GIDEON
I felt her before I found her.
The bond had settled into something I was beginning to recognize; a specific register it took on when she was thinking hard.
Not distress. Not the pulling warmth of the midday flicker.
Something more deliberate than either. The quality of someone turning a problem over and over, looking for the seam.
I followed it to the library.
She was on the window seat with a closed book in her lap and her forehead tipped toward the glass.
The afternoon light had moved since she’d sat down. She’d been here a while.
I stopped in the doorway.
This was the part no one warned me about.
Not the bond, not the possessiveness, not the way her scent had written itself into my memory as something that meant safe, which was its own kind of irony, given who I was
