Thomas had fought the demon queen's generals, the witch hunters at Miralba, and a facility full of things that had once been people, and none of it had required as much preparation as this.
He had been carrying the ring for eleven days.
Not on him. He wasn't a fool. He kept it in the small wooden box in the second drawer of his desk, under the maps, where no one had a reason to look, and every morning he opened the drawer and looked at it and closed the drawer again, the way a man checks that a door is locked even though he watched himself lock it.
Eleven days of finding reasons it wasn't the right moment.
The house was still recovering. That was the first reason, and it had been a good one for the first week — Kris upstairs being angry about being upstairs, Niall's wall still cracked in the same place because nobody had gotten around to fixing it, the particular quiet the house had taken on since KaSandra stood at the window and said Sebastian's name and the room received it the way rooms received things that were large. It was not a house that felt like the right place to ask a woman to marry him. It felt like a house that was still counting what it had lost.
The second reason was that KaSandra was tired in a way she did not talk about.
Thomas noticed the way she noticed everything — quietly, without commentary, filing it and not acting on it until acting on it was useful. She was sleeping less. She sat with Kris most mornings and came downstairs afterward with the same composed face she always wore, and if you didn't know what to look for you would have missed what was underneath it. Thomas knew what to look for. He had spent a long time learning her the way he had spent a long time learning everyone he trained, except that with KaSandra the learning had stopped being a professional habit somewhere in the last two years and become something else, something he had not examined too closely because examining it too closely was its own kind of risk.
He examined it now. Sitting in his room with the box open in front of him, the ring plain and old — his mother's, the one thing of hers he had kept through everything, a thin band with a single dark stone that had been in his family longer than anyone alive could account for — he examined exactly what he was risking and decided, the way he decided most things, that the risk was smaller than the cost of not taking it.
His mother had never told him where the stone came from. She had only told him, once, when he was young enough that the words hadn't meant anything yet, that it was meant for someone who would understand what it cost to keep something safe. Thomas hadn't understood the sentence at the time. He understood it now. Keeping people safe had been the whole architecture of his life since he was old enough to choose an architecture — the training, the formations, the specific discipline of measuring a room for its exits before he measured it for anything else — and somewhere in the last two years KaSandra had become the person he measured every room against first, without deciding to, the way you don't decide to breathe differently around someone until you notice you've already been doing it for months.
He had watched people not take it. He had watched Sebastian carry three hundred years of things unsaid and then close a ritual thread with his own life and never say, in all the time Thomas had known him, the things Thomas suspected he had wanted to say to the handful of people he'd let close enough to matter. Thomas did not intend to be a man who ran out of time before he ran out of courage.
So today. Not because today was better than any other day. Because he had run out of reasons that today wasn't.
~
He found her in the garden.
It was not the garden Thomas would have chosen, if choosing had been a thing he'd allowed himself to do in advance — the old tree stood dead center in it, indifferent the way it was indifferent to everything, and the grass hadn't been cut in three weeks because cutting grass had not been anyone's priority since Miralba. But KaSandra liked the garden in the late afternoon, when the light came in low and gold under the tree's branches, and she was there most days around this hour with a cup of tea she rarely finished, sitting on the stone bench that had been there longer than the house.
She looked up when he came out.
"You have your listening face on," she said.
"I don't have a listening face."
"You have several faces," KaSandra said. "That's the one you use when you've decided something and haven't said it yet."
Thomas sat down beside her on the bench. The wood was warm from the afternoon. Somewhere behind them, through the kitchen window, he could hear the ordinary sounds of the house doing what the house did — Tierney's voice, low, and under it the specific clatter of Dean testing his arm against something he shouldn't be testing it against.
"I have decided something," Thomas said.
KaSandra turned her cup once in her hands. She did not look at him yet — she was looking at the tree, at the light coming through it, with the patience of someone who had learned a long time ago that most important things arrived better when you didn't rush toward them.
"Is it about the training schedule," she said.
"No."
"Is it about Fenix's control."
"No."
"Then I don't know what it's about," KaSandra said, and there was something in her voice that Thomas recognized — not confusion, because KaSandra was rarely confused about anything, but the particular carefulness of someone who suspected exactly what it was about and was choosing not to say so, because saying so would take the moment away from him, and she did not want to take the moment away from him.
