Maybe you should...go."
"Why? You seemed so insistent that I train you."
"I can't concentrate with you around," I admitted "And go... far. I can feel you from a room away."
A suggestive curve shaped his lips.

His laugh rumbled against me. Eyes closed, the wind roaring like a wild animal, I adjusted my position, gripping him tighter. My knuckles brushed one of his wings- smooth and cool like silk, but hard as stone with it stretched taut.
Fascinating. I blindly reached again... and dared to run a fingertip along some inner edge.
Rhysand shuddered, a soft groan slipping past my ear. "That," he said tightly, "is very sensitive".
I snatched my finger back, pulling away far enough to see his face. With the wind, I had to squint, and my braided hair ripped this way and that, but- he was entirely focused on the montains around us. "Does it tickle?"
He flicked his gaze to me, then on the snow and pine that went on forever. "It feels like this," he said, and learned in so close that his lips brushed the shell of my ear as he sent a gentle breath into it. My back arched on instinct, my chin tipping up at the carees of that breath.
"Oh", I managed to say. I felt him smile against my ear and pull away.

Rhys straightened. "You'd- make me food?"
"Heat," I said. "I can't cook."
It didn't seem to make a difference. But whatever it was, the act of offering him food... I dumped some cold soup into a pan and lit the burner. "I don't know the rules," I said, my back to him. "So you need to explain them to me."
He lingered in the center of the cabin, watching my every move. He said hoarsely, "It's an... important moment when a female offers her mate food. It goes back to whatever beats we were a long, long time ago. But it still matters. The first time matters. Some mated pairs will make an occasion of it- throwing a party just so the female can formally offer mate food... That's usually done amongst the wealthy. But it means that the female... accepts the bond."
I stared into the soup. "Tell me the story- tell me everything."
He understood my offer: tell me while I cooked, and I'd decide at the end whether or not to offer him that food.

He said soflty, "I love it when you look at me like that." That purr in his voice heated my blood. "Like what?" "Like my power isn't something to run from. Like you see me.

To the stars who listen and the dreams that are answered." -Rhysand

If you were going to die, I was going to die with you. I couldn’t stop thinking it over and over as you screamed, as I tried to kill her: you were my mate, my mate, my mate.