He was wearing his gloves, as always. The touch was still sudden enough that Kasha’s eyes went wide.
“It’s all right. You can open it.”
His voice settled near her ear, unhurried.
“There’s nothing in it — I should warn you in advance. When my mother gave it to me, the ring and the box were presented separately, and the ring has been kept elsewhere ever since.”
His hand stayed on hers for a moment, then lifted away.
Kasha steadied herself and opened the box.
“—!”
Her eyes changed.
Leon, who had been absorbed in watching her face, looked down at the box and felt the expression leave his.
“What is — “
Inside the box — sitting there as though to mock him — was a small, semi-translucent object with a soft, unsteady pink glow. It looked like a lump of clouded gel, half-solid, half-fluid, and it pulsed with light — brightening and dimming as though it were alive, as though it were breathing.
“Is that — “
Leon’s voice was tight. Kasha closed her lips against each other and said nothing for a moment.
Found it. At last.
The first spirit stone. The medium carrying the curse of Onor — extracted from the stone that had bestowed extraordinary charisma and renown upon its bearer, and in exchange had visited upon another the curse of uncontrollable desire.
With controlled hands that were not entirely steady, Kasha picked it up.
“I need to send the curse back. We should try now, while we can — the color suggests that whoever holds the spirit stone isn’t drawing on its power at this moment.”
When the stone’s power was being used at full force, it turned a vivid, arterial red. Attempting to reverse the curse at such a moment could have unpredictable consequences for Leon. Now was the safer window.
Kasha moved quickly. As she drew her tools from her bag, Leon quietly cleared the table and brought her a chair.
She used a pair of fine pincer-like instruments and a heat-application device to peel away the coating of hardened gel that surrounded the object.
When it came free, what was left was a small, spherical core — the size of a ginkgo seed — and within it, something tiny and pulsing in soft translucent pink.
Kasha took a long, steadying breath, and began to recite the activation sequence. It was a lengthy one. Each syllable in the ancient magical language was distinct and deliberate. Leon watched her with focused attention.
When the last syllable landed, the spherical core opened of its own accord and expelled something from within — something that moved.
Leon looked more closely. It was not a seed.
It was a small insect — transparent, every interior visible — and it writhed when it hit the table, twisting with something that looked very much like distress.
Kasha’s voice was low and careful.
“This is the curse’s source. Now that I’ve separated it from the medium, I’m going to return it to the original spirit stone.”
Leon stared at the thing that had brought him so much suffering, turning it over in his thoughts. Who had placed it here — hidden inside his mother’s keepsake, in the one box he would never discard and never open — as though they had known exactly that?
Kasha did not pause to reflect. She secured the insect with the pincers and began to recite a second activation sequence, different from the first.
The syllables came precisely and without hesitation.
But before she could complete it, the insect began to radiate heat — a sudden flush of intense warmth — and then it blazed, burning a vivid, arterial red.
The same color struck Leon from within.
He looked down. Through the glove he could feel it: a burning sensation spreading through his fingers. He pulled the glove off.
The violet stone in his ring had turned red — deep, saturated, unmistakable.
His mother Larissa’s ring. The box that contained it and the ring itself had been made together, a matching pair.
Without warning, the ring itself erupted with heat, and the heat poured directly into Leon’s hand, absorbed in an instant, flooding through him. His whole body began to burn with that specific, sickening warmth he knew too well.
He yanked the ring from his finger and threw it down.
Too slow. He knew it before it landed.
The symptoms came crashing over him like a wave — intimate, relentless, utterly familiar.
He bit out a sound of pain as the desire surged upward from somewhere deep in his body. It was unmistakable. It was the curse.
Kasha had seen the insect change color and understood immediately what was happening. She could not stop. Interrupting an ancient magical activation sequence midway was its own category of danger.
Leon’s vision went red — as though someone had poured scarlet dye across everything he could see. And with it, his reason began to bleed away, leaving only sensation, only instinct, sharp and alive and fully awake.
Was it the proximity of the curse’s medium? Was it what Kasha had warned him of — that the curse was deepening its hold on him, growing stronger?
It didn’t matter. Before he could think, it swallowed him whole.
In desperation, he seized the collar of his own shirt and tore at it — as though if he could just breathe, just find the room to breathe, the rest of it might be bearable. But the hunger pressed against his throat from the inside and he could not get free of it.
Kasha’s activation sequence reached its end.
