Sleepy Fox Hollow she tells me 'worship in the bedroom'

Sorrow. It drained the energy from the very air they breathed, and for a stolen moment, she watched him, her eyes tracing the tense line of his jaw, the depth of his gaze as he looked toward her soul. She was bare before him—frayed heart from loss she still had yet to fully grasp, and from the bitterness that had stemmed in the aftermath of even her proclaimed mateship. Stigmata’s death. Takiyok’s ire. The ever-changing shift within their ranks and familiarity that gave way to nothing.

She could not.

Somewhere, she had lost herself.

“Mahler,” she breathed, his name falling from her lips before she sucked in a sharp breath. And yet she could not say more—could not speak what ached to flit from her very being. ‘I could have loved you. I could have chosen you,’ she would have told him—but what pain would that press upon him? For surely, had he any feelings for her that surpassed friendship, he would not so easily let her slip away.

And even with her beloved gone form this world, the words she withheld still could not surface, for fear of betrayal of a man long dead.