POV: Thalen
Liora was watching me when I opened my eyes, not with panic or the wet terror the others had worn before they stopped being anything.
She sat cross-legged on the stone floor, studying me the way a woman studies a storm that missed her house by a foot.
"You passed out," she said, as though this were the most urgent matter on the island. "I want you to know how deeply unflattering that was."
I had been stabbed, shattered a library, kissed a woman with blood on my mouth, and nearly let the curse strangle her. Vanity had not made the list.
"You also snore," she added. "Loudly. I considered smothering you, but you heal too fast for it to matter."
The wound had closed while I slept, the stake hole sealed into smooth skin that should not have existed by morning. The curse heals what it breaks, but leaves my mind in ruins.
"It should not heal this fast." I sat up, testing the pull of muscle.
"And yet." She held up a damp rag. "You look like you lost a fight with a butcher's block. Blood is everywhere. Hold still."
She moved closer without permission and put the cloth to my shoulder where the bruise had spread wide. Her fingers worked with flat efficiency. No hesitation or tenderness for show.
Goosebumps covered her arms from shoulder to wrist, and the thin undershift she wore was torn and stained and covered almost nothing.
The fabric clung where it was damp and gapped where it was torn, and the curve of her hip where the cloth had ridden up sent a line of heat through my ribs that had nothing to do with the curse.
"You are cold," I said.
"I am fine."
"Your skin says otherwise." I could see the fine raised texture from her collarbone to the bend of her elbow, and a tentacle stirred toward the exposed line of her shoulder before I caught it and held it still. "There are chests in the east corridor with old clothes. Some of them looked as though they were made for women."
She paused, the cloth pressed to my neck. "You are offering me a wardrobe."
"I am observing that you are underdressed for stone floors."
"How long have you been observing that?"
"Since you slept on the shore in underclothes and I had the decency not to mention it." The tentacle strained against my hold, reaching for the goosebumps on her arm. I held it tighter.
"Your tentacle is staring at me," she said without looking down.
"It is not staring. It does not have eyes."
"It is doing the tentacle equivalent of staring, and you know it." She pressed the cloth harder against my neck. "After we finish here, you are showing me those chests."
She turned her attention back to the work, her eyes scanning the damage with the focus of someone cataloguing debts.
Liora leaned closer and pressed her thumb to a scrape along my collarbone. "This one is deep. The tentacles did this when you hit the wall."
"I am aware."
She did not flinch at the flatness in my tone. She tilted her head and wrung the rag over the basin.
"You destroyed half of a library last night." She folded the rag with precise fingers. "I am going to hold that against you for a very long time."
My mouth pulled at one corner before I could prevent it, a reflex I had not felt in years and did not trust now that it had resurfaced.
Her hand paused and her expression shifted, catching the movement before I could flatten it back into nothing.
"Was that a smile?" she asked, and her own lips twitched.
"A muscle spasm. The curse affects motor function."
"You are a terrible liar." She returned to the wound, her own mouth curved in a way she did not bother hiding. One of us was enjoying this. I suspected it was not me.
The tentacles stirred against my spine, loosening from the tight coil they had held since I woke, wound inward in what I recognized as shame. One drifted toward her, toward the warmth she carried without noticing.
I pulled it back before it reached her, though years of isolation had apparently not prepared my body to obey a direct order.
"Hold still," Liora said. "I cannot clean a wound on a man who keeps flinching."
"I am not flinching." But my left side had contracted, and she would have felt it beneath her hand.
"Your entire left side just seized. That is flinching, or your ribs have developed opinions."
She was close enough that I could count her heartbeats at sixty-four per minute, slower than last night when I had found her jaw and my mouth had found hers.
The memory of it sat in my ribs. Her fingers in my hair, the sound she made when the tentacle tightened at her hip, the way she had closed the distance herself as though she had made the decision long before I gave her the chance.
The curse had been pouring out of me, the darkness expanding, and when she refused to leave it had turned toward her warmth the way a freezing thing turns toward fire.
The kiss had not been a choice. It had been the darkness reaching for the only light in the room, and my mouth had followed before the rest of me could object.
"The memory from the medallion." The words came out rough, scraped raw. "It has not faded."
Her fingers stilled on my shoulder. "Tell me while it is calm. Just what you saw."
"A woman laughing. Gold changing hands. Warmth in the center of me, a feeling I had no name for, only the certainty that I had lost it." The images were shards, too sharp and too small to assemble. "Her palm on my face. My pulse slowing under her touch."
"That sounds worth remembering." Her tone dropped, careful now, measuring the weight of every word before releasing it.
"The best I have ever known." I closed my eyes and the old fragments turned behind my lids, layered beneath the ghost of Liora's mouth against mine from last night, iron and stubbornness pressed against my lips.
Liora was quiet for a moment. Then she stood and looked at the wreckage around us. "My grandmother used to say that order in the head depends on order in the house. You cannot think clearly in a room that has been torn apart." She nudged a pile of shattered wood with her foot. "We start here. We clean the library, and every time a fragment surfaces, you tell me."
She crossed to the nearest shelf and began pulling broken boards free, stacking what could be saved on one side and tossing splinters toward the door.
I watched her work, the line of her shoulders, the efficient snap of her wrists as she sorted.
A tall shelf behind her groaned. The wood shifted, the weight of it tilting forward, slow at first and then all at once, and the shadow of it fell across her back before she heard it.
The tentacles moved before I drew breath.
Two of them shot across the room, one bracing the shelf at its center and the other wrapping around Liora's waist, pulling her backward against my chest in a single sharp motion.
The shelf slammed into the stone where she had been standing, and the crack of it split the air.
She was pressed against me, breathing hard, my arm and two tentacles around her. Her heartbeat hammered against the coil at her waist, and neither of us moved.
"Did you do that on purpose?" She tilted her head back to look at me, her face inches from mine.
"No, and I cannot make it stop." The tentacles showed no intention of releasing her. My own limbs, courting her independently. Wonderful.
"Your tentacles have better manners than you do." Her voice was steady but her pulse was not. "I hope you find that profoundly embarrassing."
She stepped free of the coil and brushed dust from the undershift, her composure returning faster than her heartbeat.
She looked at the fallen shelf, at the cracked stone beneath it, and then at the rest of the library still leaning at dangerous angles.
"We are starting in a different room," she said. "One where the furniture is not actively trying to kill me. Show me those chests."