His expression softened into love as he looked at me in the dawn light. "You already know that I want your forever freely given," Dain said in a soft voice. "I won't push you. I think, though, that I have done us both a disservice by pretending, so now I'm inviting, instead." He swallowed, looking down. "It is difficult for me to reveal the things I desire, but I'm finding that I don't want you to reach for my hand and be surprised by whose fingers close around yours."

"Invitation accepted, with gratitude," I said, blinking away tears as I reached up and wrapped my fingers around his hand. "Let's share what comfort we can with each other." I gave him a smile, a weak offering at best, but Dain only drew my hand to his mouth and kissed me again, his lips brushing against the back of my hand.

"It may be more of you comforting me, I think," he said, before releasing me from his embrace and resettling his wing-arms behind him. Dain took my hand and laid my arm over his, the way we had walked into the revel. "Are there... things that might help you?"

I could hear the desperation under the question, and the hope that he might be able to give me the answer that my heart kept clawing for. The poisonous thoughts grown from the words of a Court of Mercy lord slid into my mind like vipers, hissing their questions. What won't you let Zhiolas and Alluin say about you? Why are you more dangerous in the winter, and when the moon is in the sky? Why would someone say that you've never shown me what you look like? And behind them all was my heart, wounded by him keeping his secrets. Dain, what aren't you telling me?

"I recognize that face," he said, his brows pulling together in a troubled expression. "What dark thing is twined around your soul?"

His arm was warm under mine, his fingers strong. I knew this was Dain. I'd known him from the first moment I'd seen him. I'd seen into his heart; it shouldn't matter to me that there were other pieces to him.

But it did.

"You're allowed to have secrets," I said quietly, looking into his face.

Fear tightened Dain's face, his ears drawing back and down and his mouth parting. "Did you at least break their nose, too?" he asked, with forced levity.

I could even hear the fear in his voice, a barely-leashed terror. Whatever his secret was, he was certain it would make me reject him. The horrible irony of it was that the simple knowledge that he was hiding something was what might make it impossible for me to choose him.