GRAYSON LAID MAILAH DOWN with more care than he had ever given anything.
The mattress dipped under her weight, and for a mont Grayson simply stood over her, watching the shallow rise and fall of her chest.
The tremors had stopped. The bleeding at her fingernails had clotted. Dr. Morrison would call this a dical crisis requiring monitoring, fluids, a controlled recovery environnt.
Grayson pulled the blanket over her and turned off the light.
He sat at the edge of the bed, forearms braced on his knees, and stared at the wall for a long ti.
Seventy-three hours. He had written the protocol with a variable. A blank space. Soone. The word had cost him nothing when he put ink to paper eight months ago, because soone had not yet existed. There had been no face to assign to the 40%, no specific set of hands he’d have to watch bleed into greenhouse soil.
He reached out and tucked a strand of hair from her face with two fingers. Quick. Impersonal. The way a soldier might adjust a fallen comrade’s collar.
He left his hand there anyway.
He made a decision.
He reached inward, past the walls of his own considerable defenses, and found the thread of the dream-bridge.
It was open.
Grayson took it.
Mailah woke to the sll of jasmine.
Not the greenhouse jasmine, which had been crushed underfoot during the fight. This was sothing older. Richer. The kind of scent that ca from stone walls that had absorbed decades of blooming vines.
She was lying on a low daybed, draped in linen so soft it felt like it had been woven from cloud fiber.
The room around her was vast and warmly lit, its arched ceiling painted in faded gold and ivory. Shallow pools of steaming water were set into the marble floor, ringed by low clay urns overflowing with herbs.
Beyond the columns, the sound of water falling over stone created a constant, unhurried rhythm.
Won moved around her. Quietly, efficiently, like they had been doing this since before she was born.
One pressed a cool cloth to her temple. Another settled a ward compress across her shoulders.
A third was sowhere near her feet, and whatever she was doing with her hands felt like the bones in Mailah’s ankles were being unknotted one by one.
Mailah let out a breath she felt like she’d been holding for three days.
Because she had.
She sank deeper into the daybed. The compress on her shoulders slled of eucalyptus.
The linen was cool on the back of her knees. Soone was working oil through the ends of her hair, thodical and unhurried, and the sensation traveled all the way down her spine.
She almost forgot.
Almost.
The thought arrived the way all important thoughts do — sideways, when she wasn’t bracing for it. This isn’t real.
She opened her eyes properly and looked at the ceiling.
The gold paint caught the light in a way that was slightly too perfect, the way things in dreams always are.
A tell.
The droplets in the nearest pool were falling upward before correcting themselves, just barely, just long enough.
She sat up.
The won around her adjusted seamlessly, two of them moving to ease her back down with gentle, practiced hands and expressions of serene encouragent.
Mailah looked around the room. Every archway, every column, every pool of lamplight. She was looking for one specific thing, and it wasn’t there.
She swung her legs off the daybed.
The won exchanged a glance.
One of them — the one with the oil — placed both hands on Mailah’s shoulders with the gentle but immovable pressure of soone who had managed more difficult guests than her.
She guided Mailah back toward the cushions, gesturing toward the steaming pools, toward a low table arranged with fruits and small cups of sothing warm.
Mailah pointed at the archway.
The woman shook her head, smiling, and pressed a ward stone into Mailah’s palm.
It did feel extraordinary. The heat traveled up her arm and settled sowhere behind her sternum, and for a mont Mailah’s eyes drifted shut again involuntarily.
She set the stone down.
She stood up.
She walked toward the archway with the focused energy of soone who had just spent three days proving she could not be redirected, and the won fell into step around her in a loose semicircle, their expressions still calm, still warm, still radiating an almost supernatural serenity that Mailah absolutely refused to be managed by.
One of them stepped in front of her and held out a cup. The steam rising from it slled like warm honey and sothing she couldn’t na, sothing that pulled at her like a tide.
Mailah ducked under her arm and ran.
The corridor beyond the arch was long and barrel-vaulted, lit by oil lamps in iron brackets. Her feet were bare on cool stone and she ran with the particular reckless energy of soone who had spent three days on her knees in the dirt and was not yet fully aware her body should object.
She glanced back.