Several seconds passed.
The insect, encased in its viscous coating, let out a last foul curl of black smoke and vanished. What it left behind was a dark, sticky residue on the surface of the table.
“It worked — !”
The moment Kasha confirmed that the curse had returned to its source, she exhaled with relief and started to turn —
And felt it.
Warm fingers. Moving through the long fall of hair at her shoulder, brushing it aside, and then — without a pause, without hesitation — pressing against the bare skin at the nape of her neck.
A bare hand. No glove.
Kasha turned slowly.
Leon stood behind her, his eyes burning red, breathing in ragged pulls, his expression ravaged with something caught between pain and desperation.
“Leon.”
She said his name, trying to call him back. He gave no sign of hearing.
*Of all the moments — the stone’s power must have been in use precisely when the curse was exposed to the open air — *
She understood it now, even as the warmth of his hand spread through the back of her neck.
The protective gel coating had been placed around the curse’s core specifically to prevent this — exposure in open air was when the curse was most potent. But the stone’s bearer had called on it at the worst possible moment, and the curse had responded by surging, and Leon — the curse’s vessel — had been standing directly beside it.
She had reversed it. But the reversal could not take effect instantaneously. Whatever was happening to him right now — she had no way of knowing how long the aftermath would persist.
And then his fingers were moving again, tracing the line of her neck slowly, finding each rise of vertebra, pressing against the hollow of her nape with a heat and insistence that made it very difficult to think.
She felt his mouth lower toward her skin.
“—!”
She could not speak. She held herself rigid, every nerve lit, biting down on the inside of her lip to keep quiet, while his lips pressed against the curve of her neck.
Leon breathed in.
His face was buried in the warmth of her — the particular smell of her skin, soft and faint and clean — and for a single moment it felt like surfacing. Like being able to breathe again after too long underwater.
He wanted everything. He wanted to press through to the deepest part of her and stay there.
His mind was entirely red. Soaked through with it. The lust and the confusion and the unnamed feeling that flooded him whenever she was near — the suspicion, the longing, the anger at himself for both — all of it was one indistinguishable thing now, and none of it mattered.
The part of him that had been overtaken gave the order clearly:
Take her. She’s been playing you. Take her anyway. Take her apart.
And his lips followed the curve of her neck upward, instinct guiding him toward her jaw, her chin, the line of her mouth —
And then he found himself looking at her.
Her eyes.
Steady, bright, a clear and vivid pink — cutting straight through the red of his vision like a needle through cloth.
The effect was immediate. A searing pressure behind his eyes — and then something else. A feeling that had no name, that was not the curse and was stronger than the curse.
The red receded slightly.
His reason began to come back.
And with it came the recognition: the curse — this particular curse — did not want to harm her. Could not make him harm her. Something in its composition, in what he felt when he looked at her, would not allow it.
He understood, distantly, that he should step away. That this was the moment.
But he could not make himself do it.
His body was still burning from what the curse had ignited. And beneath the curse — underneath it, separable from it, very much his own — was a wanting that had nothing to do with the stone.
He had tasted her once already. That memory had not left him. It had taken up residence in him and refused to be quiet.
Her lips. Warm and soft and sweet. Her breath, when it reached him, carrying nothing foul, nothing complicated — just something clean and faintly honeyed, like something that should not exist in the world he moved through.
I want to taste it again.
That clarity. That specific, overwhelming relief.
And then Kasha tilted her head, very slightly, and whispered:
“I don’t mind.”
He understood. She was offering — for the curse’s sake, for his sake — to bear it again. As she had before. A kindness perhaps, or the fulfillment of a contract, or something else entirely.
It might have been humbling, to accept it that way. He knew what it was she was offering.
*And knowing all of that, understanding exactly what this is — *
He said to himself:
I’m going to pretend I don’t. I’m going to take your generosity, or your sense of obligation, or whatever careful strategy you have for this — and I’m going to use it.
His mouth met hers.
He did not try to conceal how much he needed it. He pressed into her and let himself be entirely present in it, and the taste of her undid him — the sweetness and the warmth of it — and for a brief, complete moment he forgot everything else.
The curse. The spirit stone. The letter. The unnamed shadow of suspicion that had been living in him since yesterday.
He let it all go and pulled her against him, and held her there.
She was so small in his arms. That, too, undid him — the slight, yielding softness of her, the way she fit against him as though he had made the space himself.
For now, that was enough.
