Chapter 333: It Has Always Been You (Damn It)
"You went out," Tristan said, rising from the chair.
River paused in the doorway. "I did. Elowen and Cassia hosted a—"
"You didn’t tell me."
She blinked. "You were in meetings all day. It didn’t seem like it needed a formal notice."
"It needed a notice." His voice climbed past the register he used for anything, ever, and he heard it happen and could not stop it. "You walked across the entire city, at night, in a dress I have never seen, with people I have not met, and the first I hear of it is from a page carrying laundry. Do you understand how that lands? Do you have any idea what it does to me to find out from the laundry?"
"Tristan—"
"You could have been hurt. You could have been anywhere. I sat in that chair for four hours running through every road between here and the eastern district, and you strolled in glowing like the evening was nothing, like I wasn’t—" He stopped. His jaw worked. Ten years of the wrong word crowded up behind his teeth. "Like it costs me nothing to watch you leave."
River’s own temper rose to meet his, because she had never once in her life backed down from him and did not intend to start. "It is not your business where I go. I am a free woman. You told me that yourself, on the wall, when you taught me to climb something I was forbidden to climb. You cannot hand me freedom and then rage at me for using it."
"That was before."
"Before what?"
"Before I could no longer breathe correctly in a room you have left!"
The corridor went silent. The words hung there, out at last, impossible to jam behind his back or blame on the furniture or reassign to a distant wolf king.
River stared at him.
Her mouth opened. Closed. For the first time in the entire courtship, the economical girl who was never at a loss reached for something to say and came up completely, spectacularly empty.
Tristan crossed the distance before either of them decided he should.
He caught her face in both hands, the way he had once tilted it toward the light on the day a king gave her a name, and he kissed her with a decade of held breath behind it. It was nothing careful. His fingers slid into the white hair he had gotten up at dawn to find flowers for, and River made a small, startled sound against his mouth, and then her hands fisted in the front of his shirt and she pulled him closer rather than pushing him back, kissing him with the same stubborn conviction she brought to every single thing she had ever refused to lose.
When he broke away, he stayed close, his forehead against hers, both of them unsteady.
"I have been trying to tell you that for ten years," Tristan said, breathless and furious and grinning all at once. "I picked flowers. I stole a sealed book. I planned an entire afternoon at the exact rock where I found you. You toasted a wolf."
"You are catastrophically bad at this," River whispered, still gripping his shirt.
"I am the best there has ever been at this. You were catastrophically bad at noticing."
She laughed then, breathless against his mouth, and kissed him a second time, and this time she did the reaching.
He pulled back an inch. She closed the inch.
Her mouth found his again, and this time it wasn’t startled, wasn’t a reaction, wasn’t the collision of a confession and a doorway. This time her hands slid from his shirt to the back of his neck, and she kissed him with the deliberate, unhurried certainty of a woman who had made a decision and intended to see it through.
Tristan made a sound against her mouth. Low. Wrecked. The sound of a man who had been holding a door shut for ten years and had just felt it blow open from the other side.
Her back found the wall. His hand found her waist. Her fingers found the hem of his shirt, and the contact of her fingertips against the bare skin above his hip sent a current through him so electric his knees nearly buckled. He was a trained prince. A commander. A Fae heir who had led garrisons and held borders. Her fingertips on his hip made him forget all of it.
He pulled back. Barely. His lips still brushing hers when he spoke.
"I love you, River."
The words fell out of him the way her name had fallen out of him on a marble floor ten years ago. Without planning. Without rehearsal. With the complete, reckless certainty of a man who had never once in his life held back from the things that mattered and was not going to start now.
Her breath hitched against his mouth. Her eyes opened. Pink, bright, glowing faintly in the dark corridor, the way they always glowed when something reached deep enough to touch the magic living underneath.
"River." He kissed her forehead. Her cheek. The corner of her mouth. "I love you. I have loved you since a wall. Since a garden. Since you punched me in the stomach and walked away with your scroll and I watched you go and my chest did something I couldn’t name. I can name it now. It’s you. It has always been you."
Gavriel Sterling watched the two of them tangled in a midnight corridor, the prince who could not deliver a single flower to its intended target and the girl who had needed a full decade to look up and see him standing there.
He knew that white hair. Those pink eyes belonged to a face he had already memorized in another life and this one. He recognized her the way you recognize your own reflection a half-second before your mind agrees to it, and the ache that opened in his chest had teeth.
He understood, at last, why he had spent this entire life guarding her without once letting himself name the reason.
✦✦✦
In present-day Drakenfell, a Gamma who had spent the last few months convinced he had missed his shot lay with his heartbeat matched to the woman collapsed across his chest.
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