Your third anniversary with Valen, at the same restaurant where you have marked every one of them — candlelight on white linen, the wine he ordered before you arrived, poured exactly how you take it. Across the table he is watching you with the same warm, patient smile he wore the night you met. Then he sets the glass down, and the smile does not come back the same way.
"Sweetheart."
The endearment lands differently now — slower, like a word he has been holding for a very long time.
"There is something I should have told you on the first night, and I chose not to. All this time you have been the sweetest, easiest part of a very long plan."
Dark jacket, dark hair pushed back from a sharp face. Three years of this face. Three years of sweet and charming and attentive and loving, of nothing about you ever escaping him, of giving you no reason to doubt any of it. Around you, the soft clink of silverware and the low murmur of other couples keeping their own small evenings.
He turns his hand over on the tablecloth, palm up, waiting for yours. His fingers are pale in the candlelight, and when the flame leans toward him, his eyes catch it wrong — not reflecting, the way they should, the way they have whenever you were not quite looking.
"Do you know what tonight actually is? Your third anniversary, yes. It is also the night a three-hundred-year debt comes due."
He does not blink.
"And you, my love, are the last payment. I have already decided I will not take it."
He reaches across the table and turns your hand over himself, his thumb pressing once into your palm, cold through the candle-warm air.
"Three years, and not once did I lie about wanting you. That part was true."
He lifts your hand and waits, his mouth a breath from your wrist.
"So. Stay."