to save her life and took the consequences without complaint. And when she told you she needed a partner instead of a protector, you listened." He put another log on the stump. "Two months ago you were a bartender from Savannah who couldn't commit to a lunch order. Now you're the man who stood in front of Rydan Ashkar and told him the truth mattered more than legacy." He swung. The log split clean. "She's not choosing the man you were, Criss. She's choosing the one your becoming. Give her the chance to say yes."

Kieran didn't give speeches. He gave sentences, and you had to earn each one. The fact that he'd just given a paragraph's worth meant something Criss was going to carry for a long time.

"Thanks, Kieran."

"Don't make it weird." Kieran picked up the split wood and started stacking. "Don't do it at a restaurant. Don't do it in public. Don't make a production out of it. Steph would hate all of that."

"I know."

"And Criss." Kieran paused with an armful of logs. "I'm glad you stayed."

He went inside before Criss could respond, which was probably intentional because Criss's throat had closed up and his eyes were doing something he'd rather not have witnessed.

He spent the rest of the day being useless. He tried to check ward markers and walked past three of them without reading a single one. He tried to eat lunch and stared at a sandwich for twenty minutes. He went to the Mercantile to buy something, forgot what, and came home with a bag of nails and a candle that smelled like pine, neither of which he needed.

The ring was his grandmother's. His mother had pressed it into his hand three days ago, during a visit to her rental cottage outside town, without being asked. A thin gold band with a small emerald, simple, not flashy. "She doesn't seem like a diamond girl," Leora had said, and Criss had been too stunned that his mother had read Steph so accurately from two brief meetings to argue.

He put the ring in his jacket pocket and took it out four times to make sure it was still there. His tiger was calm, which was infuriating, because the animal had the luxury of certainty while Criss's human brain was constructing elaborate scenarios in which Steph said no, or laughed, or delivered a detailed analysis of why marriage as an institution was statistically inadvisable.

She came back from the site at six with dust on her face and a glow in her eyes that meant she'd found something significant. She talked through it while she kicked off her boots, something about a new panel of inscriptions in the chamber's lower section that referenced a previously unknown alliance between three founding families, and her excitement was so genuine and specific that Criss almost forgot about the ring in his pocket.

Almost.

"Shower," she announced, already pulling the pencil from her hair and letting the dark curls tumble. "Then food. Then I need to transcribe these notes before I lose the context."

"Steph."

"Hmm?" She was halfway to the bathroom, peeling off her thermal.

"Can you come here for a second?"

She turned back, registered something in his face, and went still. Through the bond he felt her attention sharpen, the analytical mind pivoting from inscriptions to the man standing in the kitchen with his hands in his jacket pockets and his heart rate doing something she could feel as clearly as her own.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Nothing's wrong." He pulled the ring from his pocket. Held it between his thumb and forefinger, the emerald catching the last of the evening light through the window. "I had a whole thing planned. Words. Maybe a speech. But I'm standing here and you've got clay in your hair and you're about to lecture me about alliance inscriptions and I can't think of a single moment that's more us than this one."

She looked at the ring. Looked at him. Through the bond he felt the spike of surprise, then the rapid processing that was so uniquely her, the data intake, the cross-referencing, the assessment of variables. And beneath all of it, rising fast and warm, something that didn't need analysis.

"Criss Holt," she said. "Are you proposing to me in your kitchen while I'm covered in dirt?"