Jace
She had touched my face.
That was the thought waiting for me when the last watch ended and the sky began to grey at the edges and the forest came back into its shapes around me. I had been sitting with my back against the birch trunk for three hours, turning it over methodically, and I was no closer to putting it down than I had been when I picked it up.
She had touched my face. Trailed one finger across my mouth in the dark with the careful deliberateness of someone reaching for something they knew they shouldn’t. At first, I let her, just to see what she was going to do, and I had grabbed her wrist and felt—
I pressed my thumb into the scar on my hip and looked at the treeline.
Rogues didn’t feel the mate bond. That was the understanding, the accepted truth of what separation f
