"Hmm," she replied and said nothing more.
She lifted her chin to meet his eyes. His reflected darkness that simply went further, pulling you in one layer at a time until you forgot you had ever been standing on solid ground.
Cixi felt herself drowning in them.
Not the violent kind of drowning, where your lungs burn, and your arms flail, and your body fights the water with everything it has. The quiet kind. The kind where the water is warm, and the current is slow, and you stop struggling because some part of you has decided that wherever this takes you, you would rather go there than swim back to shore.
But beneath that — beneath the warmth and the pull and the unbearable closeness of his face to hers, something else stirred inside her.
Fear!
Not the fear of Cassian the man. Not the fear of what he could do, what he had done, what she had seen him do to others without flinching.
The fear of loving him.
