The matebond didn't care about timelines. It didn't care about centuries. It didn't care that Gavriel Sterling was a ghost in a vision watching a life that had ended before his began. It transmitted everything. Including this.
Tristian spun her around, turning her to face him in the bath.
Her pink eyes found his green ones, close enough that their breath mixed, and the vulnerability in her face was total, the princess and the girl and the woman all occupying the same expression at the same time.
He kissed her. Her mouth tasted like tears and wine and the word mine.
She kissed him back. Harder than she had at the altar. The hardest she had ever kissed him. Her hands went into his hair and her body pressed into his and the grief converted into something fiercer, something that lived in the same house as desperation and demanded the same currency: contact. All of it. Now.
