Yrene didn’t smile. “You waited for her while she was gone. Didn’t you? Even knowing what—who—she really was.”

He hadn’t admitted it, even to himself.

His throat tightened. “Yes.”

She now studied that woven carpet beneath them. “But you—you don’t still love her?”

“No,” he said, and had never meant anything more. He added softly, “Or Nesryn.”

Her brows rose at that, but he wrapped a hand around the cane, groaning softly as he pushed to his feet and made his way toward her. She tracked each movement, unable to set aside the healing, her eyes darting over his legs, his middle, the way he gripped the cane.

Chaol halted a step away, pulling a small bundle out of his pocket. Silently, he extended it to her, the black velvet like the rippling dunes beyond them.

“What’s that?”

He only held out the folded piece of fabric. “They didn’t have a box I liked, so I just used the cloth—”

Yrene took it from his hand, her fingers shaking slightly as she folded back the edges of the bundle that he’d been carrying all day.

In the lantern light, the silver locket shimmered and danced as she lifted it up between her fingers, eyes wide. “I can’t take this.”

“You’d better,” he said as she lowered the oval locket into her palm to examine it. “I had your initials carved onto it.”

Indeed, she was already tracing the swirling letters he’d asked the jeweler in Antica to engrave on the front. She turned it over to the back—

Yrene put a hand to her throat, right over that scar.

“Mountains. And seas,” she whispered.

“So you never forget that you climbed them and crossed them. That you—only you—got yourself here.”

She let out a small, soft laugh—a sound of pure joy. He couldn’t let himself identify the other sound within it.

“I bought it,” Chaol clarified instead, “so you could keep whatever it is you always carry in your pocket inside. So you don’t have to keep moving it from dress to dress. Whatever it is.”

Surprise lighted her eyes. “You know?”

“I don’t know what it is, but I see you holding something in there all the time.”

He’d calculated that it was small, and based the locket’s size upon it. He’d never seen an indentation or weight in her pockets to suggest its bulk, and had studied other objects she’d placed within there while working on him—papers, vials—against the utter flatness of it. Perhaps it was a lock of hair, some small stone—

“It’s nothing as fine as a party in the desert—”

“No one has given me a gift since I was eleven.”

Since her mother.

“A birthday gift, I mean,” she clarified. “I …”

She slid the locket’s fine silver chain over her head, the links catching in the stray, luscious curls. He watched her lift the mass of her hair over the chain, setting it dangling down to the edge of her breasts. Against the honey-brown of her skin, the locket was like quicksilver. She traced her slim fingers over the engraved surface.

Chaol’s chest tightened as she lifted her head, and he found silver lining her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

He shrugged, unable to come up with a response.

Yrene only walked over, and he braced himself, readied himself, as her hands cupped his face. As she stared into his eyes.

“I am glad,” she whispered, “that you do not love that queen. Or Nesryn.”

His heart thundered through every inch of him.

Yrene rose onto her toes and pressed a kiss, light as a caress, to his mouth. Never breaking his stare.

He read the unspoken words there. He wondered if she read the ones not voiced by him, either.

“I will cherish it always,” Yrene said, and he knew she wasn’t talking about the locket. Not as she lowered a hand from his face to his chest. Atop his raging heart. “No matter what may befall the world.” Another featherlight kiss. “No matter the oceans, or mountains, or forests in the way.”

Any leash on himself snapped. Letting his cane thump to the floor, Chaol drifted a hand around her waist, his thumb stroking along the sliver of bare skin the dress revealed. The other he plunged into that luxurious, heavy hair, cupping the back of her head as he tilted her face upward. As he studied those brown-gold eyes, the emotion simmering in them.

“I am glad that I do not love them, either, Yrene Towers,” he whispered onto her lips.

Then his mouth was on hers, and she opened for him, the heat and silk of her driving a groan from deep in his throat.

Her hands speared into his hair, onto his shoulders, across his chest and up his neck. As if she could not touch enough of him.

Chaol reveled in the fingers she dug into his clothes, as if they were claws seeking purchase. He slid his tongue against hers, and her moan as she pushed herself against him—

Chaol backed them toward the bed, its white sheets near-glowing in the lantern light, not caring that his steps were uneven, staggering. Not with that dress little more than cobwebs and mist, not when he never took his mouth from hers, remained unable to take his mouth from hers.

Yrene’s knees hit the mattress behind them, and she drew her lips away enough to protest, “Your back—”

“I’ll manage.” He slanted his mouth over hers again, her kiss searing him to his very soul.

His. She was his, and he had never had anything he could call such. Wanted to call such.

Chaol couldn’t bring himself to rip his mouth away from Yrene’s long enough to ask if she considered him hers. To explain that he already knew his own answer. Had perhaps known from the moment she’d walked into that sitting room and did not look at him with an ounce of pity or sadness.

He nudged her with a press of his hips, and she let him lay her upon the bed gently—reverently.

Her reach for him, hauling him atop her, was anything but.

Chaol huffed a laugh against her warm neck, the skin softer than silk, as she scrabbled with his buttons, his buckles. She writhed against him, and as he settled his weight over her, every hard part of him lining up with so many soft parts of her …

He was going to fly out of his skin.

Yrene’s breath was sharp and ragged against his ear, her hands tugging desperately at his shirt, trying to slide to his back beneath.