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Sounded easy enough.

With my free hand, I reached into the boiling pot of water.

“Lana—” Asher said, alarmed.

“What?” I asked, pulling a long noodle out. It flopped around my hand.

Asher grabbed my fisted hand, his brows pinched together with concern.

Thinking he wanted the ribbon of pasta, I handed it over. It draped itself into a pile in his palm. He stared at it bewildered.

I missed something.

Finally, Asher said, “Your hand. You stuck it into boiling water. Didn’t that hurt?”

Oh.

I held the hand up and wiggled my fingers. “It’s fine.”

Dumping the noodle onto the counter, he took my hand and turned it over.

I froze as his hand encased mine, his thumb brushing over my knuckles. He gaze scoured my skin, looking for some injury that wasn’t there.

He was concerned that I was hurt.

And now, watching him, I had the oddest sense that he was fighting the urge to do more. To reel me in, to move his hands up my arms.

My mate my mate my mate.

Now that my mind had acknowledged it, my blood seemed to sing it.

I swayed a little on my feet. All those pretty delineations between Asher and me boiled away. Human. Infernari. Victim. Villain.

My hand began to tremble. He had to notice.

“Jame Asher, I don’t want to be your enemy,” I whispered.

He shook his head slowly, his cheeks sucking in. “You’re not.”

I could feel it searing through me—hope. Hope that even though he didn’t think and feel like an Infernarus, he might care for me the way I did him.

The alcohol made me bold. No, my heritage made me bold.

I dared to look Asher in the eye. “What am I—to you?”

His jaw clenched as he stared at me. I thought he would answer, I really did. But then he blinked slowly, and his gaze shifted. He reached around me and turned off the burner, grabbing the pot and moving to another area of the kitchen.

“Asher, what am I to you?” I repeated. Because now, on the eve of battle, I needed to know.

I could hear water splashing as he poured the noodles into a metal bowl with holes.

He brought the bowl over and dropped it on the countertop next to me. “What do you want to know? Whether I like you? What do you think, Lana?” He jutted his chin as he asked. “I was supposed to kill you just like every other demon. I couldn’t. You were supposed to be my prisoner, and now we’re making dinner together. I saw you dying, I saw you giving up, and it broke something inside me, and I couldn’t let you. I’ve been alone for years, and now I don’t want to be.”

Gods, he looked so angry. All I could hear was the pounding of my pulse.

“So yes, I like you. I feel a helluva lot more than that for you. And that’s got me all kinds of conflicted right now... because Ishouldn’t. But I do.”

So he felt it too.