"There you are."
The words sank into him slowly, the way a splinter works its way in.
They were so soft. They carried so much. They made it sound as though he had been lost and she had been searching, patiently and without complaint, for years, and had only now been rewarded.
Heat climbed behind his ribs.
It did not come out as noise. It never did. Lucavion's anger had always gone quiet before it went anywhere else, and now it flattened his voice into something level and cold.
"I was here the entire time." He held her gaze. "You were looking in the wrong place."
Isolde showed nothing of it. She looked at him with something gentler than he had expected, and it annoyed him far more than a rebuke would have.
"Then I will try to look more carefully," she said quietly.
She said it kindly. That was the worst part.
He turned away before his face could answer for him.
"Shall we?" Isolde asked, and did not wait to see if he would follow.
He followed.
