His lips were cold. Impossibly, devastatingly cold, like the first frost of winter against skin that had only known the sun. They brushed against hers, a whisper of a touch, a question asked in the absolute silence of the crumbling shrine.
Caelan watched her eyelids flutter closed, saw the faint tremor that ran through her slight frame, felt the fragile warmth of her breath ghost across his own frozen lips. She did not pull away. She leaned into the touch, a silent surrender that shattered something deep within the icy fortress of his control.
Fool, the ancient, pragmatic part of his mind snarled. She is mortal. She is breakable. She is the spark that will ignite the pyre beneath your entire existence.
But the other part, the part that had felt dormant for centuries, the part that remembered sunlight and warmth and the sharp, aching beauty of a fleeting human life, did not care. It only saw her. Isadora. The impossible girl who had looked at a monster and seen… something else.
