Page 56 of Crown of Thorns

I was capable of much more than I thought.

The realization should have terrified me. Instead, it steadied me further.

The house was dark when I arrived. No one waited in the kitchen. No Mrs. Fahey with tea and questions. I climbed the stairs to the master bedroom alone.

Lorcan was there.

He was standing at the window, shirtless, his back to me. In the streetlight, I could see the definition of his spine, the tension that didn't leave him even in stillness. Blood wasn't visible on him, but I could smell it on his skin—iron and copper underneath the expensive soap.

"You should clean up," I said.

He turned. His eyes were still empty. Still dangerous. But when he saw me—saw my blood-stained hands, my singed hair, my steady shoulders—something cracked open in the terrible blankness.

"Come here," he said.

I did. I crossed the room and stood before him, and he reached out slowly, like approaching something wild. His hands settled on my face. His thumbs traced my cheekbones. Searching for injury. Finding none.

"You could have been hurt," he said.

"I wasn't."

"You ran toward an explosion."

"Yes."

He pulled me against his chest. No sexual intent. Just need. Just the primal relief of finding the thing you'd started to care about still intact. I could feel his heartbeat against my ear—fast but controlled. Already coming down from the adrenaline.

His skin was warm through the thin material of my t-shirt. His spine was rigid with tension that wouldn't release. This was what trauma looked like on him—not emotional, but physical. His body held what his face wouldn't display.

"Your heart is racing," I told him.

"So is yours," he said. "I can feel it."

I realized he was right. My pulse was hammering against my ribs. All the adrenaline from the scene, all the sensory processing, all the crisis work—it was hitting me now in his arms where it was safe to let it.

We stood like that for a long time. His hands in my hair. My hands on his waist. The smell of smoke and blood and expensive cologne mixing into something that would stick with me for weeks. Texture of his skin. The scar on his shoulder, still larger than I'd expected the first time I'd traced it, from wounds he'd never fully explained. The way his breathing gradually slowed to match mine.

"We're going to war," he said into the top of my head.

"I know."

"You might see things. You might have to be things you don't want to be. You might look at your own hands and stop recognizing them."

"I know that too."

He pulled back enough to look at me. His eyes were still cold, but the emptiness was gone. There was something harder there now. Something permanent. Something that understood that I'd already chosen this path the moment I ran toward that explosion instead of away from it.

"Good," he said. "Because I need you to understand what you're married to. This isn't just me anymore. It's both of us now. And there's no going back from that."

The click of understanding happened somewhere deep in my chest. He wasn't asking anymore. He'd stopped trying to hide the machinery of his world. He'd opened the door and waited to see if I'd walk through.

I walked through.

He kissed me then. Not tender. Not gentle. Claiming. Burning away any remaining doubt about what I'd agreed to, who I was becoming, what choices I couldn't unmake.

When he pulled away, my hands were still steady.

That was the thing I would remember about that night—not the explosion or the wounded or the machinery of violence. The thing I would remember was that I hadn't flinched. My hands didn't shake. I ran toward danger and helped, and the man who owned my name was proud of me for it. I wasn't sure what that made me anymore. But I knew that whatever I was now, I was becoming it by choice