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“I need help reacting to something,” Kat announced as she slotted herself in at Emory’s shoulder.

Ever since the Third Century had been released from digging in favor of furnishing guard rotations for the prince, Giselle had taken their newfound free time as an opportunity to double down on drilling, and Emory had been dragged along for the ride.

Kat had found him leaning on the edge of the fence that demarcated this camp’s training grounds, watching as Giselle stomped her way through a familiar set of spear drills.

Kat couldn’t help but wonder whom Giselle was picturing at the end of her spear when she practiced century tactics like this.

The Demon Lord’s defeat had wiped the notion of thrall armies from this plane completely.

Staying signed on as a soldier meant that the next enemy you faced in tight ranks on the battlefield might be just as human as you were.

Once they defeated the last Lesser Lord, that was.

“Hello to you too,” Emory said, tearing his eyes from his pupil to flash Kat a boyish, almost sheepish smile that had her fighting the urge to check over her shoulder and make sure no one else could seeit.

The past two weeks had been a unique sort of torment, with Emory suddenly remarkably underscheduled and Kat pulled relentlessly back into the prince’s orbit with orders to uncover a traitor in their midst. There’d been no time to continue the conversation they’d started in the woods outside Fallon, and Kat could barely look at him without feeling the itch to drag him into the first dark corner she could find.

Duty had reared its ugly head to remind them of their true priorities.

It was that duty she tried to focus on now as she leaned in and muttered, “I just had an illuminating little chat with Faye Laurent, and now I think we might be able to narrow our investigation down to two. It has to be either Celia or Daya.”

Kat filled him in on the details, bent close enough that he could hear her without raising her voice but not so close that any passerby could accuse them of anything untoward.

She couldn’t help second-guessing every inch of distance between them now.

Faye had seen clean through her. How many of their compatriots were just as savvy?

She could feel the same tension in Emory as he listened, attuned as she always was to the way her battle partner moved and reacted.

It had been months since the last time they were in battle together, but she recognized this rigidity and hated feeling like she was the cause of it.

They were supposed to be in peacetime. Why did it feel like they had more to fear now than when the High King of Hell was blighting their land?

“So the prince’s plan is to put a hold on the couriers and…wait?” Emory asked after a long beat of silence filled only by Giselle’s distant grunts. “Surely there’s more that can be done.”

“Not without incurring their suspicion,” Kat replied. “Unless…”

“Unless?”

“Their focus has to be on the prince, and they’ll be paying close attention to any action he takes that might indicate he’s on to the traitor. But the infantry is nothing but background noise to them. Our own could observe them beneath their notice.”

“Say the word and I’ll marshal the troops,” Emory muttered, low and serious. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small cloth bag. “Candy?”

Kat let out a startled chuff at his sudden about-face. The bag was stamped with a familiar confectioner’s seal. “But these…”

He pushed it toward her insistently, and she took it. “You spotted them in Fallon on the day we went looking for the hand pies.”

Several other things had happened that day that had shunted her memory aside until this moment.

Kat unraveled the string wound around the bag and tipped the package over, shaking a handful of small candies into her palm.

They were pale white, and the scent of mint and sugar wafted from them.

This she did remember—the way the sudden whiff had done nothing to help with her borderline insatiable hunger as they hunted the city for Roberto’s cart.

“You were a little busy in the day following, but I doubled back before we broke camp to see if they were worth the fuss.”

“You didn’t have to,” Kat protested, even as she resisted the urge to cram them in her mouth immediately. “They aren’t on the list.”

“We could add to the list,” he suggested. “It’s not set in stone.”

“You haven’t even shown it to me,” Kat reminded him.

Something about the notion of expanding their ambitions rankled at her.

It was no insult to the ground they’d already covered, but it felt like the kind of thing that could easily get out of hand.

They couldn’t be making up goals just to check them off.

She didn’t even know how long the list was, and she got the sense Emory was afraid to show her—that he worried it might scare her away.

