"When I first saw you at that academy," Athanor said, "you were furious. You called me a creep in front of half a courtyard. And something inside my chest reacted to it."
He looked at his own hands. "You need to understand what that meant. I hadn't felt anything in there for so long that I'd stopped believing there was anything in there to feel. And then a mortal girl insulted me, and I discovered I owned a heart, purely because it started hurting."
"And it wasn't only that day. Every time you stayed near me, the thing forgot it was forbidden to behave that way. Which made everything considerably more complicated."
His eyes moved over her then, from the ruined pins in her hair down to the one boot she still hadn't bothered to take off.
"And tonight it crossed every boundary I had left. The moment it saw you step out of that carriage."
