Page 256 of The Mercy of Dawn

Mikael was far too content to hold her close, brushing a hand over her back while he carded the other through her soft, inky-black hair. It was even shorter than when he last saw her, but Mikael was certain now she could pull off anything. He focused on that, and the sheer warmth of her body tucked against his, instead of the way the angles of her bones dug into him.

The road to getting her healthy again was going to be a long one.

But she was alive, he reminded himself, and everything else just needed time.

When the sobering reminders of why he was so grateful she was alive became too hard to ignore, Mikael eased back from her. He notched his fingers under Cyril’s chin and tipped her face up.

The faintest trace of sun-spun gold shimmered in her eyes and, for now, he would take that.

“You’re feeling better?” he asked, even though the answer was obvious. After all, she was up and walking on her own. Lucid, too.

A far cry from the condition he left her in.

“So much better,” she said with a smile that made him want to believe it was the truth. “I’m just tired now.”

As she was still speaking, Mikael started easing Cyril backward. One shuffled step at a time, towards the bed that he was desperate to crash into.

“That makes two of us. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since—”

Cyril planted her hand on his chest.

“Wait a second,” she said, and Mikael stilled.

He didn’t even get to ask why before her other hand slipped up the back of his neck, tangling into the damp strands at his nape. He caught just a sliver of her wry smile before she pulled him down and pressed her lips to his.

Gods. He missed this too.

The physicality that inevitably came from being in her presence.

For being a woman who had self-proclaimed ineptitudes with her feelings, physical affection was something she had no issue with. Mikael was just happy to be on the receiving end of her attention, and her unfathomably soft lips.

That first kiss was tender, carrying a weight of relief with it. But another, and another, followed it until Cyril’s lips lingered with restrained eagerness, and both her arms slid around his neck.

Mikael's blood warmed thoroughly.

As he started guiding her backward again in slow, measured steps, he didn’t dare pull his lips from hers. Not with how easily they parted for him, that first brush of her tongue triggering a honey-like drip of need down his spine. The soft, breathy noise Cyril uttered when the backs of her thighs hit the bed was all the confirmation he needed that sleep could wait a little while longer.

He helped her up onto linens that felt like fucking silk after a week in bedrolls and inns, and let her pull him right in with her. Only then did he let that molten, indulgent kiss falter, as she settled back into the plush duvet and Mikael kneeled above her.

He took a single look down at the wisp of fire-made-flesh that turned his life upside down in ways he could never imagine, and words just tumbled out of Mikael.

“Cyr, I love you,” he said, and Cyril stilled.

Her hands hovered on his arms, braced on either side of her, and she looked thunderstruck.

“I love you so much,” he repeated, a little more softly, because he needed her to hear it again, “and it was like fucking torture being away from you.”

It was the honest to gods truth.

Mikael had known for longer than he cared to admit that it wasn’t just some fleeting physical interest he had in Cyril.

He was enamored—no.

He was fucking infatuated with every part of her being.

That night in the cellar, faced with the possibility of an existence without her, only solidified what he’d been too afraid to admit to himself. And the turmoil he battled, leaving her behind? Confirmation he was a coward for not telling her.

His words hit their mark this time.