Page 143 of The Crown’s Temptation

He looked at her. She was watching him with those gold eyes that had been catching him off guard since before he even knew they were gold. Even when they were glamoured into a warm brown and he had seen her that first time across a tavern and even then had wanted her more than he cared to admit.

"I am not angry at you," he said. "I am angry at the situation."

"That is a very diplomatic answer."

"I am a very diplomatic man."

She snorted. He almost smiled.

He looked back at the fire. The thing about retrieving the Arrolyn was that he had always known what awakening it would do and what it would not do. It would make her whole. If awakened, it would cure the poison. It would give her back the part of herself she had been missing for her entire life.

It would not make her his.

He had understood that from the beginning.

He had not anticipated that the wanting would get worse as it went on. Proximity was supposed to help. Usually when you saw something up close long enough the wanting became manageable, incorporated itself into the background of things. Usually.

This had not done that.

"Sleep," he said. His voice was even. He was grateful for that.

"I am not tired."

"You are exhausted."

"Those are not the same thing," she said — which was his line, and she knew it, and from the look on her face she knew that he knew it.

"Sleep," he said again.

She shifted in the chair, pulling the loose corset around herself, and closed her eyes with the expression of someone doing it to humor him rather than because they intended to actually sleep.

Within three minutes she was asleep.

He sat in the other chair and watched the fire and did not examine any of the things he was not going to examine tonight. There were several of them. He was practiced at this by now.

He simply sat. He watched the fire. He waited for the treatment to do what it was doing and for the night to pass and for her to awaken so he could watch her walk back through the dark toward a ward he could not cross to reach a man he had never met and had no particular quarrel with and yet.

He put another log on the fire.

He waited.

The Undoing

TEORIN

"Where the fuck were you?"

Asharin raised her head from the bed, eyelids heavy. "What is wrong?"

"I told you to stay in the Darkway. I told you Morrath is dangerous, that I can protect you here. That I can keep you safe."

"And?"

She looked confused, which sent another wave of anger through him.

"Do not play dumb. You did not come back last night and were gone all day today."

"Were you worried?" she said.