Page 39 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“What did you find today that you haven’t told me?” He asks it straight out, nothing under it.

So, I give it to him. All of it, in the order the archive gave it to me, from the one world, through the war and the sealing, to the memory cut out of everyone they carried away. I don’t give him the last passage.

“What does that do to the hunt?” he says. “To the marks?”

“It means none of it was an accident. Somebody sat down and built this.” The rail is cold enough now that I can feel it up in my wrists. “Whatever’s waiting at the middle of it gets bigger every realm we take.”

He doesn’t ask me what else I’m holding just puts his hand down on the rail beside mine. His little finger is against mine, he leaves it there. I can hand him the last passage tonight, with nobody out here to hear it but him. I can stand here and watch what it does to him, or I can let him have tonight and carry the rest one more day. I don’t say either of them out loud.

He turns and he reaches for me. Twice, that I know of, he’s stopped himself doing this, and both times I watched him do it. He doesn’t stop himself now. For the first time since the corridor this morning there’s nothing careful left in his face. His mouth has come off the line he keeps it on. His eyes are on my mouth and he isn’t hiding that they are. It comes down on mine, not a question, not waiting for an answer. One hand goes into my hair at the back of my skull. The other closes on my waist and hauls me in against his front.

My hands land flat on his chest. Then they’re fists in the front of his shirt, pulling him down to where I can reach him properly. I feel his warmth through the linen. He tastes like cold stone and dust from that room. Underneath that is like nothing I have ever had in my mouth. When I open he makes a sound low in his throat. I feel it come through my palms before I hear it. Heat comes up under my skin everywhere he’s holding me, at my waist, the back of my head, down both arms. I’m not deciding any of it. It’s the same heat my wings answer to when I’ve lost hold of myself completely. I haven’t let it get up this far in decades. I don’t put it down now. Not the force of it. Not that he wanted this. It’s that all of him is in it and he isn’t holding anything back. I’m standing inside that with the last passage still unsaid.

I pull back. I watch it close over him. It takes no time at all. Whatever was in his face goes straight out. The stillness comes back down over the top. He straightens and puts the half step between us himself, before I can do it, doesn’t ask me anything. An answer has already come off me, the wrong one, the one he’s been handed every time. I don’t correct him. that would mean telling him all of it, and I can’t do that tonight.

In the middle of all that, something faint touches the edge of my reading from a long way off. It isn’t Valen, or. this castle, or any signature I’ve read in my life. It’s gone before I can turn toward it.

“This isn’t about you,” I say. “It isn’t doubt.”

True, as far as it goes. He doesn’t ask me for the rest, just gives me a short nod and lets the quiet stand where it is. We stay at the rail a while longer without touching. The valley has gone all the way dark under us. There’s nothing left to see out there but the water holding the last of the sky. I go in ahead of him, already knowing I can’t stay where I’ve been standing.

Chapter 25

Nyxiana

We walk back through the castle without saying anything.

The guest wing has gone quiet. The lamps in the corridor have burned down to a low amber along the floor. Doria is still working at my skin in here, thinner at this hour, steady as a pulse I can’t put a finger on.

At my door we say goodnight. Neither of us means it. He goes on down the corridor to his own room, four doors along.

Then I’m alone with the door shut behind me.

I try to work. The archive is the useful thing to be thinking about and it’s the safe one. Which shelves we didn’t reach. What the tapestry did while I was reading. Whether Lachlan knows what’s under his own house.

None of it holds.

There’s a guard on the stair two floors down. He’s bored and his boots are wet. I have him whether I want him or not, the same as I have the cook, the steward, the woman with the wine. Tonight the whole castle comes through me and none of it is loud enough to cover the four doors between his room and mine.

I catch myself in the black glass of the window when I finally move. My eyes have gone gold at the edges.

That has meant the same thing for decades. I’m nearer the edge of my own control than I’ve let myself notice. The dragon in me got there first.

There’s the other thing under it and I know exactly what that is too. The last time I fed to full was before Drakoria. Yesterday morning in the quarter came to about a third of what I went down there for. My hands have been steady all week because I make them be.

The last passage is still sitting where I left it this afternoon. I read it with him at my shoulder, close enough that his sleeve was against my arm. I translated every line on that page out loud except the one about him. It took me about as long as it takes to move my eyes down four lines.

He asked me what had changed. I told him the material was heavier than I expected.

Every person who ever kept that man handed him a version of the truth. Today I did it too.

I go out into the corridor. The plan is to walk until this is tired out of me. Left, away from his door, down the long stretch to the stair at the empty end of the wing.

I go right.

Four doors. I’m standing in front of his before I’ve put a single sentence together.

I knock.