Chapter 6: The Snap

Torren was waiting for me on the tower stairs with his shirt already off.

"Aldith's holding the basin," I said. "Sit."

He sat on the edge of his bed.

Aldith set the water down beside him with hands that shook only a little.

She did not look at his shoulder.

"I'll be at the foot of the stairs," she said, and left us.

The lamp hissed.

I knelt on the stone in front of him, and my breath caught anyway.

Last night I had only seen his arm.

Tonight the whole left side of him was open to the light.

I saw his shoulder, his chest, and the long ridged plain of his back where the beam had come down.

The scar tissue ran from his jaw to his hip.

On the right side he was just a man, huge and hard with muscle.

A few old white nicks crossed his ribs.

The two halves of him did not belong to the same body, and both of them were beautiful to me.

I hadn't expected that.

"Linen?" I asked, and held it up.

"No."

I looked at him.

"Your hands," he said.

His voice had gone rough.

"Not the cloth. It sticks to the weeping. I'm asking."

"All right."

I set the cloth aside and put my bare palms on his scarred shoulder.

The world dropped out from under me.

It was heat, first, a shuddering rush of it up both arms.

Then it was a sound, a low chord inside my skull.

It rose until every bone I owned rang with it.

My wolf, small and brown and sleepy for as long as I could remember, lifted her head.

Him.

Torren made a noise in his chest, raw and cut off.

He caught my wrists in both hands and held them against his skin.

"Mabyn."

"I know," I whispered.

"Don't move."

"I'm not."

"Don't."

His thumbs pressed into the insides of my wrists, and my pulse slammed into them.

"Gods, the smell of you."

He was breathing me in, his scarred cheek against my hair, his eye shut.

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