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The morning light comes in low and pale and it moves across his skin like it's readin' him. Like it knows what it's lookin' at. The angels on his shoulder blades are mid-dive, wings spread and weapons out, faces set with the kind of grim that has nothin' to do with fury and everythin' to do with duty.

And lower, down his spine, the chain holds its judgment with blind eyes, and no mercy, and both hands full.

I've seen this before. I know this skin. But I keep lookin' anyway because who wouldn't?

I'm not quite used to the new hair yet, and I can't pretend otherwise, because my first impression when I saw it was purely one of loss—the specific and irrational grief of somethin' familiar bein' taken without your consent.

Who is this man if not the angel?

Not that the short hair makes him look like the devil. It doesn't do that exactly. But those long golden waves were the locks of cherubs and every time I ever watched them fan across a pillow or catch in the wind off the high plains I'd thought—that's the part of him that was meant for somethin' better than this world. That's the contradiction made visible.

He hasn't looked like a child since he was sixteen, so it's not that the long hair made him younger. It's not that simple. It just made him softer, somehow, which is a dumb observation because Legion Kane has never once in his entire life been soft.

Not in the way it counts. Not even around the outermost edges of himself where other people keep their gentleness, where they leave the door cracked.

But this new look is harsher. Viking-blunt and deliberate. And the cut has revealed tattoos on the back of his neck I never even knew existed, which somehow bothers me more than the hair itself does, the idea that there are parts of him I haven't yet read.

A demon, small and precise, holdin' a little banner in its clawed fist. The letters on it are fine-lined and certain—We are Many.

I like it though, and I can't quite get ahold of why that is. It does something to him I don't have the vocabulary for, which is sayin' something, because I have an excellent vocabulary and I have spent a considerable amount of my life findin' the precise words for Legion Kane.

But this isn't softness and it isn't longing, exactly. It's more like seein' a sculpture before and after the artist made the final cut—the form was always there in the marble, and yet…

He looks new.

Not new the way something is new when it has no history. New the way something is new when all the unnecessary parts have finally been stripped away and what's left is the truest version of the thing. The essential version.

Where he was once wild, and rugged, he is now hard in a way that has no apology in it. Sharp in the way a good blade is sharp.

I always felt protected under his eye. He was my armor. A whole suit made of metal. He has always been the shield between me and whatever was comin'. That hasn't changed.

What's changed is the quality of it.

Before, there was something regal in the danger of him. Something almost courtly in the way he carried his fury—like a lion who knows he is the lion, who doesn't need to prove it because every creature in the valley already understands.

He had that whole, Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil kind of quality to him.

This is different.

This is a wolf in the moment before the attack.

The prowlin’, and pacin', and performin' is over and all that's left is the strike.

If he was my shield before, now he is a wall. A thousand years old and made of stone surrounded by a moat and a drawbridge that never lowers.

I am safe behind his wall.

I know this with a hundred percent certainty.

A sudden wave of nausea hits and for a moment, I am absolutely certain that I am about to hurl my guts right here in bed.

I throw the covers off, get up, and run toward the bathroom.

Legion stirs, his voice low and mumbly just as I drop to my knees in front of the toilet and lean over. "What the hell's happenin'?"

I retch.

He's behind me before I've finished. Barefoot on the cold tile, one warm hand landing between my shoulder blades while I'm still heaving, gentle in a way that shouldn't be possible from hands that size.