Chapter 89
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She had resolved to embrace him with a generous heart even if his face proved uglier than any other—but now, confronted with such excellent features, she found herself quite satisfied.
…Was she the sort of person so easily swayed by appearance? A twinge of self-reproach touched her, yet his beauty was of a caliber that made resistance futile.
“Far more than I expected… you are pretty.”
At this unguarded appreciation, Caligo’s brow twitched as though he strove to understand her words.
Did he know what “pretty” meant? The slight furrow between his brows suggested displeasure, yet she felt certain he had understood her.
“I mean, you are handsome.”
Ah, he did understand. He had looked puzzled at “pretty,” but the way his ears reddened at “handsome” confirmed it.
Fiona let her gaze drift downward, surveying his body.
Unlike his unexpectedly fine face, his body was very much as she had sensed.
She had known, of course, but seeing it with her own eyes confirmed it: his frame was immense and solid.
At the training ground, Caligo had towered a full two heads above the soldiers who sought to restrain him.
Even seated on a low stool, the crown of his head reached Fiona’s sternum. His shoulders, broad beyond measure, seemed thrice the span of her own.
As her eyes traced the swollen muscles of his upper body, fresh anger kindled at the realization that he wore nothing at all.
“You could have escaped easily. Why did you not?”
The question slipped out unbidden.
Given how he had torn through his restraints as though they were paper, Caligo had not been unable to leave that place.
He could have fled at any time, yet he had not. Perplexed and grieved, she murmured this aloud—and to her surprise, Caligo offered an answer.
“Troublesome.”
The words emerged so naturally, so perfectly formed, that her eyes went wide.
To another, it might have seemed a mere short utterance. But Fiona understood.
A fitting answer to her question. Pronunciation and articulation so natural they no longer felt foreign. A clear gaze meeting hers without hesitation.
“…Since when have you grown so fluent?”
She had scarcely spoken with him until now, and so had failed to notice. Seeing Caligo so startlingly close to normalcy, Fiona felt once more that her decision had been right.
He was not the sort of being who should be treated as a beast—not in the manner she had just witnessed.
Though she had resorted to somewhat drastic means to behold her husband’s face, Fiona suffered no punishment like the hapless women of myth. There would be no trial of seeking a vanished husband; her task now was simply to tend Caligo well and live.
She had been observing him for some time, fascinated, when she realized that the observation was not one-sided.
As much as Fiona studied him, Caligo was staring fixedly back at her.
In truth, Caligo’s mind was presently empty of all save the act of beholding Fiona. The sudden release of the second binding, the sharpened pulse of reason and intellect—none of it mattered.
His luminous golden eyes greedily drank in the sight of his wife. Hair red as a setting sun. Eyes of pale jade. The white skin his fingertips had traced, the full lips.
He had known her dim outline in the darkness, but it was nothing compared to seeing her in the light.
Above all, Caligo cherished this moment—her clear gaze meeting him directly. In those lucid, transparent eyes burned a flame, and she had protected him, saved him from those who would bind and trouble him.
He could not understand her saying he was pretty. Among all the creatures his consciousness had beheld since awakening, she was the most wondrous. Whom did she call pretty?
“Fiona is more… beautiful.”
But his expression remained clumsy, and he could only offer such inadequate words.
Fiona, however, seemed focused less on the content than on his improved speech.
“In any case, it is good to see you.”
So saying, she looked once more into his eyes.
“Now, at last, I greet you face to face.”
Their gazes held, intertwined, and for a long while did not part.
Having long savored Caligo’s golden eyes, Fiona thought she understood, dimly, why Jayden had kept them from seeing one another.
This single meeting now offered an experience far more dense and profound than all their months of dark trysts.
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