Page 75 of Zenith Tower

“For a while.” I looked at her fingers resting against my cuff. “Then you arrived at the Hall.”

Her fingers slipped beneath the folded linen and rested against the inside of my wrist.

Copper light surfaced under her touch.

I drew a slow breath. The room had not changed, but my body no longer understood it at the same size. I knew the distance to the door, the width of the bed behind Astra, the steward’s position down the corridor. I also knew the exact pressure of her thumb against my pulse and the heat gathering where the unfinished line met her skin.

“May I touch you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I put one hand at her waist.

The word had mattered. It always would. But the way she leaned into my palm mattered too, as did the breath she released when I drew her closer. Her hands moved up my chest and settled at my collar.

“You’re still trying to decide for me,” she said.

“I am trying to understand the cost before I help you pay it.”

“I already understand the danger.”

“That does not make the danger smaller.”

“No.” She opened the top button of my shirt. “I still want the bond.”

The open line pulled hard between us.

I had spent months treating that pull as a warning. Even after the night in the salle, I had held still when it reached for her on the formal floor and across the bridge into the Tower. The discipline had protected us once. Here, with Astra’s fingers warm at my throat and her eyes refusing every retreat I offered, it had begun to look too much like the cage my father intended it to become.

I touched her face. “Astra.”

She turned her mouth into my palm and kissed it.

The small contact stripped the last useful thought from me.

I bent and kissed her.

She met me without hesitation. Her mouth opened beneath mine, warm and certain, and the hand at my collar slid around the back of my neck. I remembered kissing her at the Hall, on the salle mats with the lamp burning down. Memory had not dulled the small sound she made when I drew her closer.

Astra pressed closer. My back struck the edge of the table, and she made a low sound against my mouth when I pulled her between my knees. I kissed her again, slower, remembering the shape of her lower lip and theway her breath changed when my thumb moved beneath her jaw.

The rain-dark line brightened.

She felt it. Her wrist turned until the open ends of our lines rested against each other.

Heat moved through my Mark, no longer banked at the forearm. It climbed beneath my sleeve and spread across my chest in a pattern I had held down so long that feeling its full shape was almost pain.

Astra drew back enough to see my face. “Does it hurt?”

“Less than suppressing it.”

Anger sharpened her face, though none of it was for me. Her fingers went to the buttons at my cuff.

She opened them one at a time. Then she rolled the sleeve back and uncovered every dark channel I had spent my life hiding.

Her palm settled over the Mark.

I closed my eyes.