The silence finally trickled in through my frantic thoughts. I glanced back—and found Leander Fabian at his most beautifully unruffled, every bit the untouchable, beautiful, and sinister necromancer I’d first met months ago.

He hadn’t moved so much as an inch from the casual, lounging position where I’d left him a few minutes ago. From the slight upward curve of his lips, he hadn’t a care in the world. Three months ago, even I would have been fooled by that display…before I’d finally discovered his own wounds and insecurities, which he hid so well from the rest of the world.

“Have a good day’s work,” he said calmly, long eyelashes lowering to shield his dark eyes. “I’ll see you sometime soon, I expect.”

Rationality flooded back in on me like a shower of cold water. I dropped my shoes to the floor with twin thuds and let the adrenaline flood out of my sagging shoulders. “Oh, hell. I’m sorry, love!”

He shrugged gracefully. “For what? You know I’d never stand between you and your work…or your family, for that matter.”

“I do know.” I hated the elegant blank of his expression. He never wore it when he felt safe. Not ever. “But I shouldn’t have walked away when we were in the middle of an argument.”

…Not when I knew perfectly well that Leander had been abandoned by the first people he’d ever loved, the moment he’d become an irritation to them. His own parents had handed him over, as a child, to be raised by a vile beast of a necromancer rather than support him themselves through the inconvenient development of his unnatural powers. For all of his adult power and self-sufficiency, that early abandonment had left scars too deep to heal completely even now. It was why he’d taken so long to risk speaking his true feelings to me, and it was why he almost never asked me outright for anything that mattered to him.

Rational or not, I knew that his fears hurt him every bit as badly as my own hurt me—and I could not stand to cause him pain.

Feet bare, I climbed back onto the high bed. “I am sorry.” I held out my right hand. “But you know I won’t ever really leave you. I won’t, no matter how upset I might be! I love you. We’ll work out any problems together.”

Leander drew a deep, ragged breath. The cool mask dropped away from his face to leave raw vulnerability in its place as his long fingers closed around mine. “I know,” he said quietly. “Thank you for saying it, though. You really don’t have to move your workshop here. That was only an idea, not an order. I’ll never mention it again.”