My eyebrows pulled together. Okay. This was a difficult one. I needed to pick something I wanted to know, whichever thing would make him the happiest to tell. But he was so complicated, my wonderful, layered, tormented soulmate, and I wasn't sure what the best thing to choose was.

"Leah," he said gently. "It's okay. Whatever you want will be good."

I looked back up at him. Those wolf eyes looked down at me, eyes I had first seen while dying, the best, most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my entire life. I remembered, suddenly, being at prom as a teenager and spinning in a circle with my best friend, our hands interlinked and our eyes on each other, our laughter drowned out by the throbbing music. Everything around us had blurred into nothing but streaks of color, but we were in perfect balance, our eyes locked together, and though we were the ones moving it felt like the world spun around us, our faces immovable fixtures in each other's gaze.

And I could feel it, too, the sense of standing on the precipice, as I looked into his face. Those eyes would hold me for the rest of my life, always in perfect balance with me, my true north in a crazy world. The words were on my tongue – I love you – and like a gentle finger laid across my mouth, I silenced myself. It wasn't the right time, not when I was lying in a bath because the scent of my desire was agony for him, and not when I'd been in his room because three people had put me there so that I could destroy him.

"Tell me how you fell in love with me," I said.

His eyes went soft, full of longing and unconditional love. "That's what you want to know?" Dain asked, his voice hoarse.

"More than anything," I replied, unable to take my eyes off of him.

"Then I'll tell you," he said. Dain leaned against the edge of the tub, looking only into my face, with my naked body on display.

Love, I thought. What he wanted more than anything in the world was my love. And he had it, and I knew it would make him happy to know, and I wanted to tell him—Not now, the other part of me said, and I listened to her, because I knew she was right. He wouldn't believe anything from my lips right now, and it would only be devastating to hear those words when he couldn't trust them. But Dain could tell me about his love, and maybe that would be almost as good.