There are doorways a person walks through once and spends the rest of their life measuring time against, before it and after it, and the strange mercy is that you never know you're standing in one until you've already crossed.
Gavriel Sterling stood in the dark corridor where a prince had a princess pressed to the wall, and for the first time in the vision he wanted to look away and could not. The ache in his chest had gone from a dull weight to something with a blade in it. He watched himself, in a face that was his and was not, hold the girl he had spent a decade earning, and he understood he was about to witness the moment his own soul had been made.
River's fingers were still curled in the fabric at Tristan's hip. Her forehead rested against his. Their breathing had fallen into the same uneven rhythm, two people who had stopped pretending the distance between them was anything other than a formality about to be dissolved.
