“Does it… help?” I ask, immediately regretting the question.
“With hunger?” he says calmly. “Yes.”
“And with the bond?”
He pauses, goblet hovering just short of his mouth. “That,” he says carefully, “is more complicated.”
I laugh once, breathless. “Everything with you is complicated.”
“Yet here you are.”
I take a bite of bread I don’t taste. “What does it taste like?” I ask, gesturing vaguely at the goblet. “Blood, I mean.”
His eyes narrow slightly. “You don’t want that answer.”
“I asked.”
He sets the goblet down with deliberate care. “It tastes like life,” he says. “Like heat. Like memory. It tastes different depending on whose it is.”
My pulse stutters. “And mine? What would happen if you drank my blood now that we’re bound like this?”
The bond flares, sharp, startled, intimate, like I’ve struck a live wire.
His jaw tightens. “That’s enough.”
I don’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.
We sit there, the air thick and vibrating, until I reach for the bread again at the exact same moment he does.
Our fingers almost touch. I pull back instantly, heat flaring up my spine, pulse racing like I’ve done something unforgivable.
He stills. The bond reacts before us, my breath hitch and his shoulders go rigid. Neither of us comments on it.
Eventually, he clears his throat and stands. “You should rest.”
“Yes,” I agree too quickly. “We both should.”
We avoid each other’s eyes as we prepare to sleep, the silence between us heavy with everything we didn’t say.
That night, sleep betrays me.
I dream of heat and silk and shadow. I am not in my chamber, but somewhere vast and dark, the air heavy with magic and promise. Zeidan stands before me, unarmored, unguarded, his usual sharp edges softened by firelight and something dangerously tender in his eyes. Behind him, shadows unfurl—wings, vast and obsidian, stretching slowly as if they’ve been waiting for me to see them.
They frame him like a throne of night. I should be afraid. Instead, my magic sings.
He steps closer, close enough that I feel the warmth of him, the pull of the bond tightening until it hums through my bones. Silk brushes my skin, my own clothes, dissolving into something soft and unfamiliar and when his fingers close gently around my wrist, the contact sends a shiver straight through me.
My magic answers his touch instantly, flaring bright and eager, curling toward him as if it knows him. As if it has always known him. His thumb traces the inside of my wrist, right over the pulse, and his wings shift, folding in slightly, sheltering us from everything else.
“Do you feel it?” he murmurs, voice low and velvet-dark.
I do. Gods, I do.
The bond tightens, warm and heady, wrapping around my thoughts until there is only him, only this, heat, shadow, inevitability, and just as his forehead lowers toward mine, just as my breath catches?—
I wake, heart racing, skin warm, magic restless and aching beneath my ribs. And the memory of wings lingers far too vividly.
I am mortified, ashamed, and wide awake. Did I just dreamed of him kissing me? Of all people?