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Luna squeezed in closer and gripped him at the nape, her front pressed to his. “I am not scared. We will have every opportunity. You’re holding me, you’re whole whether you realize it or not, and you don’t have to say anything because that look I’ve been longing for already says everything I need to know—that you adore me. So…”

His words from their shared dream in Thodelebor’s caves—a bold list of declarations from a version of him who had no idea how fucked up he was. How much guilt and shame and pain he was truly carrying around.

She laid a kiss on each of his lids, the diamond drops of his fresh tears clinging to her. “I love you.”

A kiss on his cheekbones, either side of his jaw. “I love you.”

Her lips met his for the barest moment and she whispered, “Stars above, I love you, Brand,” against them.

Luna dragged her thumbs along his lashes. “I will love you until you realize that you, too, are all that is lovely and blessed in this world. Everything that is good. Whatever happened to you. Whatever you need. I will love you through the healing of it, no matter how long it takes. I will love you if it never happens and you stay exactly as you are for the rest of our lives. I loved you before, I love you now, and I will always love you, regardless of all else.”

He wanted to bellow to the rafters when she pulled away before he found his voice.

Until she walked around to the other side of the bed and pulled the heavy linens down, fluffing the pillows as she said, “I can’t pick you up and tuck you in as you did for me, but know the desire is there and the sentiment stands. Come on.” She patted the downy mattress. “Get yourself cozy.”

The denials lodged in his throat were cleared by some wretched sound between a laugh and a sob.

Shite. He was the world’s greatest fool.

This involuntary silence, the freeze over his mind and tongue, was as much a prison as Okthana’s had been. Brand was stuck screaming inside of himself instead of raining sweet words on her skin. Instead of doing something to show her what she meant to him. What her declarations fucking meant to him.

“As I said,” she murmured, “we will have every opportunity. I will never leave you again, remember? I am yours and you are mine.”

Luna climbed in, her back against the nest she made at the headboard, and opened her arms.

It would take a thousand lifetimes to even begin to deserve her.

Instead of his hands or lips, Brand traced her features with his gaze, locked on her face as he scooted back and laid down in her embrace. At the sound of her steady heartbeat against his ear, he released a shaky sigh and let it carry him to sleep.

This time, when he traveled through dream and nightmare in turns, he had her light to keep him company.

In the morning, Brand awoke in his greater form.

It was the same the next day.

And the next.

Every time, Luna talked him sweetly back, only for Brand to be rendered silent again. The worst, longest episode of his life, the secrets and traumas holding his tongue in their poisonous claws.

After the first time, Luna fortified her broken bed, making it big enough to hold him in his rage. She brought him food, and helped him drink cool water and pleasantly bitter wine. She made sure he stayed clean, using her magic and the basin of water in turns. She burned herbs and candles, the same scent wafting in the air that always clung to her. She knelt at his feet, teaching him how to count and breathe through it when the vise around his lungs threatened to kill him. She ran her fingers through his growing hair, the pointed tips of her nails dragging along his scalp as he wept.

She sang the same, sad songs she’d crooned in his tower stairwell night after night. The ones he’d hated because he couldn’t figure out why they hurt so much.

Brand understood now. That wasn’t the beast’s repugnance, it was his own. Not for the sound of her voice, but that she was so far away while crying out her laments, his greater half crying out just as fiercely.

Brand never spoke. Couldn’t, no matter how hard he tried. Every time he thought to raise his voice, every time he tried to open his mouth…

Guilt strangled him. Shame gagged him. Terror smothered him. Embarrassment choked him. He didn’t know where to start. Didn’t know how to admit to the things he did that led to the rest of the shite. Didn’t know which detail would free him. Didn’t want to scare her away. Didn’t want that fire in her sea glass eyes to fade.

Brand didn’t know what to do. Burning Solyrian, he didn’t know what to fucking do.

Luna never pushed. She didn’t prod or judge or expect bloody anything from him.

He wasn’t sure if it helped or made everything worse.

More often than not, she sat at his side, humming away, a pinched look of concentration on her face as she wove her sparkling threads of moonlight into…something. He barely followed the hook as it dipped in and out, and her progress was always bundled into an unruly heap in her lap.

He simply watched her, hour after hour. Day after day.