Page 39 of Dark Restraint

She’s still watching me too closely. It makes me feel like my heart is beating on the outside of my skin, exposed and uncomfortable. Vulnerable. If she looks at me with pity, I might have to leave the fucking room. But she just tilts her head to the side and seems to consider something. “Before. What about after?”

I shake my head sharply. “It’s always been you. I’m not interested in anyone else. I haven’t been since we met.” And Minos knew better than to send me on those kinds of missions, if they even existed in the first place.

“You were thirteen when we met.”

I swing back around to face her. There’s something tight and hot in my chest. “No, I was fourteen when I moved in.”

“Yes, I know that.” She waves it away. “But that day in the market. You were thirteen then, right? It was winter, so it was well before your birthday.”

She remembers.

I rock back on my heels, that feeling of vulnerability threatening to sweep me away. I don’t have it in me to lie. Not to her. Not like this. “Yeah. I was thirteen then.” I speak so softly, it barely counts as a whisper. She hears me anyway. Of course she does.

“One last question.” She seems to lean forward, gravitating toward me without moving an inch. “Would you have chosen any of those people if the alternative wasn’t starving to death or some other awful outcome?”

“No,” I say softly. There it is. The ugly truth. Maybe it would feel less ugly if I had chosen them. I don’t think so. I was just a fucking kid. Trauma can make you grow up fast, but in the end, it’s not a substitute for the life experience that comes with a few decades on this goddamn rock orbiting the sun. I’m grateful to the kid I was. He did what it took to survive, to bring me to her. The cost is barely worth counting.

Her lips curve a little, even though her eyes stay so incredibly serious. “Then I think the maze was your first time, wasn’t it?”

I stare at this woman, at the shining star that has been my guiding light for most of my fucking life. I knew from the start that I would never deserve her, but I didn’t give a fuck. I wanted her all the same. And yeah, there was a moment in the maze when I was sappy enough to mourn the fact that this might be her first time, but it wasn’t mine. That experience had been taken from me a very long time ago, through desperation and violence. I swallow hard. “That’s not how it works.”

“It is with us.”

The same words I said to her back in the maze. I stare at Ariadne, and there’s a part of me that almost hopes she doesn’t remember. That might make this experience more bearable, this vulnerability less shocking. But no. The knowledge is there in her eyes. She knows exactly what she’s saying, exactly what that sentence means to me.

To us.

I clear my throat again. “Yeah.” The tightness in my chest gets stronger. Hotter. “Yeah, I guess that is how it is with us.”

She holds out her hand, and I move to her on pure instinct. Ariadne lifts my hand to her face and rubs her cheek on my knuckles. “If I read this in a book, I would throw it across the room in pure disbelief. But I think there’s a part of me that knew you, even then.”

I scrub at my chest, but it does nothing to alleviate the thickness there. “I didn’t think you remembered.”

“Of course I did.” Her heart is in her eyes. It’s the way that I’ve always wanted Ariadne to look at me. The foundation has been there, but it’s always been overwritten with fear or guilt or lust. Even now, my mind shies away from labeling it.

I don’t know what else to say, so I speak the first thing that bursts into my mind. “You never said anything. When I showed up, when he put me to work, you acted as if it was our first time meeting.”

“For a little while, I did think that. You looked so different when he introduced us that I wasn’t entirely sure you were the same boy I’d seen in the courtyard.”

I smirk. “A bath and haircut can do wonders.” To say nothing of clean, expensive clothing. Or at least the new clothes had felt expensive and downright decadent. In hindsight, I recognize them for what they were—disposable in Minos’s eyes. The cost might have been world-changing to me as a kid, but they were one step above trash to Minos.

Just like me.

“I suppose so.” She presses a kiss to my wrist. “It took me a couple days, but no matter what else changed about you, your eyes were the same. They’re still the same.” Ariadne smiles, looking almost self-conscious. “By that, I mean you looked at me the same.”

I shouldn’t ask, but I can’t seem to help myself. “How did I look at you, Ariadne?”

For a few moments, I think she might not answer. But she finally lifts her chin. “Like I was your everything. Like I was some goddess who wandered into your life. It made me uncomfortable as a kid because I didn’t really understand it.”

“And now?”

She smiles. “I still don’t really understand it. I’m no goddess. I’m human and flawed right down to my bones.”

I stroke her fingers with my thumb. “Not to me. To me, you’re perfect, sweetheart.”

That manages to fluster her when nothing else did. She sputters a little and won’t quite look me in the face. It’s incredibly fucking cute. Finally, she blurts out, “I like it when you call me that.”

“I like calling you that.” Sweetheart. Mine. It all amounts to the same thing.