Page 148 of Silver in the Bone

I shook my head. My stomach was as tight as a drum.

“H-how are you not fr-freezing?” I asked.

“If you were to ask my dear mother, she’d say it was because I was born with gentle fire in my heart,” he said with a strained look in his eyes. “But I think there’s just something wrong with me.”

The heat from his hands felt like it was radiating through our jackets. My jaw locked from the force of the shivers racking my body. Emrys’s face fell with concern.

“That bad?” he whispered.

I nodded. It felt like my lungs had frozen and the silver coating my bones refused to loosen its grip on the cold.

Emrys closed his eyes, turning his face up toward the ceiling of the watchtower, where a winding staircase led to the flat roof. “I am suggesting this in a way that is devoid of anything other than concern for your well-being, and with the full knowledge that you are less likely, in this moment, to be able to punch me for it ...”

I stared up at him, exasperated.

“Yeah, I do deserve that look, but ... I could warm you?” The words came out in a rush as he looked back up at the ceiling, his throat bobbing hard. “I mean, for your well-being. Not any other reason. I said that already, didn’t I? I’m just trying to make the point that it’s only weird if we make it weird, and we don’t have to make it weird. At all.”

The thought was enough to get the blood back to warming my face.

It won’t be anything different than when you and Cabell were kids, I told myself. In the days we had to sleep outside in the cold, we’d huddle together under the blankets to stay alive. And there was nothing there between Emrys and me to make it any more than that.

There wasn’t. And I was so cold.

To keep him from seeing the way the flush was spreading up from my neck to my ears—and to get him to stop talking—I turned onto my uninjured side, facing away from him. Creating space for him beneath the makeshift covers. It wasn’t fair for me to keep them all to myself, anyway.

His hesitation made my stupid heart give a kick. I stared at the dark stones across from me, my body tensed with a held breath. The firelight flickered away like the sun past the horizon.

There was a soft rustle of fabric. As I drew my next breath like the last one before a deep plunge, the jackets lifted and he slipped in behind me, fitting his body to mine.

Heat enveloped me like a summer day, spreading slowly across my every sense, turning my body from stone to skin again. He inched closer still, until my head was tucked beneath his chin, and I let out a shuddering breath as one of his impossibly warm arms wrapped around my waist.

“Is this okay?” he asked, barely a whisper.

I nodded, closing my eyes at the feeling of his heart pounding against my back. His breath stirred my hair, sending a shiver down my spine. I flushed as warmth pooled low in my belly again.

“Still cold?” Emrys’s voice rumbled in his chest.

His arm tightened around me until I brought my own down over it. Every thought, every nerve in my body, narrowed to where my bare skin touched his. Long legs wove through mine as if they belonged there. I wondered, as his hand spread over my belly, if he could feel the honeyed heat pooling in my core.

I breathed in deeply, no longer able to hear anything over the sound of our hearts racing one another to some unknown end. I felt almost drunk with it, the way his breathing hitched when I traced a vein from the top of his hand down over his wrist. I’d never had any other power but this.

It would be reckless to do it again. Absolute madness to let my finger drift farther through the light dusting of hair, tracing over him like a map to someplace unknown. My hand stilled as the soft skin became rough. Scarred.

Emrys turned his cheek to rest against my hair. “I lied to you before.”

A whisper. A secret.

My eyes opened.

“I didn’t get the scars on a job.” I could barely hear him over the pounding of his heart. He breathed the words as if he were scraping them from his soul. “My father gave them to me.”

It took a moment for me to understand what he’d said. Careful to tuck my wounded arm close to my body, I rolled over and pulled back from his chest to look at his face.

“What?” I whispered.

The tendons of his neck strained as he tilted his head back, closing his eyes. The scar there made my breath catch again. “The things he believes ... He’s always been fixated on strange ideas, I guess, but in the last year ... it’s gotten so much worse. This was ... this was punishment when I refused to do what he wanted me to.”

My mind was too quick to fill in the blanks of what had happened to him. I didn’t dare ask any of the questions racing through my mind. I didn’t know what to say. What could I say to any of that?

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