[Amber’s POV] т
I know his footsteps before I know I'm awake. Something in my chest catches like a hook, tugging me through layers of bad sleep, and by the time torchlight shifts at the corridor's end my pulse is already doing things I did not authorize.
Arthur crouches at the bars. His gaze finds my shoulder before it finds my face, and everything about him goes the kind of still that precedes either violence or prayer.
"How long has it been bleeding?" Not a question. A demand dressed up in a question's Sunday clothes.
"Good morning to you too." I press my palm harder against the dressing and it squelches, which neither of us pretends is a good sign. "Since before dawn—the stitching caught when I turned and came apart like wet paper."
"Let me see it." His hands grip the bars and the tendons pull taut—the mate mark on his forearm catching torchlight, pulsing in the same rhythm hammering beneath my ribs. I look away from it like that helps.
"Through iron bars, in this light, with your medical degree from where, exactly?" I shift my weight and the wound sends a white-hot objection screaming up my neck. "It's fine, I have survived worse."
"Amber." My name in his mouth lands like a hand catching my wrist mid-fall. "You've soaked through three layers—that is not fine by any definition available to us."
He's right, which is the most annoying part. My body is failing in the pedestrian way bodies do when you stop treating them like they matter, and I've been rotting in a stone box for two days while the crown prince decides what entertainment I'll provide next.
"That needs stitching, clean supplies, and heat to draw the infection." His knuckles have gone white on the iron. "None of which exist in this cell."
"Astute. I've been composing a strongly worded complaint to the management." The sarcasm comes out weaker than intended, which concerns me more than the blood.
Something shifts behind his eyes—the quiet arithmetic of a man who has finished weighing consequences and found them laughably beside the point. He reaches for the latch.
"Don't." I push myself upright too fast and the corridor tilts sideways. "His orders were explicit—I stay in this cell, you stay on that side, everyone keeps their fated-mate nonsense to themselves—although that wasn’t said out loud, but I imagine—"
"The terms did not account for you bleeding to death." He doesn’t let me finish. Rude. The mechanism groans and the door swings open, his scent pouring through—pine resin, cold stone, something darker my body catalogs against every protest my brain can muster.
"And when Desmond finds out?" My spine presses harder against the wall—not away from Arthur, but toward something solid, because the bond is making my bones feel liquid.
"He will find out—that is not a variable I've failed to consider." He steps inside and the cell halves itself around his shoulders, then crouches before me until the proximity turns the bond into something with teeth.
Every nerve draws tight. My skin prickles where his body displaces the air between us—a quarter-inch of charged nothing that my treacherous brain interprets as invitation. I dig my nails into my thigh.
"If this goes another day, you lose the arm." He says it the way you report weather. "I will not watch that happen from the other side of iron."
"Noble and stupid in equal measure." My voice thins despite myself. "I don’t know what he considers appropriate consequences for such trespassing, but I doubt they would be pleasant—"
Without letting me finish again, he slides one arm beneath my knees, the other behind my shoulders, and lifts. The contact detonates—heat blooming from every point where his body meets mine, the bond flaring so violently my vision whites.
"Put me down." I grip his collar because the alternative is dissolving, his throat inches from my mouth, his pulse beating hard beneath the skin. "I can walk—this is unnecessary and theatrical and you know it."
He is already moving, stride unbroken. The flex of his shoulders with each step, the controlled power in his arms—the bond converts every point of contact into something devastatingly intimate.
The guards at the corridor's end register what they are seeing and discover a sudden fascination with the far wall. My mouth opens for something cutting but his scent has saturated my lungs and nothing comes.
"He will know within the hour," I manage against his collarbone. His chest vibrates when he answers and the resonance travels through my sternum.
"It is added." He takes a staircase without slowing and I stop arguing because his heartbeat has become the only steady thing in my collapsing world.
His chamber is a revelation of absence—narrow bed, water basin, weapons rack. The room of a man who has been making himself small inside a palace his whole life, and the recognition hits somewhere I wasn't braced for.
He sets me on the bed with surgical care. When his hands slide free the cold rushes back so sharply I lock my teeth against the sound clawing up my throat.
"This will hold," he says, threading a needle with steady hands that I track against my will—the scarred knuckles, the careful grip. "It won't be gentle."
"Gentle hasn't been on the menu since I arrived." I watch him lay out supplies with the precision of a man who has stitched himself together more times than anyone bothered to ask about.
He works without rushing. The needle bites, finds its rhythm—but his fingers on my bare skin send heat cascading down my ribs and pooling low in my belly.
Every graze near my collarbone makes my breath stutter. He notices—his hand stills one fraction of a second before continuing, and that fraction tells me everything about how hard he is working to keep his touch clinical.
"You didn't have to do this." I watch his knuckles brush the hollow of my throat while he ties off the last stitch. "Watching from behind the bars satisfied your orders. This satisfies something else entirely."
His fingers press against my pulse point and hold—one beat, then two. His thumb shifts barely a millimeter in a migration that could be accidental but isn't, and warmth floods downward so fast my lips part.
"Yes," he says, voice stripped to something raw. "It does." He draws his hand back slowly, washes it, and when he turns the distance between us is nothing—three feet of charged air and silver marks burning bright enough to read by.
"Does it hurt?" I ask, eyes tracing the silver lines on his forearm where his sleeve has ridden up. "The bond—when you are this close to me."
"Not hurt." His voice has dropped into something I feel in my bones rather than hear. "More like a tide—manageable at a distance, considerably less so now." His gaze falls to my mouth on the last word.
His fingers find my jaw. The touch ignites something building since the cabin—electric, flooding, burning until my skin aches everywhere he isn't. His thumb traces my lower lip and his silver eyes have gone ungoverned, every careful wall in ruins.
I lean into his palm and his breath catches and the bond roars between us like a living thing—and the chamber door slams open hard enough to crack stone. Two wardens fill the frame, armored, faces carved from professional blankness, and Arthur's hand drops from my face like severed rope.
"The prince requires your presence." The larger one's gaze moves between us, cataloging damage. "Both of you. Immediately."
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