Page 34
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’ve paced the room approximately forty-seven times. You’ve sharpened that dagger twice, and it was already sharp enough to split a hair before you started.” I pull the sheet up to my collarbone, suddenly very aware that I’m in a tank top and underwear in a dim room with a restless demigod. “You need to rest.”
His grip shifts on the dagger’s hilt, knuckles whitening, as if the leather wrapping is the only thing keeping his hands occupied. “I’ll rest when we’re somewhere I trust.”
“You don’t trust the Aldridges?”
“I don’t trust anyone.”
“You trust me.”
His jaw tightens, and the dagger stills in his hand. His temperature climbs another half degree, concentrated in his chest and spreading lower, and he angles his body a fraction away from me.
“Get in the bed,” I say, the words leaving my mouth before I can run them through any kind of filter.
His eyes lock onto mine. “No.”
“Kieran—”
“What I said at the spring hasn’t changed. Every person I let in dies.” He rotates the dagger once in his hand, slow and deliberate. “I’m not adding you to that list.”
The words hit the way they did in the moonlit water, when he was inside me and then he wasn’t, when he pulled back and said everyone I care about dies like it was a law of physics instead of a fear.
But that was the spring. This is a twelve-by-ten room in New Orleans. We’ve crossed an ocean since then, and he’s standing here sharpening blades at two in the morning because he can’t turn his brain off, and the distance between the bed and the floor isn’t protecting either of us from anything.
“It’s too late for that,” I say, steadier than I expected. “You already let me in. You did that when you found me at the Crown and carried me to your room. You did it when you held me on the ship. You did it when you told Nina’s mom we’re together.” I hold his gaze, daring him to contradict me. “Sleeping on the floor doesn’t undo any of that.”
Kieran’s output betrays him, climbing in the steady, inevitable pattern I remember from the spring.
“I’m not asking you to change your mind,” I continue. “I’m asking you to try sleeping in a bed instead of on a hardwood floor with a weapon in your hand before you wake up the entire Aldridge coven with your pacing and I have to explain to Lenore why her house guest spent the night sharpening knives.”
The ghost of a smile crosses his face. He looks at the bed, then at the floor, then at the dagger in his hand… and then back to me.
Not at my face, but lower. Because the sheet apparently slipped while I was sitting up. It’s pooling at my hips, and the band of my underwear is visible above the waistline—a thin strip of black cotton against my skin that I didn’t think about when I was arguing with him but that I’m thinking about very much right now.
His eyes dilate, his body going rigid with the effort of not moving. The front of his thermal signature is a furnace now, heat blooming low and unmistakable, and he shifts his stance.
Pull the sheet up. Pull it up right now.
But I can barely breathe, let alone move enough to pull the sheet up. And a growing percentage of me doesn’t want to.
Before I realize what’s happening, Kieran sheathes the dagger, crosses to the nightstand, and looks down at it. Specifically, he looks at my sweater and my jeans folded on top of it, and the corner of his mouth does a thing that isn’t a smile but makes my pulse jump twelve beats above baseline anyway.
He reaches for the dagger on his hip and draws it slowly. The blade slides free of the leather with a whisper of steel, and he sets it on the nightstand on top of my jeans. The sound lands low in my body, and my thighs press together beneath the sheet—an involuntary adjustment I pray his peripheral vision misses.
The dagger strapped to his thigh comes next. He unbuckles the holster with deliberate fingers, and the leather falls away from his leg in a way that makes me fixate on the muscle beneath the fabric.
That one goes on the nightstand, too. On top of my sweater.
His weapons on my clothes. Steel against cotton.
Stop assigning meaning to object placement.
I continue tracking every movement of his hands as he reaches for the next blade. This is a thin knife I didn’t know he was carrying, pulled from the inside of his boot. He straightens, and the motion brings him close enough that his heat washes over me from two feet away. The wave of it rolls across my bare shoulders and down my chest, and my breath catches audibly—a small, traitorous sound in the quiet room. His hands still for half a second, and this close, I can see the flush riding high on his neck, the careful way he’s keeping his hips angled from my line of sight, and the fine tremor in his exhale.
When he sets the knife beside the daggers, his fingers brush the folded edge of my jeans. I expect him to pull away immediately, but he lets it rest there, his eyes on the growing pile of weapons and clothing on the nightstand.
He removes another blade, from his belt this time.
