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The silence isn’t cruel.
It’s deliberate.
When I finally look up, his gray eyes are calm. Too calm. That unsettling stillness he wears like armor, like he’s already considered every possible outcome of this moment and picked the one where I survive it.
“You want me to ask,” he says at last, voice low, even.
“I don’t know what I want.”
I expect judgment. Some sharp-edged reminder that I let Ambrose touch me. That I offered myself to him.
But Riven just nods once.
He leans against the tall dresser near the window, arms folding slowly. “You’re not the first person he’s walked away from after tasting something real.”
I flinch.
Not at the truth of it.
At how easily he says it. Like it’s just another scar in the catalog of Ambrose Dalmar’s regrets.
“He didn’t just walk away,” I murmur. “He shattered it. Like he needed to prove that wanting something doesn’t mean he has to keep it.”
His gaze shifts, tracking something invisible beyond my shoulder.
“Ambrose is a strategist,” he says. “Always has been. He calculates his own ruin before anyone else can.”
Riven pushes off the dresser, moving slowly, like I’m a skittish thing he might scare off. He kneels at the edge of the bed, his hands resting lightly on his thighs.
“You need to stop waiting for someone else to choose you,” he says quietly. “You’re not a prize. You’re not a consequence. You’re not a damn detour from destiny.”
My throat clenches. “Then what am I?”
His eyes darken, shifting from crimson to that dangerous, molten gray. “You’re the storm they all forgot to prepare for.”
I don’t breathe.
He reaches forward, and for a moment I think he’s going to touch me—but he stops just shy of my knee, his fingers curling back into his palm.
“Rest,” he murmurs. “Stay here tonight. No one will come in. I’ll keep them out.”
“I don’t want to be alone.”
He doesn’t leave. Doesn’t retreat behind silence or offer sanctuary from a distance. He watches me unravel, soaked and shivering under the weight of Ambrose’s rejection, and without a word—he unbuckles his boots.
Slowly. Deliberately. Like he’s choosing every motion with the same precision he uses to kill.
Then the coat, discarded in a heavy drop.
The shirt next—peeled away, revealing skin marked with threads of ancient power, muscle laced with ink I’ve never seen fully, symbols too old to decipher. He pulls back the sheets and slides in behind me. He presses his chest to my back, arm curling around my waist, hand spanning the center of my ribs like he means to hold the pieces of me in place.
His breath is steady.
Mine isn’t.
“I love you,” I say.
Not tentative. Not fragile.