Nayl had told her not to trust him.
She would not have seen his eyes slip down to her throat at the mention of eating were she not already watching them, watching as they mimicked the pre-dawn sky overhead.
Paler. Just minutely so, but enough for Djinni to see.
She’d known he was something different, but she’s never seen this before. Djinni had managed to convince herself that she wasn’t curious for an achingly long time. She’d left him to stew beneath the water, turned her eyes away from the hoofprints that ended at the water. She hadn’t asked questions, she hadn’t sated her own thirst when it comes to the black stallion. She’d let him turn the pond red with her blood but he won’t answer her question.
Kiss me. He commands her.
“No.” She replies.
The space between them is her protection. Her silver chest is steaming slightly in the cold air, warmth and water leaving her dun hide. With Ivar between them, she is safe.
Touching him will draw her in again, and it might trap her forever.
She’s not thinking of his adhesive skin, of the way he’d supernaturally kept her against him in the cave those long months before. She’s not thinking that he’ll be the one to trap her; this is a snare that she’s set and baited herself.
”I don’t share.” She’d told him those years ago, when they had first come to Sylva. “I don’t share.” She says now. He might not understand, but that’s not important. She understands, she knows. She will keep her heart – her love - to herself, she will take the admission that she had made to Luster those months ago to her grave. It never occurs to her that Luster might already have told him.
“Leave me alone, Stillwater.”
She disappears, though she leaves their sleeping son behind for now. It is not Stillwater that she distrusts, after all. It is herself.