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“Why?”

Caelith hesitated.

“They don’t understand why you survived,” he said finally, and the honesty in it startled her. “That is what frightens me most.”

Maia’s chest tightened. “But they’re trying to find out. They know it was one of their own.”

“Right now they are guessing,” he replied. “And guesses get people killed.”

She searched his face, expecting deflection and found none. “Whatever they were doing with the shards, it isn’t finished, is it?”

“No,” Caelith said. “It isn’t.”

Her gaze dropped again to his wrists. “And what happens now that they - and you - are unbound?”

His expression darkened. “Now I stop pretending I’m something I’m not.”

A chill traced her spine. “And what are you?”

She stepped closer despite herself. Close enough now that she had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes.

His gaze dropped to her mouth, then slowly back to her eyes. “Someone who saw you long before that wraith did.”

Her breath faltered, the moment spoiling all too quickly with the sound of footsteps echoing faintly at the far end of the corridor.

Caelith’s attention snapped toward the sound, but his stare went back to hers quickly. She thought he might step back and walk away, as he always did. Instead, he stepped closer, so close she could feel his breath along her mouth.

“Do you have any idea,” he breathed, danger threaded through his voice, “what it took not to come and find you the moment I felt the wraith enter the Archive?”

Her anger flared, sharp and blinding, the air between them igniting.

“Then why didn’t you?”

She didn’t wait for the answer, her chest rising too fast. She shoved him, just once, a sharp push to his chest. He didn’t stumble, but the contact cracked something open between them.

“Don’t stand there acting like you’re the only one afraid,” she said, voice shaking. “I was there. I felt it. And I keep wondering whether you feel any of it at all. Every time you look at me like that and then stop yourself, every time you pull back…” She clenched her fists and took in a deep breath. “I’ve started to think maybe there’s nothing there to pull back from. Maybe this really is nothing to you. Like you said in the Archive, it means nothing.”

His hand came up, stopping just short of her arm but not touching. He looked at her, his jaw clenching, then closed the distance entirely. Her back met the stone next to her desk, his hand bracing on the wall beside her head, the light vanishing behind his frame, his breath warm against her cheek.

Lightning lit the room white momentarily and threw their shadows across the wall. Hers leaned towards him. His leaned towards her. Not north. Not towards the Fracture at all.

“You think I do not feel this?” His voice was low, stripped raw. “You think that it means nothing to me, to stand this close and hold myself still? To stop, every time, when stopping is the last thing I—”

Before he could finish, she kissed him.

The kiss was sudden and fierce, born of anger and adrenaline and everything they weren’t saying. It wasn’t careful. It wasn’t gentle. It was heat and clash and frustration spilling over, her fingers pulling him closer, his breath becoming hers.

He found her waist, and pulled her hips against him in a single, decisive movement. The contact stole the air from her lungs. She felt the hard line of him, the heat. Everything coming undone.

Anger then bled into something darker, hungrier and deeper. Something impossible to stop. His other hand moved from the wall and his fingers ran through the back of her hair, gripping tightly, holding her close to him.

She didn’t notice his hands move under her. She only knew that he had lifted her as though she weighed nothing, because to him she did, and set her on the edge of her desk.

Something went over. She heard the pot knock and the long wet sound of it going across the boards. She had spent four hours making that ink, but she did not care at all.

He moved between her knees and she let him, both hands fisted in the front of his shirt, keeping him exactly where he was. He kissed her and did not stop himself. She could taste the break in his control; his restraint finally worn thin.

She did not know how long it went on, only that when the sound finally reached her, it took her a moment to understand what it was.