stone-faced before this woman he had chased across the world, and awaited her reaction. It would determine the whole of their future.
He told himself he didn’t care either way. That his heart was as much stone as he knew his expression was. There were some who had found his pursuit of vengeance unforgivable. There were others whose interest in his past had always seemed too avid for his comfort. This was nothing but a test to see where Amaya would fall on that spectrum.
It would set the stage for how he handled his marriage going forward, nothing more. Either she would prove herself a worthy queen, a woman like his foster mother, who was braver than most men, his queen—or she would simply be a wife with a lofty title who would eventually give Kavian his heirs.
It matters little which way she goes, he told himself then.
But he found that he was frozen in place, awaiting her judgment, all the same.
Amaya swallowed hard, but she didn’t shift her gaze from his. She still stood tall before him. The warm light from the lanterns made her look gilded, standing there with her glorious spill of dark hair all around her and her perfect breasts visible beneath that silky little shift she wore. She was still so pretty it almost felt like an attack. An assault. It rolled over him and flattened him. It took out his defenses like a kick to the knees.
But he had no intention of showing her that.
“You obviously expect me to clutch at my pearls and faint,” she said after a long, long moment.
“Aim for the bed,” he advised her. “The rug is not as soft as it appears.”
“Did you torture him?” she asked.
He hadn’t expected that. He considered her more closely.
“No,” he said at last. “He was the butcher. I wanted only what he took. If not my family, then the throne.”
“Did it change you?”
He blinked, and ignored that heavy thing inside his chest that seemed to bear down hard at that, as if his heart was still wrapped in those same old chains.
As if he was.
“No,” he said after a moment, when that harsh pull inside him faded. Or became more bearable somehow. “The change you mean happened much earlier. When I accepted that I would become what I hated in order to do what I must. I do not regret avenging my family. I regret only that I share anything with the man who killed them—that in order to honor my family I became a murderer, just like him.”
“No.” Her voice was fierce then, immediate, and her eyes glittered. “Nothing like him. You could never be anything like him. He killed children for his own selfish gain. All you did was take out a monster.”
And Kavian had not realized, not until that moment, how very much he’d needed to hear her say that. How much he’d needed proof that she was who he’d thought she was from the start. He didn’t want to analyze it. He didn’t want to consider the implications. To hell with all that.
She was looking at him as if he was some kind of hero. Not the monster he’d long ago accepted he’d had to become because he’d had no other choice. She was looking at him as if—
But he couldn’t let himself go too far down that road. He couldn’t risk it.
“Come here,” he gritted out at her, and he didn’t smile when she jerked slightly at the harsh command, or even when she obeyed. He crossed his arms over his chest and peered down at her as she drew near. “Kiss me.”
Amaya swayed toward him, the light playing off the silken shine of her shift and the smooth intoxication of her skin. She hooked one hand over his forearm where it crossed the other, and then she went up on her toes and slid her other hand along his jaw as if she sought to comfort him. And he felt the wholly uncharacteristic urge to lean into her palm, as if she was sunlight and he could bask in her a while.
Just a little while, something in him urged.
“Does this mean I passed your test, Kavian?” she asked him, a smile in those dark chocolate eyes and teasing the corners of her lips. “Or are there more hoops I must leap through tonight?”
He smiled then. Triumph and need and that heavy thing in his chest that made his heart beat too fast, too hard. He didn’t want to name it. He refused.
“It means I want you to kiss me,” he said, as if hunger for her weren’t tearing at him, deeper and more ravenous than any he’d ever felt before. As if he could stand here all night, ignoring it. “I do not believe I was unclear.”
“A kiss is my only reward for hours on a horse and hard labor by the fire?” She was teasing him again. Kavian understood that, even though he rather thought she took her life in her hands when she dared do it. Or maybe that was his life she held, and she was squeezing it much too hard as she went. So hard, it was almost a struggle to breathe. “That hardly seems equal to the effort I put out today to please you. Shouldn’t you be the one to please me for a change?”
“Kiss me,” he suggested, darkly, “and you will find out exactly how pleasing I can be, azizty.”
She didn’t laugh, though he felt it there in the air between them, music and magic, as if she had. She hooked her other hand around his neck and stretched herself up toward him, and he let her. He waited.
Amaya hovered there for a moment, her mouth a scant breath from his, her dark gaze solemn. Kavian remembered, suddenly, their first meeting. That same look in her eyes as they’d met his for the first time. The promises she’d made him then.
And that next morning, when her brother had come to tell him that she had fled the palace, her whereabouts unknown.
“If you break another vow, Amaya, I will not be quite so forgiving.” He hadn’t meant to speak. He hardly knew his own voice when he did.
But her lips curved slightly, only slightly, and she didn’t pull away. “Has this been your version of forgiving?”
He could hardly hear her over the thunder of his own heart.
“You’ll understand if I find that confusing.”
“You are the only living creature I have ever forgiven anything.”
It was a confession, gruff and unexpected. And he should not have made it to her, Kavian knew, but it mattered to him that she had not looked at him with horror drenching those lovely eyes once he’d told her his story. It mattered to him that she’d sought to defend him instead.
He could not for the life of him understand why it mattered.
Why she did.
Only that she had from the start. That she made him believe he could have a different sort of ending than the one he was certain he deserved.
“I’m honored,” she said quietly now, like nothing so much as another promise, one more solemn vow, and then she kissed him.
She was as sweet as she was enticing, and he drank her in. He let her explore him, tasting him and teasing him, kissing him again and again until he could feel the catch in her breath.
And
