Gwen, despite everything—despite her flushed face and her trembling ears and his hands still warm and heavy over her chest—laughed. It was a genuine laugh, surprised out of her, breathy and bright in the amber dark of the tent. She pressed her lips together immediately after, trying to smother it, but it was too late; it hung in the air between all three of them, warm and human and entirely incongruous with the situation.
Lira's grip on his arm loosened fractionally.
Viktor exhaled slowly, something in his shoulders settling into a different kind of ease—not the ease of conquest but the ease of a man who was, perhaps for the first time today, simply warm and horizontal and surrounded by the specific gravity of people who had chosen, for complicated reasons of pride and stubbornness and something neither of them would name, to stay.
His thumb moved one more slow circle against Gwen's chest through her shirt.
She let him.
