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"Then let it go." He said it plain, the way he said the true ones. "There's no one here to see it. No report. No Dowager. The king himself put me on this side of your door. For once in either of our lives, Diana, there's no one we have to be but this."

* * *

She kissed him then, careful of his shoulder. He made a sound that had nothing of pain in it, and she pulled back an inch to check anyway.

"Was that..."

"Not pain. Do that again."

So, she did. She learned him slowly this time. Slow was all his strapped-up body would allow, and it turned out neither of them minded slow at all. She got him out of the last of the dusted layers with a patience she hadn't known she owned, and every place her hands found, he told her, in the small helpless sounds of a man who had never once in his life been touched only to be touched.

"Tell me if I hurt you," she said, against the warm skin at his throat where the scales gave way.

"You won't."

"Humor me. I've never done this with a man held together by strapping and stubbornness."

"Then we're matched. I've never done this like this at all." His good hand moved slow through her hair. "Every other time in my life, I was somewhere else in my own head. Watching the door. Counting the ways out. I'm not counting anything now. I didn't know a body was allowed to just be here and stay."

"Welcome," she said, and felt him laugh, felt it travel through the hum a half-second before it reached the air.

His good wing tried to come around her out of instinct and caught against the strapping. He went still. Something crossed his face she'd never seen there. Not pain. Shame. He'd spent his life being the one who did the protecting, and being on the other end of it plainly cost him more than the wound did.

"Leave it," she said softly, and put her own arm where the wing would have gone. "You covered me once already tonight. It's my turn. Let me."

And he did, and she watched what it cost him. Letting her hold him was plainly harder than carrying the ceiling had been. He shut his eyes anyway, and something in him that had stood guard for twenty-six years finally, for a little while, let itself sit down.

The hum, when it came, was nothing like the shy pulse from the caves. It rose the moment they came together, low and sure and everywhere at once, and this time she felt it answer in her own chest and not only in his.

"Kavren." She got his name out against his mouth. "The hum. I can feel it now too. On my side. That's new."

"I know. It started the second you told me to come in the door. I don't have a word for it."

"I do." She'd heard Athena describe this once, in a warm room, with a baby on her hip, and she hadn't understood a syllable of it until right now. "Athena has it. With Varek. She told me it feels like the first full breath after years of shallow ones." She put her forehead to his. "She said it means you're mine. That it's already decided, and the only choice left is whether you fight it."

"I'm not going to fight it."

"No," she said, and there was salt in her voice and she let there be. "Neither am I."

*** Kavren ***

Afterward they lay tangled in the low lamplight, careful of the strapped wing. The hum ran between them slow, deep and settled, and for a long while neither of them needed to say a word.

He had spent his life certain he knew every corner of himself. A weapon, a watch kept or a distance held. He lay in the wreck of that certainty now with a human woman's head on his good shoulder and found he didn't miss it. He'd been so sure, for so long, of the small hard shape of his own life. He wasn't sure of anything tonight, and he found he didn't mind that at all.

"So," Diana said eventually, into his chest. "In the interest of full disclosure. I'm reliably told this doesn't come undone. The bond. Athena says it's permanent."

"Good."

"You didn't even think about it."

"I've spent every year of my life being aimed at something I never chose." He turned his head so his mouth was in her hair. "You're the first choice that was ever mine. I'm not going to stand here and pretend to weigh it."

"That was almost romantic."

"I'm learning. You're a bad influence."

"The worst." She found his hand in the dark and laced her fingers through it. "We have to be careful, you know. Out there. The king put you on my door tonight. But his mother's still down the hall sharpening something. Jadirel's still out there with a grudge and a following. And the sun is still dying on schedule. Tomorrow it's back to two feet of distance and correct faces."