they met hers. “Your father could not forgive you for stepping so far outside the lines?”
“He’d gone as far as he was able, and you have to understand,” she said softly, “it was far for a man of his age and time and culture. He was a very good father.” Shuddering, she surreptitiously wiped away the tears she hadn’t been able to keep from falling. “But when I walked away from the marriage and from his dream of me holding the most important job in the village, it was too far.”
• • •
Stefan didn’t know how a normal man, one whose emotions hadn’t been Silenced as a child, would react in such a situation, but he knew what Tazia needed. Except he had to wait until they were alone, where there was no risk he’d be reported. This area wasn’t heavily populated by Psy, but there were enough around that he might be recognized.
He held his instincts in check the entire way back to the hotel, the control grinding at him. Tazia’s shoulders were bowed, her face wan. Closing and locking the hotel door behind them, he put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around. When she didn’t resist, he enclosed her in his arms, keeping his hold gentle.
Until she burrowed into him, her hands fisted against his chest. He tightened his hold, held her as she cried. Right then he was helpless in a way he hadn’t been since he was that bleeding, desperate child trying to shift half a mountain off his family. There was nothing he could move or shift for her, nowhere he could take her at this instant.
All he could do was hold her.
When he felt her stop crying after a long, long time, he lifted her into his arms and carried her to her bedroom. Placing her on the bed, he lay down beside her curled-up body . . . and sensed the pain controls snap one by one, the fragile foundations on which they’d been laid no longer in any way hospitable.
It should’ve been excruciating, but he felt only a sense of freedom, as if he could finally breathe. The medics who’d evaluated him couldn’t have known the extent of the weakness in his conditioning or they’d never have let him out into the world. But then, he hadn’t realized the magnitude of the fault lines inside him until Tazia had walked into the station.
Something in him had broken that day.
Today, the already fractured ice splintered into countless shards.
Curving his body around her smaller one, one arm under her neck, the hand of his other on her hair, he just stayed with her. She didn’t reject his touch, her body melting into his as they lay there beneath the afternoon sunlight that slanted into the room through the blue-painted wooden blinds. Used to the rhythms of her sleep, he sensed when she gave in to exhaustion.
He knew he should rise. Tazia wouldn’t want a man who wasn’t her husband to sleep with her in her bed. But when he tried to retrieve his arm, she made a complaining sound and wriggled closer. He could’ve easily reached into her mind, her human shields thin, and woken her, but he would never breach that trust. The only time he would ever enter Tazia’s mind was if she invited him in.
“Stefan.” A sleepy murmur.
“Shh. I’ll go.”
“No.” She curled her fingers over his arm. “Stay.”
It was the only word he needed to hear. Settling, he let the sun warm his skin as Tazia’s presence warmed parts of him he hadn’t known existed, and he slept.
• • •
They didn’t wake again until sometime in the night hours, the world hushed around them. Having forgotten to bring in food for later, they ate all the tiny boxes of crackers and cheese in the hotel suite, as well as the packets of nuts, drank enough water to counter the salt, then fell asleep again. And this time when they ended up in the same bed, it wasn’t by happenstance.
Tazia turned in the doorway to her room, looked at him over her shoulder, and in her eyes was a quiet invitation. He went because he couldn’t say no to Tazia, and they slept again, this time even more closely intertwined, his legs tangled with hers, her arm around his waist and his hand fisted in her hair.
He woke in the morning to the feel of her slipping away, but there was no awkwardness when they met again afterward. This