“Hey,” he said firmly. “The list is a rule we invented to give ourselves a reason to treat each other. But I don’t want it to be the only reason.”

“Oh, am I being rewarded for something?” Kat asked slyly.

The tips of Emory’s ears had reddened, and he cast a distressed look over to Giselle, who was mercifully still focused enough that she hadn’t noticed her mentor’s attention slipping away. “Can’t I do something nice for you just because I want to?”

Yes, she wanted to say. Forever, she would have added.

What a wonder it would be to be spoiled for the rest of her life by this man’s generosity, but that thought was far too big for this moment and the tiny candies nestled in her palm.

They were barely a week away from the capital.

Barely two weeks away from Adrien’s victory ball.

The day Kat would decide the shape of her future was almost upon them, and the dread was only getting more and more concrete by the moment.

For years, soldiering had been an obligation, which meant she’d never had to think about what she’d be without it.

She missed the forge. Missed her father.

Missed the feeling of a hard day’s work going toward making something, not advancing an arbitrary line on a map on the orders of someone who wasn’t risking their life the same way she was.

But she was so much more than a forge girl now. She’d put in the work to hone her token. There was a door open, and the temptation to walk through it was only growing day by day.

Kat held her palm out, offering it to Emory.

“I got them for you,” he insisted, holding up his hands.

“And what did you get for yourself?” she asked.

“Honestly, my purse was a little light after our last excursion together,” he said sheepishly. “But I had a few pennies, enough for something small.”

Their last excursion together. Where he’d nearly fought an old man over being able to buy her a meat pie, then emptied out his coin purse for the orphanage matrons and their charges.

Suddenly it was all Kat could see—the way this man gave himself away ceaselessly.

The way he enlisted the second he was able to.

The way he spent his spare time training up a teenaged girl to make sure she’d survive the front lines.

He gave and gave and gave. He left so little for himself.

And what had Kat done? She took. She took his offerings.

She took the prince’s attention and brought her whole century into the line of fire in the process.

If she walked through the door that had swung open for her, she’d take the place that Emory deserved, the officer position only she could qualify for with the golden token around her neck.

Again, she pushed her hand toward him, and this time he didn’t resist as she tipped one of her candies into his palm.

There were so many things she didn’t dare say out loud.

That half the joy of this little quest they’d constructed for themselves was sharing a good thing together.

That now that there was a future to consider, she wanted to spend as much of that future as possible finding every good thing in the realm they could share.

That nothing since the end of the war—not even the threat of the Lesser Lords hunting them—had made her feel dread like the moment Faye insinuated that she knew their little secret.

“Together?” she breathed instead, and maybe that was the heart of it. This question that was lurking in the space between them, the one they kept needing to answer over and over again.

Emory popped the candy in his mouth, and as always, she moved in tandem with him.

It was delightful—it couldn’t be anything else. A burst of sugary sweetness, balanced perfectly with the crisp cool of the mint flavoring. She knew she could always rely on Emory to find the best of the best, and she wasn’t even sure if she’d ever told him just how much she loved mint.

“This had better not be a commentary on my breath,” Kat said, just to see him nearly spit his out in a panic as he shook his head.

“What have you guys got there?” Giselle called from across the training field and they both straightened like schoolchildren who’d just been caught by a teacher.

Emory snatched the pouch out of Kat’s hands and tucked it behind his back. “No idea what you’re talking about.”

Giselle trotted over, and if Kat didn’t know any better, she’d swear the kid sniffed the air like a dog. “Did you finally give her the mints?”

“No,” Emory blurted, just as Kat said, “Oh, finally ?”

Giselle flashed a smug little grin. “He’s been carrying them around for weeks waiting for the right moment. Did he try to pass them off as something he just happened to have on him?”

Emory shouldered in front of his self-appointed charge. “Don’t listen to her. No idea what she’s talking about. Heat must be getting to her after all that drilling. Hey, Giselle, want a mint? They keep your mouth very occupied.”

