The way she presses her head into my shoulder at night.
The way she clings when the boat rocks.
The way she looks at sea creatures. Like she’s meeting old friends rather than curiosities.
That contradiction should make me cautious.
Instead, it makes me want to know more of her until I ache.
The intimacy we shared on the deck keeps replaying under my skin like an itch I can’t scratch.
It was a trespass and a homecoming at the same time.
Wrong and inevitable.
I told myself the bite would mark her body and that would be that. I did not expect it to mark me—inside, where no one else could see.
It started as a low, steady tug. Now, it answers every small motion of hers.
It has unmoored me.
“Kael? My Lord? Can I fetch you anything?” Aloysious’ voice comes from the shadow, a step behind me, polite and cautious as always.
“No, I’m fine.” The words land hollow even to my own ears.
A lie.
The deck rocks beneath my boots and for a briefer instant I fumble, the gullies of my sea-legs unfamiliar.
Aloysious breathes a startled little sound—then retreats with a respectful bow.
I should be a pillar.
Instead, I stand here, a Lord who wishes he could be nothing more than the quiet man who can make a woman laugh.
She’s below deck, refreshing herself at my suggestion—an absurd, domestic command that makes her lady’s maid’s eyebrows lift—and I am left to pace like a boy testing his sea legs for the first time.
The memory of her weight in my arms, the tilt of her head as she surrendered to the current of us, keeps surfacing like a stubborn wave.
I ask myself questions I was never schooled to ask.
Is this true? Is she truly mine in the way the old songs mean? Or is it some trick my pride is playing to make my life less hollow?
I will ask Alaric.
He is the only Lord I know who has found a true viyella and come back whole enough to speak of it in anything but myth.
Dagan’s mouth will chide. His hands are always full of dirt and blunt honesty.
He has not yet tied the thread of a mate around his own waist, and I do not think he envies the ache I carry.
Still, if there is anyone to measure the real from the contrived, it will be Alaric.
It’s right then that Dagan finds me in his steady, no-nonsense way—boots loud on wet planks, cloak smelling of loam and storms that folded slow.
He walks like the world taught him to, broad and inevitable. The crew rights itself when he steps aboard. Men straighten the way reeds snap up at the approach of wind.
“You look softer than last tide,” he says without preface, voice like gravel warmed by wine.
