Page 33
“I prefer not to overstate certainty without evidence.”
“We have evidence.”
“We have strong indication.”
“You are impossible.”
“I have been called worse by people with better diction.”
“That guard insulted you in public, grabbed you last night, and helped set up a provocation today. I don’t need a notarized confession to see the shape of the trap.”
“No,” she says, and something in her expression opens just enough for me to see the worry underneath. “You do not.”
The agreement takes some of the fight out of me.
Rain begins again, light at first, pattering against the roof edges and turning the passage mouth silver. The smell rises from the stones, damp and mineral-rich, mixing with the faint warmth of her soap. I should hate how clearly I sense her. I should hate how my body catalogs every detail as though survival depends on it.
Maybe it does.
She steps one pace closer.
“Isolde,” I warn, and the word leaves me rougher than I intend.
“You told me not to come closer. I stopped. Now I am choosing one step.”
“That is not how warnings work.”
“It is how choices work.”
The bond tightens with a charged awareness that makes my palms ache. She is still several feet away, beyond arm’s reach. Close enough to study. Too close for comfort. Not close enough for the part of me that wants to close the distance and find out whether touching her would steady me or destroy us both.
She watches my face. “Do you fear harming me?”
The question cuts straight through every defense I have been stacking since yesterday.
I look away first.
That is answer enough, but she waits.
The passage narrows around the silence. Somewhere beyond it, a vendor shouts that his lentil cakes are hot. A horse snorts in the street. The scrying window above remains dark, but I can still feel the memory of Vaerith’s gaze like a stain on my skin.
“Yes,” I say.
The word is rough.
She does not move.
I look at her. “Yes. I fear it every second I’m near you, and worse when I’m away from you because distance makes me stupid. When I saw him touch you, the hunger went straight for him. Not generally. Not randomly. Him. I could feel the shape of his soul like a weak seam in cloth, and for a moment the only thing that felt wrong was leaving it intact.”
Her face pales slightly, but she remains steady.
I keep going because stopping now would be cowardice. “Then Vaerith looked through that mirror, and I wanted him too. I wanted to go through the glass. I wanted to find whatever part of him thinks it can point me at people and call me proof. I wanted to tear that part out and feed it to the thing in me until it shut up.”
Her fingers tighten around the folio.
“That is what you’re studying,” I say, trying and failing to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “Not a fascinating anomaly. Not a useful pattern. Me. Standing here deciding, over and over, not to become what men like Vaerith already believe I am.”
“I know.”
