She read to him.
The old language was thick and cumbersome on her tongue, a story of a place that no longer existed. It didn't matter. She could have been reading a ledger or a list of winter stores and the effect would have been the same. The book was a permission slip—a reason to be in his space, to watch his hand rest near hers on the velvet, and to pretend that they were both interested in anything other than the heat of her and the cold of him
She sat on the low chair he had drawn up beside his, close enough that when she turned a page, her elbow passed through the cold that hung around him.
That was the first thing. The cold.
She had felt it before in flashes, at her throat, against her mouth, but sitting beside him for an hour was another matter entirely. He was a block of win
