“Oh! It’s perfect. A little cool, but that’s never stopped me before.”

“I remember it stopping you once,” Lucien counters, unbuttoning his shirt. “When we first met.”

“You were awfully cold, weren’t you?” I laugh, wetting my hair. “Blackmailing me every chance you got.”

“A precaution,” he argues with zero bite to it.

“A way to test me, more like.” I swim over to the side of the pool. “Well? Did I pass?”

I watch him shrug his shirt off, sword-muscles and thief-muscles and prince-muscles rippling beneath skin. His shoulder blades are as wicked sharp as I remember them—his spine a beautiful curve into the hem of his pants.

Pants.

Oh gods.

I look away just in time, the sound of a belt hitting the ground. My skin prickles red-hot under the water, goose bumps and tightness and…I can’t let him see me like this. Cool. Composed. Zera Y’shennria is always cool and composed and ready with some quip. Worldly. Experienced. Never shy. It’s one thing to see myself naked, but seeing him—

“I thought you said the water was cold?” His voice filters out from somewhere to my left, the water rippling as he slides in. “But your face is bright red.”

“It—it is! Cold!” I start, my throat suddenly sand and gravel. “I was just—”

And then he’s there, in front of me, standing chest deep in water and close enough to feel his body heat radiating through it. Droplets gleam on his collarbone as he leans in, putting one broad hand to my forehead.

“Do you have a fever?” He pauses. “Is it foolish of me to even ask if Heartless get sick?”

I can feel the outline of him, the barest skimming of skin against skin—my thighs, his wrist, his ribs, my fingers. Touching me. Just the lightest touch—

he used that against you, the hunger faintly calls from the depths. touch.

My eyes dart up to his face, points crystallizing in the mush he’s made my brain into. I start, my laugh fragmented.

“I was so happy to be with you again, I almost forgot. You—Varia said you’re a skinreader. All those times in Vetris, that kiss—”

Lucien’s hawk eyes close for a moment, then open with renewed determination.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “For all of that. The first time was a mistake—I didn’t know I could do it. It just…happened.”

“All your powers?” I press. “Just like that?”

“It was a dream.” He nods. “Varia used to tell me witchbloods became true witches in dreams, but I never understood it. Until it happened. That night I called you to the West Tower, with Malachite and Fione, I dreamed of a tree.”

I slide my fingers through the black-silk water uneasily. “The Bone Tree?”