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SEREN

T he warmth is the first thing I notice.

Not from the fire in the hearth, nor the silken sheets tangled around my limbs. This heat is something deeper, something that lingers in the spaces between my skin and my bones, as if he is still there, pressing into every inch of me.

The room is too quiet.

No voices, no movement beyond the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of his breath beside me. He hasn’t left.

A part of me expected him to be gone when I woke. A part of me wanted him to be.

That same part, the part that has always fought, always resisted, always run does not pull away.

Xirath lies next to me, half-propped against the pillows, his golden eyes heavy-lidded, watching.

Watching me.

A slow exhale slips from my lips, but it does nothing to steady the chaos unraveling in my chest.

His expression remains unreadable, but the tension in his shoulders tells me what he will not.

This has changed something.

Everything.

The truth presses down on me, suffocating.

I should speak.

Say something, anything to break the thick silence coiling around us.

Yet, my throat tightens when I attempt it, as if the words refuse to take shape.

Xirath shifts beside me, the sheets pulling lower, exposing the carved planes of his chest, the streaks of crimson along his obsidian scales.

Memories of his touch flash like wildfire across my skin.

Heat rushes to my cheeks, and I force my gaze away.

A mistake.

My body betrays me, aching, remembering.

This was not supposed to happen.

His fingers brush against my arm. A slow, deliberate touch.

A tether. A reminder.

A warning.

"You’re thinking too much," he murmurs.

My jaw tightens, muscles coiling with resistance. "I’m thinking exactly as much as I should be."

The ghost of a smirk tugs at the corner of his lips, as if he expected my reaction.

He is too calm.

Too collected, too steady, as if last night has not ruined him the same way it has ruined me.

"You regret it." The statement is flat, unbothered, yet there is something beneath it.

Something he is not saying.

I pull the sheet higher over my chest, fingers curling into the fabric. "I don’t know what I feel."

A lie.

He catches it immediately.

Golden eyes narrow, sharp and assessing. "You hate being trapped. But you keep coming back to me."

His words scrape too close to the truth.

The tension thickens to the point of suffocation.

I push myself up, forcing distance between us. His gaze follows every movement, unreadable yet too knowing.

"Don’t make this something it’s not," I snap, hating the way my voice wavers.

Xirath does not look away.

His fingers skim my wrist, slow and unyielding. "Tell me what it is, then."

I cannot.

There is no name for what burns between us.

No rational explanation for the way my body responds to him, not as a prisoner, not as a possession, but as something else.

Something I don’t know what to name or what it even means.

A sharp inhale stings my lungs, but the words slip free before I can stop them. "This changes nothing."

A dangerous humor darkens his expression. "Then why are you trembling?"

I snatch my wrist from his grasp, ignoring the way his touch lingers beneath my skin.

Panic claws at my ribs, rising, rising, rising.

I am losing myself.

I am losing the fight.

Xirath sees it.

He sees everything.

The truth sits between us, unspoken but suffocating.

I do not hate this.

I do not hate him.

But if I admit that even for a moment there will be nothing left to protect me from the ruin waiting at the end of this path.

He lets me go.

He does not stop me when I stand, does not pull me back into the gravity of his presence.

But I feel him, watching.

A predator biding his time.

A ruler waiting for me to decide what I am willing to surrender.

The decision is not his to make.

It is mine.

I do not have an answer yet.