[Arthur’s POV]
The morning arrives without the decency to kill me first. I have not slept—not because the corridor stone is unforgiving, though it is, but because every time I closed my eyes, the cabin came back.
Her voice, raw and unguarded. The architecture of her spine beneath my hands—I have replayed it so many times the memory has worn grooves into the inside of my skull.
I straighten when the door opens. She steps into the corridor in yesterday's silk, her hair loose, her left shoulder held at the particular angle of someone managing pain they have decided not to mention.
"Good morning," she says, with the specific brightness of a woman who also did not sleep and has chosen violence about it. "I've been informed the crown's new property requires a bathing appointment."
"The bathing chamber is on the lower level." I fall into step beside her—regulation distance, two feet of charged air that might as well be packed with gunpowder. "I'll escort you."
"Escort." She tests the word like something found on the bottom of a shoe. "Is that what we're calling it, when from where I stand it looks remarkably like a very well-dressed leash?"
"It is a leash." No point in decorating it. "I am simply the hand holding it, rather than the one who fastened the collar."
"Poetic.” She huffs, and that not-really-a-laugh eases the knot in my chest all the same. “Do they teach that in Wolfblade bodyguard training, or is the brooding self-awareness a personal touch?"
My mouth does something I have to strangle before it reaches full expression. "Personal touch. The training is mostly stabbing."
She laughs—short, surprised, bitten off at the edges—and the sound lands behind my ribs like a fist. I fix my gaze on the corridor ahead and count the torches, because the alternative is memorizing the way firelight moves across her throat.
The stairwell is narrow, the stone worn smooth by centuries of boots. She takes the first step and her ankle turns—loss of balance, nothing dramatic—her body listing sideways, one hand reaching for a wall that is too far away.
I catch her arm. My fingers close around bare skin where the sleeve has ridden up, my thumb settling against the soft inside of her elbow, and the bond detonates like something with a fuse.
Heat floods up my hand, through my wrist, crashing into my chest so hard my vision narrows. Beneath my thumb, the mate mark pulses—warm, alive, pulling with a force that has nothing to do with gravity and everything to do with the woman whose pulse I can see hammering in the hollow of her throat.
She goes still against me. Her breathing changes—I feel it, the shift from startled to something deeper, slower, her ribs expanding against the air between us.
Her eyes lift to mine and what I find there strips the last rational thought from my skull. Her lips part, her fingers curl against my forearm—not pulling away, pressing in—and my entire body answers with a violence that makes my teeth ache.
I let go. The release is physical—wrenching my hand back, stepping down, putting the regulation distance between us through sheer force of will. My hand burns where her skin was.
She doesn't speak. Neither do I—there is nothing to say that the silence is not already screaming between us like a living thing.
We walk the remaining corridor without words, without looking at each other. The air has changed composition—thicker, charged, every breath of it tasting like the moment before a storm breaks.
My hands stay locked at my sides. Her arms fold across her chest. Two people pretending very hard that they are not on fire.
The bathing chamber door is heavy oak, iron-hinged. She pauses with her hand on the latch. "I imagine you'll be standing right here when I come out."
"That is my assignment." My voice comes out flatter than I intend—compressed, all the air squeezed from it.
"Dedicated." She holds my gaze one second longer than safe, then pushes through the door. It closes between us and I press my back against the stone wall hard enough to feel every ridge through my shirt.
Water on the other side. The pour of it—a basin being filled, the slosh of someone lowering themselves in. I stare at the opposite wall and catalog the stonework with the desperate focus of a man whose sanity depends entirely on mortar joints.
Granite, second course, hairline crack running from the lintel to the—a sound through the wood. Low, involuntary—the sigh warm water pulls from damaged muscles when the heat finally reaches bone. My hands fist at my sides.
The cabin rushes in again—uninvited, absolute. Her body arching beneath mine, that same sound pulled from her throat but closer, my mouth against the pulse point under her jaw.
The way she said please like it was the first time the word had ever worked. Her fingers gripping my arms hard enough to leave marks I wore for three days and mourned when they faded.
I open my eyes. My wrist is in my other hand, grip tight enough to grind the bones together, and I force my breathing flat through sheer mechanical will.
In for four, hold for four, out for four—a calming technique designed for battlefield panic. It is failing spectacularly against the sound of this woman sighing in a bath.
Water shifts beyond the door. Another sound—quieter, half-swallowed, caught between her teeth.
I do not know if she is in pain from the wound or simply feeling the heat ease into damaged tissue. It does not matter—my body has already decided what it is hearing, and has responded with the subtlety of a battering ram.
I stay exactly where I am. Both hands behind my back, fingers interlocked, every muscle in my shoulders rigid. The sounds continue—small, muffled, devastating—and I stand sentinel over each one like a man guarding the door to his own undoing.
Silence. The water stills, and I count thirty breaths before the door opens—thirty measured, regimented breaths that cost me more discipline than any combat deployment I have survived.
She emerges dressed, composed, hair damp against her neck, smelling of lavender soap and warm skin. She meets my eyes and I see it—the flush that has nothing to do with hot water, the careful steadiness that costs her exactly as much as my stone-wall impression is costing me.
"Does it get easier?" Her voice is quiet, stripped of the sardonic edge she wields like armor. "Being near each other with all of it just—sitting there."
"No." I hold her gaze because looking away would be its own confession. "It gets worse."
Her mouth presses flat and she nods once—a sharp, contained motion—before turning toward the corridor without asking me to elaborate.
I fall into step behind her, two paces back, hands locked behind me because I do not trust them at my sides. Her damp hair leaves a dark line down the back of her silk.
I track it the way a condemned man tracks the walk to the scaffold—with full awareness that the destination will end him, and no power whatsoever to change course.
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