And that was all they said about it. Just the acknowledgment that he'd made a choice, that the choice had cost something, and now they were sitting in what it cost.
Then, in the small ways the team used instead of words, they closed the distance. Rhiot crossed the room and dropped a hand on Kearan's shoulder, brief and heavy, then gone before Kearan could flinch from it, and went back to the wall. Seph dragged her chair an inch closer to his. Trux didn't move, but he quit looking at the door like he wanted to be on the other side of it. Nobody made a thing of it. That was the point. You didn't make a thing of it. You just stayed, and you let the person watch you stay. I knew Seph would update Ryker later when they were alone.
Grayson didn't say anything. He set up his laptop on the table and focused on whatever was on his screen. I couldn't tell if he'd moved their personal part of their conversation to a psychic one, or if he was still processing. It was hard to tell with him sometimes.
Then Kearan reached for his sleeves, the long ones he always wore, and pulled them back to look at the scar, then returned them down over his forearms. I'd seen him do it a thousand times, the practiced motion of a man putting things back where they went. Except this time it wasn't a shield going up. It wasn't him closing off after being seen. It was just settling, the sleeves going down because that's where they belonged.
The scar was still there. He was still covering it. But the covering meant something different now. It wasn't hiding him. It was just his.
Nobody else caught it. They were all still inside their own heads. But I caught the new gentleness in how his fingers smoothed the fabric over his wrists, and it cracked something open in me, because if he could be this wrong about what his team's silence meant, what else had he decided about himself on the strength of a quiet he'd read backward?
What had he decided about me?
He finished with the sleeves, and his eyes came up to mine. Something different in them. A question forming. A lock starting to turn.
Grayson caught the shift between us and, without a word, turned back to his laptop, handing the two of us a sliver of privacy in a room full of people. Seph was still somewhere in her own head. Rhiot was carefully examining something on the war table. Trux was still holding the Hesolga down. And Kearan kept looking at me like he was working something out.
Like maybe he'd been wrong about that too.
I didn't look away. I let him get there on his own, let him sit with having been this wrong about one silence and start to wonder about another. The dagger lay across the grimoire while the soul ring pressed against my sternum. The threat was still circling the perimeter and the clock was still running down. But right then, watching him pull his sleeves down and look at me like the distance between us might be something we could actually cross, something changed.
CHAPTER 16
Iwas halfway into my sleep clothes when the door opened, no knock, no warning. My first thought was Seph coming to debrief, or Mephistral deciding personal space was a suggestion. My hands were still tangled in the hem of my shirt when I registered it was Kearan in the doorway, and the set of his shoulders told me something had changed. He had the look of a man who'd finished a calculation and landed on the answer he'd been avoiding.
"Hey," I said, which was not the right response to someone walking into my room unannounced Though I was secretly very pleased he'd come. "You going to stand in the door, or actually come in?"
He stepped inside and shut it behind him, controlled, like he'd rehearsed the moment a few times before he did it for real. The room felt smaller. He took up space in a way he usually went out of his way not to, always so careful to exist out of the way.
"I've been thinking about the bond," he said, even, clinical, the voice he used when he was processing through logic before he let it turn into feeling.
I pulled my shirt the rest of the way down and didn't reach for anything else. He'd already seen the scar under mycollarbone where a demon had marked me, already knew the fault lines of everything that had tried to break me and missed.
"Okay," I said.
"I want him bonded first. I think he's coming to terms with what happened." He paused, his hands going to his sides like they didn't know where to land. I'd learned that tell. It meant the next thing was going to cost him. "But I've also been using it as cover. Telling myself I'm being strategic when what I'm actually doing is stalling, because the alternative to stalling is bonding with you, and that means admitting something I've spent the entire time pretending I don't feel."
My breath caught. I didn't rush him. He wasn't finished and interrupting now would've been like yanking a thread he was in the middle of pulling loose.
"Terrified of what?" I said, even though I knew. I needed to hear him say it.
"Of losing myself once I become vulnerable with you," he said, the words fraying at the edges. "Of doing the same thing I did with Maren, except you'd be permanent. Written into my nervous system. And if something happened to you."
He stopped, jaw tight.
"You don't want to be hurt again," I finished. "You'd know exactly what it felt like to have me die."
His shoulders dropped. The relief of having it said out loud must have been enormous. "Yes."
"And then you told me I was wrong about what the team's silence meant," he went on. "That I'd built years of hurt on top of misreading their quiet. And I realized I'd done the same thing to you. I've been reading your distance as rejection when it might've been something else. Reading your quiet as proof I was right to hold back, when maybe you were just waiting for me to figure out I was allowed to stop."
"I was," I said. "I've been waiting."
"I know. I figured it out. Finally."
He was close enough now that I could see how exhausted he was.
"I want to bond with you," he said, and his voice changed, softer, stripped of the clinical distance. "Not because the situation demands it. Not because of the Hesolga. Because I want you. Standing outside your room for weeks telling myself restraint was wisdom instead of cowardice has been the worst kind of exhausting. I'm done pretending the reason I can't touch you is that I'm protecting you, when the truth is I've been protecting myself. And I'm done protecting myself from you. I'm in love with you, Parker. I'm terrified, and I'm going to do it anyway, because the alternative is spending whatever time we have left on the wrong side of a door I've already decided to walk through."