The won had stopped at the arch. They stood in a row, watching her with the collective patience of people who understood that the drear always cos back eventually.
Mailah grinned. It felt strange on her face, like a muscle she had forgotten.
She turned forward.
She ran directly into a wall.
Except the wall had a heartbeat.
The impact knocked her back a step and a pair of hands caught her by the arms before she could stagger.
Her chin ca up. She already knew. Sothing in her chest had recognized the particular density of him before her eyes confird it.
Grayson.
He was not in his bloodied shirt. He was not the version of himself that had knelt in the ruins of the greenhouse with glass in his hair and soone else’s blood on his hands.
He was simply himself — dark-suited, broad-shouldered, standing in the middle of a dream corridor as though he owned the architecture of it. Which, she realized, he did.
His eyes were blue. Not the black of his power engaged and dangerous, not the silver flash of his demon default.
Blue. The color she had seen only in unguarded monts after his mory loss, bright and storm-edged, lit from sowhere inside.
She stared at him.
The sound that ca out of her was not dignified. It was sowhere between his na and a noise of sheer, involuntary relief, and she said it twice before she could stop herself.
"Grayson!"
She crossed the distance between them in two steps and reached for his face.
He caught her wrists.
Not cruelly. But firmly, with both hands, and he held her at arm’s length with an expression she couldn’t imdiately read.
It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t his CEO-boardroom blankness. It was sothing more concentrated than that, sothing that looked almost like restraint under pressure.
His eyes moved over her face the way soone checks a map after a catastrophe — assessing, cataloguing.
"You’re depleted," he said. Flat. Clinical. The words of a man reading a report, not standing three feet from soone who had just survived the unsurvivable for him. "Your energy signature is already pulling."
"I don’t care," she said.
"You should."
His jaw set. "I’m feeding right now," he said. "Without touching you. Without trying. That’s how dangerous this is, and you want to stand here and argue with about it."
"I’ve survived a lot," she said. "If you think one night with you is going to be what kills , Grayson, you have a very high opinion of yourself."
The corner of his mouth did not move. But sothing behind his eyes did.
"I’m not doing this." The words ca out asured. Final. The tone he used to end board etings and interrogations. "Your body is in that bed. Recovering. What you’re asking is indefensible."
"We’re in a dream," Mailah said.
"Exactly. In a dream, with you, I feed," he said, and the word ca out stripped of all the clinical distance he usually wrapped around it. Raw. Almost reluctant. "The connection between us doesn’t care about the boundary between sleeping and waking. I take from you whether I an to or not, and right now you have nothing left to give."
Mailah looked at him for a long mont.
"I feel fine," she said.
She took a step toward him. He held his ground.
She took another. His jaw tightened.
She reached up and put her hand flat against his chest, over the place where his heartbeat was slower than hers, steadier, the particular rhythm of sothing that had been alive for longer than she could fathom.
"I feel," she said quietly, "absolutely fine."
He looked down at her hand. A long, asured look. Then back at her face.
"You are the most reckless person I have encountered in centuries," he said.
The words were not a complint. They were not delivered like one. But they landed sowhere in her chest anyway, warm and entirely unwelco.
Sothing shifted. Not in his expression — Grayson’s face gave very little away even in dreams, apparently — but in the quality of the air between them.
The corridor, the lamps, the distant sound of water, all of it contracted slightly, the way a room does when attention narrows to a single point.
He reached out.
His hand closed around the back of her neck, thumb pressing into the line of her jaw, tipping her head back. Not gently. Not cruelly. With the particular calibrated force of soone who has decided sothing and is no longer debating it.
"If you’re exhausted—" he began.
"I’m not," she said.
He looked at her for one more mont — studying, calculating, that blue gaze moving across her face like he was solving an equation — and then he turned, and the corridor was gone, and there was a bed.
It simply appeared, the way things do in dreams when the person constructing them stops pretending they weren’t going to do this all along.
He laid her down with a different kind of deliberateness than the greenhouse — not the desperate carefulness of a man handling sothing broken, but the focused intention of one who has made a decision and stopped second-guessing it.
He set her against the pillows with both hands and then stood over her, and the look on his face was sothing she had no word for.
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