Page 115 of The Last Remaining Light

They fell quiet again, and when she opened her eyes, she noticed he was looking at her bed.

Wait, no. Near her bed. She followed his gaze to… oh.

“You still have it,” he said.

The journal.

The worn leather one he had given her before she left Lumenshire Abbey. It still rested exactly where she always kept it, beside her pillow, its edges softened from turnings of handling. And beside it—

His letters. Every one of them.

They were carefully stacked in the spiral pattern she always arranged them into whenever she reread them late at night. Which was often.

Caelyn stared at them without saying a word, and Elowynn watched the guarded composure leave his expression. What remained looked dangerously close to vulnerability.

Elowynn became painfully aware of the intimacy of what he was seeing.

He was not witnessing her scholarship or how she danced between barbed insults and silver-tongued politics. He was not witnessing the carefully composed woman the rest of Veylspire knew.

He was witnessing her. Raw and unfiltered. He was witnessing the grief, exhaustion, and loneliness she worked so hard to hide.

It was also proof that after five turnings and all the distance between them, she still fell asleep beside his words every night.

“I read them when I cannot sleep,” she admitted before she could stop herself.

Caelyn looked at her then, and stars, she wished he hadn’t.

She wished he hadn’t.

The look on his face nearly broke her apart.

Elowynn moved toward the window mostly to escape the intensity of him standing so close. She tried to focus on the stunning vista that was Veylspire.

She felt him approach behind her, but he didn't touch her. He was just… there. Close enough that she felt his presence everywhere along her back.

A part of her was silently begging him to reach for her. To feel his hands along her shoulders, down her arms, to wrap around her and hold her.

Why? After all these turnings? Why did this attraction flare now? Was it because she loved him before she departed for the city? Or had she fallen in love through their letters? Or was it a mixture of the two things?

“Who is he, really?” Caelyn asked finally, breaking her tumultuous thoughts.

Elowynn knew exactly whom he meant. She kept her gaze fixed out the window.

“I do not fully know yet.”

The silence stretched.

Then, “But you suspect something.”

“Yes, I do,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. There was hesitation in her before she continued. “Korvel is too careful.”

Caelyn made a sound low in his throat that sounded like a growl.

“He wasn’t too careful with you.”

Elowynn’s heart flipped in her chest, and she fought a smile at the growled words. Distracting herself from those thoughts, she kept speaking.

“I dislike how he watches people. His increased vigilance is perplexing. And he is strategic.” Her fingers tightened against the windowsill. “Every conversation tonight felt like positioning.”