His eyes drop to the hollow of my throat, where the tunic neckline pulls askew and a thin curve of violet ink shows against the brown of my collarbone. The look on his face goes beyond hunger. It carries the sharp attention of a creature verifying its territory remains unchanged. The mark pelts once under his attention, a heavy, spreading warmth, and my knees come dangerously close to buckling for reasons I decline to name to myself, let alone to him.
"Stop looking at it," I bite out, my skin flushing hot beneath his scrutiny.
"You wish me to stop looking at what I made," he observes, the idea seeming to amuse him.
"I wish you would get your centuries-old face out of my corner and leave," I tell him, pouring every ounce of venom I can muster into the command.
He merely offers a low, thoughtful "Mm," before dismissing my defiance entirely. Instead of retreating, he leans in slowly without any dramatic theater, bringing his sheer mass to bear.
A small shift of his weight brings his throat a few inches closer to my face, close enough for me to smell him, which is apparently a thing I am doing now. An alien Reaper should smell like rust and engine coolant and ancient dust. This one smells like warm metal and something clean and green, a faint living scent that reminds me of the internal gardens he mentioned the ship kept. The heat of his breath moves across the top of my hair. The living metal veins at his wrist brace beside my head and thump steadily against the obsidian.
I stop breathing.
His eyes have come back to mine. The red is deeper now, almost molten, and a small, inhuman tension sharpens his face—the closest approximation of a smile he permits. The amused kind. The predator-watching-prey kind. The kind that puts my back flat against the obsidian and makes the mark under my tunic clack hard enough to hear in my ears.
"You are frightened of me," he notes, registering the erratic jumping of my pulse against the close air.
"Observant," I fire back, refusing to let my voice shake.
"And you will not look away." His eyes lock on mine, drawn to the contradiction of my fear and stubbornness.
"Also observant." The syllables dissolve into the quiet before they even leave my lips, stripped of their usual bite. "You want a medal?"
"No." His eyes drop, just for a heartbeat, to my mouth. Drop. Linger. Lift.
The world tilts under my feet. The hot, restless place under my sternum, the one I shoved away a minute ago, claws its way open and answers him without my permission. I feel it happening. He feels it happen. The red in his eyes ignites. The line of his mouth hardens into a shape past amusement, past hunt, past every version of hunter and hunted I have ever known. Something sharper. Something that landed in this ward without my invitation and has decided to stay.
And he sees it.
He sees it, and his focus hardens, and for one suspended second I am absolutely certain he is about to close the last few inches between us—absolutely certain—and I’m unsure, with a cold, sickening clarity, what I am going to do when he does.
Except that he does not.
He holds there. Close enough that the rise of his chest almost touches mine. Close enough that his breath is warm on my forehead. He holds there, and the hot red banks down by a fraction as something like discipline tames whatever just stirred nearby, driving it back into the dark where he has kept it caged his whole centuries-long life.
He exhales, and his hand leaves the wall beside my head.
He steps back once. Twice. Without turning his back to me, he retreats toward the door the way a large animal retreats from something it has decided, against its own instinct, to leave alive for one more night.
At the threshold, he pauses. The red in his eyes lifts to my face again, and he speaks, and his voice turns into a shade rougher than it was when he walked in.
"Clean yourself, Nyra," he rumbles. "Or I will come back and do it for you."
The door closes.
I stand with my back to the door, pressure building under the mark as my hands start to tremble.
I breathe through it, restrained and disciplined. The breathing I learned in the back alleys of Orun when a man twice my size was walking away from me and I needed my hands stable enough to count whatever I had just lifted off him before he doubled back. In through the nose. Out, through the teeth. In. Out. Until my heartbeat settles into something I can work with.
What rises after the shaking has something sharper in it than calm. A cold, bright realization that cuts under the fear and plants itself at the top of my skull.
He left.
He came within a breath of doing something without a plan or a precedent, only to turn and leave. Which means he can be pushed. The Reaper who crushes scavenger hoppers and marks women against their will, the Reaper who is almost certainly older than every person I have ever met, canslip.He walked in pious and walked out rougher than he arrived, and I watched it happen, and that is the first real piece of ground I have stood on since I crossed the breach in his flank.
Fine.
Fine, fine, fine. I can work with slip.