Zafira’s dreams were usually as straightforward as an arrow, but not this night. One moment, she saw the Jawarat’s vision, only instead of crimson flooding the streets of her village, the blood ran black while the book crowed of redemption, and as she tried to grasp its meaning, to continue onward and see what happened next, the white village darkened and narrowed to a room.
A veiled bed, silks sliding along her bare skin, lips feathering the slopes of her breasts. Her name a whispered prayer in her ear.
She woke with a start. An odd, aching need tightened her skin. The Jawarat purred.
The hour wanes.
But night still clung to the sky. Khara—of course it was still dark out; they were in Sarasin. She made to move from her warm cocoon of blankets and froze.
Her cocoon was not a blanket, but a body, solid and lithe. Nasir. She was nestled against him, wrapped in his arms as if she would disappear if he let go. At some point in the night, he had discarded his gloves. Her dream rose vividly, heat breaking out across her body.
His exhales were steady and measured on her shoulder, and she carefully twisted her neck to face him. He was even more beautiful asleep. The harsh lines of his brow were smooth, long lashes fanning like scimitars against his copper skin. Her fingers itched to brush away the wayward locks that had fallen across his brow.
One of his hands was splayed across her stomach. The other, the one connected to the arm beneath her, rested palm
up beside her face. Ever so slowly, she lifted her hand, marveling at the quake in her fingers. As if she had never once achieved perfect stillness when drawing back an arrow. As if she had never stood unmoving before a deer in the darkness of the Arz.
When she was near him, the very rhythm of the world became something else. A wild, terrifying, incomprehensible thing.
She held her hand over his, two contrasts of color, two differences of size, two palms made for each other.
His hand tightened on her stomach, and his breath hitched. Slowed. Zafira bit back a gasp as something roused low in her belly, embers stirring to a flame.
Turn to him, they seemed to say. Act, they goaded. Or perhaps it was the Jawarat and the mayhem it desired. It was one of the rare moments when she didn’t care if it was, because skies, she wanted it, too.
She closed her eyes and didn’t dare move.
He was adept as she was, the assassin to her hunter. He only needed a heartbeat to read the shift of her breathing. Yet Zafira had noted the way his senses were hindered when it came to her. As if he were suddenly so tangled in his own emotions that he was blinded to all else.
She cracked her eyes open a sliver and relaxed her breathing—as much as she could, considering the pounding beneath her skin. The pillow shifted, and he muttered a curse. One by one, the pads of his fingers lifted.
Silence.
And then, a tumultuous sigh.
“Zafira.” He cleared the roughness from his throat and tried again. “Zafira. We have to go.”
She made what she hoped was a believable act of waking slowly and turning even slower. His eyes were flint, unreadable.
At last, as if he knew, as if he needed to explain why he’d held her, he said, “You were shaking last night.”
“And then I stopped,” she said, holding his gaze to say that she knew why she had stopped and that she liked it and wished the night had never ended. What were words if not feelings?
“And then you stopped,” he replied, honing the weary cadence of his voice as if to say Me too, fair gazelle, me too.
But the night had to end. Everything had to. Cannot all three be one and the same? She’d been so deep within the turmoil of the Jawarat that she’d forgotten the weight of that question. The sweet torment it gave her.
Nasir was watching her, reading her, and his smile moments later was a spoonful of sorrow.
“Come,” he said, fitting his gauntlets and the mask of the Prince of Death back in place.