Thomas reached into his coat.
He had rehearsed this. Not the words — the words he had decided, three days ago, not to rehearse, because rehearsed words came out like rehearsed words and he did not want that, not for this. What he had rehearsed was simpler than that. He had rehearsed doing it at all. Getting the box out of the drawer and getting himself out of the house and into the garden and getting his own hand to move the way he needed it to move.
He got the box out.
KaSandra went very still.
Not surprised-still. Thomas would think about that later, turning it over the way she turned things over — she had not been surprised, not exactly, and he understood, somewhere underneath the roaring in his own chest, that she had known this was coming for longer than eleven days. She had simply let him arrive at it in his own time, the way she let everyone arrive at things in their own time, because rushing people toward what they already knew was not KaSandra's way.
"Thomas," she said.
"Let me finish," he said. "I've been trying to say this for eleven days and if you stop me now I don't know that I'll manage it a twelfth."
KaSandra closed her mouth.
The garden was very quiet. The light was doing the thing it did at this hour, coming in gold and low, catching the dust in the air the way it caught everything, and somewhere above them a bird that had nested in the dead tree despite every reason not to sang something short and indifferent to the two people below it.
"I have spent a long time being careful," Thomas said. "It's what I do. I measure things. I plan for what's real instead of what I hope is real, because hoping gets people killed and I have watched it get people killed, and I decided a long time ago that I would rather be right than be warm about it." He turned the box over once in his hand. "I am not being careful right now."
KaSandra's eyes were on him. Steady. Waiting.
"I don't know how many years we have," Thomas said. "None of us do. We are about to walk toward something worse than what we walked toward at Miralba, and I have run every version of the math I know how to run, and none of the versions guarantee anyone in this house their next year, let alone their next ten." He opened the box. "I decided I did not want to walk toward it without having said this first, whatever happens after."
He held it out.
The ring caught the gold light and did something quiet and small with it.
"KaSandra Lucas," Thomas said, and it was the first time in eleven days that saying her full name out loud had not felt like a rehearsal, "I would like to marry you. Not because it's safe. Because it's the truest thing I know."
For a long moment KaSandra didn't move.
The bird sang again. Behind them, faintly, Dean said something and Tierney laughed at it, the ordinary sound of the house continuing to be a house, unaware that in the garden something was suspended, waiting.
KaSandra looked at the ring. She looked at Thomas — really looked at him, the way she looked at very few things, with the full and undivided attention that Thomas had learned, over two years, was the rarest thing she gave anyone.
"Thomas," she said again, and her voice had changed, had dropped the careful evenness she wore like the long coat, had become something smaller and more exposed than Thomas had heard from her since the night she told the room that Sebastian was dead.
"Yes," she said.
It was one word. Thomas felt it land somewhere underneath his ribs with a force that eleven days of preparation had not prepared him for.
"Yes," KaSandra said again, and this time there was something close to a smile in it, small and real and entirely hers. "Yes, Thomas. I will."
He reached for her hand.
For a moment — one single, unhurried moment, the kind the two of them had not been given very many of in the last three years — nothing was wrong with the world. There was no demon queen two floors under a facility, no cracked anchor, no seven tubes with something waking up inside them. There was only the garden, and the dead tree that had outlived everyone who had ever sat under it, and the gold light, and KaSandra's hand in his with the ring catching the last of the sun, and the small real smile that had cost her more to give away than anyone in the house but Thomas would ever understand.
That was the moment — later, Thomas would understand that this had been the exact moment, the one the entire eleven days had been narrowing toward, the ring half onto her finger and her hand warm in his and the gold light catching both of them under the dead tree that had stood in that garden longer than either of them had been alive — that the air changed.
It was a small change. Thomas felt it before he understood it, the way he felt most dangerous things before he understood them, a drop in temperature that had nothing to do with the afternoon and a stillness in the garden that had nothing to do with peace.
KaSandra felt it too. He saw it cross her face — the shift from the smaller, exposed thing back into the composed and careful thing, instantaneous, a door closing.
"Thomas," she said, and her voice had changed again, had gone flat and fast in the specific way it went when something needed to be said before it was too late to say it. "Don't move."
He did not have time to ask her why.