Yes, she thought, but some part of her delighted at the way his voice broke.
“No,” she said, and brazenly turned her lips to his palm. She slid her fingers up the scruff of his jaw before gently threading them in his hair. His lips touched hers, warm and soft, foreign and familiar at once, and nothing existed save for him and her and this.
He eased her back into the pillows, and she fell drunk on the faint sweetness of pomegranates and the weight of him. A sound escaped her when he pulled back with a torn exhale and skimmed his hand down the length of her, lingering at her thigh.
“Wait,” she gasped. She was going to explode. Irritation flitted across his gray eyes, and she felt the sting of it as acutely as a knife.
“What is it?”
“If we do everything now, then—”
She had never seen anyone so still, as if even his heart stopped at his command.
“Then what?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said quickly. Her pulse pounded at her neck. She didn’t feel empowered as she usually did with him. She didn’t feel longing. She felt … debased. Everything felt wrong and she wanted to disappear.
“Interesting,” he murmured. He swept off the bed, and she saw a line of deep mauve on his robes that hadn’t been there before. “I thought you would never make the mistake of falling in love.”
Zafira went cold at the sudden change in his voice. The way it deepened into velvet. Confident in a way only immortality can provide. There was only one to whom she had spoken those words aloud: the Arz. There was only one who had listened from its depths. Who had befriended her as she had him.
His eyes, no longer gray, glinted amber in the lantern light.
A scream clambered to her throat, and she tried, tried, tried to shout, but her voice was swallowed by horror and the dizzying sensation of his mouth. A thousand and one emotions slowed her down: fear, disgust, anger, and—worse—desire.
Before a warning repressed it all: the Jawarat was in plain sight.
“You are every bit as decadent as I imagined, Huntress.” The Lion’s voice was a caress as the room festered with shadows, dark as a hollow grave.
Her pulse pounded in time to her single thought: The Lion. The Lion. The Lion.
“I missed you, azizi,” he said softly, eyes darkening as they roamed her supine form.
My darling.
She had a terrible, sickening realization: Some twisted part of her had missed him, too. She had never really lived without him. He had always been within reach, his presence exuding from the strange trees and impenetrable darkness, the shadows curling around her limbs, calming her.
A wicked grin contorted his mouth. “Did you not miss me? We are one, you and I.”
“You’re not the first to say that,” she bit out as she dug her fists into the sheets and forced herself upright and out of bed.
He canted his head, unveiling a lock of white in his dark hair as he neared. Slowly, his features shifted into his own, and the Lion stood before her, golden tattoo glinting in the lantern light. ‘Ilm, it said. Knowledge. For which his hunger could never be sated.
“But it was I who made you what you are, my bladed compass, and because of it, you cleverly bound yourself to t
he Jawarat, successfully gleaning the knowledge of the Sisters of Old.”
His brows rose at her hesitation.
“You fear it,” he realized with a soft tsk, backing her to the wall.
She allowed it, for it was drawing him away from the Jawarat.
“You fear the doors that knowledge throws open. Embrace it, azizi. There is no greater gift.”
“I will never—”
“Shh,” the Lion murmured, stopping her with a thumb to her mouth, calluses rough across her lips. “Brash promises so quickly take us in directions we don’t like.”