"I'm right about most things."
"You're right about bookshelves and wrong about Kvothe. That's your ratio."
He almost smiles. Crosses the room. Sits in the reading nook beside me. It fits us both, because it was always going to fit us both. Our shoulders touch. The window lets in the afternoon light.
"I have something," he says.
He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a book. Small, worn, a paperback with a cracked spine and dog-eared pages. He hands it to me.
Black Beauty.
This book is older, loved, the cover soft from handling. I open it. On the inside cover, in Silas's handwriting, careful, precise, the penmanship of a man who treats words like they matter:
For Dev. Your house. Your shelves. Your home. I love you. — S
We sit in the reading nook. Side by side. The shelves around us, mostly empty, waiting. The window facing east. The house new and smelling like oak and paint and the beginning of something.
"Dev?"
"Yeah?"
"Welcome home."
I lean against him. His arm comes around me. Through the window I can see Robin outside and the afternoon light is warm and the house is quiet and it's just us.
"Silas?"
"Hmm?"
"I want to see him."
He goes still. Not tense. Listening.
"The lion," I say. "I've been with you for months and I've never seen him. I hear him sometimes, the rumble in your chest when you hold me. I know he's there. But I've never seen him."
Silas pulls back enough to look at me. "You're sure?"
"I'm not afraid of anything when it comes to you."
He studies my face. Whatever he finds there makes him nod, once. A decision made.
He stands. Steps to the center of the room, the empty space between the bookshelves. Pulls his shirt over his head, then the rest, because I've learned that shifting in clothes ruins them and Silas is practical about everything.
"Don't move," he says. "Just stay in the nook. Let him come to you."
"Okay."
The shift is nothing like I imagined. In books it's dramatic, violent, bones cracking and flesh reshaping. In reality it's quiet. A ripple that starts in his shoulders and moves through him like water, and then Silas isn't there anymore and the lion is.
He's enormous. That's the first thing. I knew he would be, knew it intellectually from watching the other pride membersmove through doorways and fill rooms, but knowing and seeing are different. He takes up the space between the bookshelves like he was made for it, tawny and gold, his mane dark and thick around a face that is somehow still Silas. The same steady eyes. The same focused attention. The same quiet that fills whatever room he's in.
He watches me. I watch him. The reading nook suddenly feels very small and the lion feels very large and my heart is hammering but it's not fear. It's awe. The same feeling I get when I open a book and the first sentence is so perfect it stops my breath.
"Hi," I say.
The lion blinks. Slowly, deliberately, the way cats do when they trust you.
"You're beautiful," I say, and my voice cracks on it because he is. He's terrifying and beautiful and mine.