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“All evidence indicates as much,” he pointed out, laying his body over her, neatly pinning her in place.

“Stormbreaker,” she prompted, and he exhaled, lifting his gaze to the pinking sky.

“It’s a misnomer,” he replied, meeting her gaze again. “A weather mage provoked me into a duel. He threw all sorts of storms at me, as you might expect from that type, and I warded against them, biding my time until he exhausted his magic.”

“Seems like a reasonable approach, if there aren’t others you need to protect, and if your magic in sustaining the wards can outlast theirs hurling lightning at you. Takes patience, though.”

He grinned at her, a wolfish cast to it. “I’m a patient man, I told you.”

Yes, and as he’d demonstrated repeatedly over the course of the night, so much so that she flushed at the memory.

“I love that you blush for me,” he said in a gravelly voice, brushing his lips over her warm cheeks.

She would not be diverted. “So, ‘Stormbreaker’ because you broke his storms?”

“I may be patience, but you are persistence,” he commented on the breath of a laugh. “No, my wards broke—just as he’d nearly run out of magic and had only rain left, but a lot of it. I was soaked in seconds.”

“So, it should be Stormbroken?” she asked, keeping a straight face with effort.

“But for a poetic rescue, yes. Probably the bard felt sorry for me because, in the very next moment, I slipped in the quite copious mud and slid ass over teakettle down a considerable hill.”

She tried not to laugh, but the hilarity broke out of her and she emitted a gargling snort.

Stearanos glared at her. “She laughs at me,” he commented dourly.

“It’s just that…” She gasped, lost control, and laughed entirely. “The image of you… so dignified… sliding down that mud slope…” She couldn’t get out any more, laughing helplessly.

Stearanos waited her out, his sternly set lips twitching, until he finally smiled, then laughed, too, shaking his head. “It’s good to hear you laugh,” he confessed. “A real laugh.”

Reaching up, she ran her fingers over his lips. “It’s good to see you smile a real smile.”

He kissed her fingertips. “You’ve given me a reason to smile, Oneira.” Pressing kisses down her arm, then up her throat to her lips, he kissed her lavishly and lingeringly. Then he broke the kiss and delivered a stern look. “But you owe me a story now.”

“Any story?” she inquired, languid and saturated in the pleasure he brought her. “Or a particular one?”

“Tell me about paying off your debt. Not what led to it,” he said, soothing her as she tensed. “I’d love to hear the good part. What did it feel like?”

She hadn’t thought about how that had felt in so long, overwhelmed as she’d been by the horror of how she’d gotten to that point. Stearanos sounded so wistful, his eyes full of a longing she remembered all too well, that she found she wanted to share that feeling with him. “It was…” She paused, searching for the right metaphor.

“I didn’t expect to feel much of anything,” she explained, trying again. Pushing up, she rolled him onto his back, taking her turn to survey the bounty of male beauty spread before her. He gazed up at her, eyes dark, braids spilling black-and-silver over the colorful pillows. “I was so numb, so emotionally eviscerated after… well, you know. But I wanted it done with. I’d already committed the crime; I wanted my prize, however ill-gotten.

“I took that chest of gold and carried it into Zarja’s court. I don’t know how I looked, but there was this astonished silence. You know how court is never completely silent?” She continued when he nodded in understanding. “I’d never heard it like that—as if everyone held their breath at once. And Queen Zarja, she just watched me come toward her, this look of terror on her face. I nearly felt bad for her, but…” She breathed a laugh, tracing the lines of his scars. “I dumped out that chest of coin at her feet—dramatic, I know—and it was as if I released the weight of all those years. It all dropped away and for the first time in my life, I owed no one anything at all.”

Stearanos listened, lips slightly parted, no tension in them, wonder in his gaze. “I can’t quite imagine,” he said in a hushed tone.

“It wasn’t at all what I’d fantasized, all those years. You know, as you do.” She touched those lips with reverence.

He nodded. “Yes, I know.”

“We joke, don’t we? About those who hold our contracts controlling us with leashes, but that’s exactly how it felt. Even before the geas was gone. As if I’d been tethered and was suddenly free, like I could float away, weightless.”

“Or disappear,” he suggested quietly, “to live alone in the quiet.”

“Exactly.”

“I’m glad you reappeared, Oneira.”

Moved, she bent to kiss him. “So am I,” she whispered against those lips she loved so well. He slipped a hand under her hair, feathering a caress at the nape of her neck, drawing her into a deeper kiss, quickly heating.