“I love you.” She said it like a confession, and with the words a burden she hadn’t even known she’d been carrying eased from her shoulders. In its place was nothing but relief: relief and a sweet lightness that almost brought tears to her tired eyes. “I love you. And if I had my free choice, if we were simply man and woman in this room together, no vows on us, then I … I would choose to love you as a wife, in body and in soul.”

“Mehr.” He breathed her name, looked up at her with those pained midnight eyes, dark and sweet. “We don’t have a choice. You know that. You know he’s taken our choices away from us.”

“We always have choices,” she said. “You taught me that. When you obeyed the word, not the spirit of the Maha’s words, when you chose pain, over and over again, instead of hurting the both of us in … in a different way. When you decided to help me perfect a way to use the Rite of the Bound to save ourselves, even though you knew our hope of success was small and our risks were huge. You showed me what choices really mean.”

“I can’t see,” he said hopelessly. “I just can’t see what choices we have.”

The blankness was encroaching on his eyes. She cupped his face in a hand, willing it away. “You were thinking of the boy you were, and the man you could have been. Think instead of who you are now. Push back the pain if you can,” she pleaded, “and listen to me.”

“I’m trying,” he whispered, his skin burning hot beneath her touch.

“You just as you are now—scars and vows and sigils and all—you are the one I trust,” Mehr said fiercely. “Not some imagined version of you. You. If you esteem me as you claim to do, Amun, then trust yourself as I do. You can let the Maha turn you into an animal, or you can choose to take the love offered to you freely. Look beyond the pain and the blood and tell me: What choice do you want to make?”

He looked at her, looked through the pain, as if he saw her and only her. His grip on her hand relaxed, fingers uncurling slowly to let her free. She pulled back her own hand, just a little, but remained still. Waiting for him. He rose up on one arm, shaking with the effort. She watched, holding her breath in her throat, as he reached a hand out, and cupped her face.

Then he kissed her.

The kiss was tentative—just a bare, brief touch of his mouth against hers, the fleeting pressure of his warm skin. They parted. Then Mehr leaned forward, into his hand and his lips, and kissed him back.