Seraphina woke before the light had fully settled.
For a while she did not move at all, lying on her side with her head propped against her hand, watching him. The room still held the dim hush of early morning, the last of the lamps guttering low, their light tracing the hard lines of his shoulders where the sheets had slipped away.
He looked… unguarded.
Not gentle, never that, but stripped of the distance he wore like armor in waking hours. His hair fell loose across his forehead, his breathing slow and deep, the tension that usually marked him nowhere to be seen.
It stirred something complicated in her chest.
Satisfaction came first, sharp and immediate, followed too closely by something darker—resentment that she had needed this moment at all, that it had come like this, stolen rather than given. Anger followed behind it, quieter but heavier, settling in the space beneath her ribs where it refused to move.
