Leon stood looking at her closed eyes and the small fists clenched at her sides and felt something he didn't immediately have a word for.
Is this a trap?
The thought arrived and he waved it away almost instantly. Loriel couldn't pull something like that off. She didn't have the architecture for deliberate manipulation — everything she felt moved straight to her face without passing through any filter first. The closed eyes, the tiptoes, the expression of someone bracing for something they'd decided to stop fighting against — that was just her. Unguarded in the way she apparently was around him specifically, without quite realizing how unguarded she was.
He looked at her for a moment.