“Who am I to complain about my silence being bought so deliciously?”

So she knows for sure, Kat thought as Giselle folded her hands out eagerly for Emory to shake a few candies into.

Of course she knew. From the pineapple incident alone, she must have been able to tell something was going on, and if that didn’t seal the deal, morning after morning training with Emory would have.

At least she seemed content to be bought off with sweets.

But unlike with Faye, Giselle’s awareness steadied something in Kat.

Sure, the girl’s origins were mysterious and almost certainly noble, but she’d proved herself time and time again in battle, fought side by side with them, and never backed down from an opportunity to be a better soldier—not in the stickler-for-the-rules way that would spell certain trouble, but in a way that made Kat trust this kid with her life.

Giselle caught her eye with a wry smirk.

“You know, I’m finding myself exhausted from a long day of drilling, as my teacher has so wisely pointed out.

I think I might go nap somewhere out of the way before the dinner call goes out and tell everyone I was drilling with Emory if anyone asks where I was. ”

She sauntered past them, setting her practice spear back on the rack. Emory stared after her. “I’ve never seen her call a practice early. Do you think she’s feeling well? Maybe I shouldn’t have given her candy—”

Kat was already dragging him by the hand in the opposite direction.

Privacy in a war camp was one thing. But in the convergence of the Third Century’s operations with all the chaos of Adrien’s road project, Kat had begun to notice gaps.

Consistent gaps, now that she was stuck with the prince long enough to check them day in and day out.

It was into one of those gaps that Kat pulled Emory, barely certain they were out of sight before her lips sealed over his.

He tasted of mint and grit and the salt of his sweat, and she realized somewhat sheepishly that he might have appreciated some forewarning and an opportunity to freshen up.

But from the way he drew her firm against him, she also understood that any further delay would have been torment—or an opportunity for one of their obligations to rip them apart unsatisfied again.

“You’re sure…” he groaned against her collarbone as her wandering hands began to pull at the lacings of his clothes. “Sure this is a good spot?”

“Can never be too safe,” she panted. “But this is Lady Laurent’s storage wagon, and I’ll wager she’s off trying to make herself too useful to notice.”

“Fair, but if someone else notices a wagon rocking…” he countered, bucking his hips a little into hers for emphasis. The wood beneath them creaked worrisomely, but the heat of him growing hard against her made a fierce counterargument.

“Then we’re going to need to be fast and creative,” Kat replied, and from the wicked curve of the smile her lips found in the dark, she knew her challenge had been accepted.

It was different from the first two times they’d been able to have each other properly—no less desperate, but so much more urgent.

Kat felt a little wild with it, with how much she had to let go all at once.

There was no slow lead-in, no long night, no lazy walk back to the camp.

They could be caught at any moment. They had to take everything they could all at once.

There wasn’t the fear of the first time, and a surprisingly comfortable folded spare tent made it a huge improvement on their second, but as Kat tried to let herself sink wholeheartedly into the pleasure of everything Emory had to give, she found that a new sort of desire was starting to build to a much less satisfying peak in her.

She craved, more than anything, a chance to be lazy with this man.

A slow morning. A soft bed. No war hurrying them to scramble from the wreckage of Mira’s tent, no duty dragging them back to camp after their tumble in the woods.

They’d made it to peacetime against all odds. She wanted to enjoyit.

Which wasn’t to say she wasn’t enjoying herself now.

In fact, she wished she could let Emory know exactly how much she was enjoying herself without alerting the road camp to the fact that two people were currently defiling a storage wagon.

It was another maddening way this was good but could be better.

Maybe to love someone was to workshop, whether it was their dogged pursuit of their food quest or the relentless need to have this man in pieces over her body.

That was it, she decided in the aftermath of the second shuddering orgasm he’d coaxed from her in mere minutes. That was the impossible future she craved above all others. A chance to pursue perfection, and to share it with him.