In the moment after, her fingers brush over her lips, eyes closed, a question asked by one blind; they sting under the sea-salt of her skin, swollen and tender with his attention, and yet - they curve.

He catches up her hands, and in the wash of lamplight, she wants to tell him you look like your mother, all golden hair and flushed skin, all the intensity of a man aflame, her name curling like smoke off his tongue.

The scent of the future chokes her as he bends close, blood and ash, foreign shores on his skin; she breathes it in, like an oracle, like a devotee, and lets him possess her, the only god she has faith in.