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She nurtured it.

Now, there is a softness in me—for her.

But instinct creeps through me, and I graze my teeth over her soft skin.

Her wince is a sharp needle through her. Between me and the tree, her muscles smack to her bones and freeze.

“I won’t harm you—” My face splits with a grin against her neck. “—unless you ask me to.”

A hiss burrows in her chest.

Then the pinch of her nails bites my neck.

“I will,” she warns. “Even if you don’t ask.”

Her promise almost brings me to my knees. The shadows of darkness in her call to me.

There is darkness in her. More than I would have expected from a light halfling.

It is as intoxicating as her tender side, those afraid instincts that must warn her off me—ones she fights.

In that alone, she chooses me.

Now she must leave me. The night is late.

My farewell is a kiss to her jaw. I don’t risk taking it further than that fleeting tenderness.

Hidden in the darkness of the shade, I watch her run back to her home, climb up the lattice and vines, then slip in through the parted window. I always stay, always watch.

She never notices.

Never notices that each time, I wait for her to be safe in her bedchamber before I leave.

I take the trek back to my cousin’s home beyond the court borders, and it’s an hour before my boots are climbing the steps of the front porch.

The house is large enough that it hardly feels crammed with so many folk stuffed into it for the Fae Eclipse, there remains a sense of suffocation, not unlike sleeping with one’s head under the weight of blankets, and I can’t quite shake it.

I endure it.

I have lived decades in barracks, crammed into closets passing as rooms with a half-dozen other males.

It is the light lands that puts me on edge. My bones thrum with the sense of not belonging, always teetering on the edge of threat. My muscles ache with the constant air of light from the moon. And now, as I make my way through the house, my skin crawls—a warning of nearing dawn.

I avoid the drawing room, where the hearth with be crackling and my mother will be having tea with her sister. I take the stairs directly to the third floor. There, another set of thinner, ladder-like stairs ascends, narrow and rickety. They lead to what was once an attic, but is now remade into a blackout room. It was done for me, my visit to the light lands that could, in some rays of the sun, kill me. Sear me to the bone. A painful end, to die by light. A shameful one, too.

Dare has no need for the black paint that cakes the windows in the attic, nor the wooden boards nailed to them, and not the three layers of thick heavy curtains added for the sake of it. He can walk as freely in the sunlight as my cousin can, as any light male or hybrid can.

Still, Dare chooses to lodge in this arched room with me, just as he chooses the dark itself. And so that is where he is when I climb the stairs and duck under the short, squared doorway.

He stands at the mirror, free from the constraints of his armour, smelling faintly of bathwater and soap. Some droplets of water fall from his combed waves and trickle down his spine.

Eamon sits on the foot of my bed.

I spare him a nod of greeting as I make my way to the dresser.

I begin to peel off my leathers piece by piece, and as it always does, it feels something like removing strips of my own skin. I feel the loss.

“You cut it close,” Dare tuts. “That halfling is going to get you killed.”