"Ciri... we've been through this. This whole wolf without a pack thing... it's getting us nowhere. Don't throw any more parties without inviting me. Okay?"

The words cut through Cirilla like a knife. It silences her, and for a moment the woman recluses into herself. How was she supposed to reply to that? Confusion rolled over her, resulting in a tingling sensation that began in her paws and made its way up to her forehead. She frowned.

No one had cared for her like Ambrose had. Nobody had looked out to her like Ambrose had.

She had never cared for someone like she had Ambrose. Aurelia was different... she was her daughter. But this... this was different. Ambrose... His name slips off of her tongue with a new found ease, a whisper in the wind as something inside her builds. She stands, moves closer to him, and sits directly in front of him with a twitch of her single ear. The tension she feels is suffocating, the confusion evident on her features as she does one simple movement. One simple movement to declare her feelings she had been suppressing for so long - Cirilla moves and lays her head on Ambrose's shoulder, relaxing into him as though she were so innocent and unharmed. Something she had not felt in such a long time.

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There's turmoil in her eyes, and there's a brief silence strung between them. She's turning his words over in his mind, he knows—and he hopes that this time, she remembers them. Thunder rumbles, distant now. Her voice reaches him like a sigh, and his heart flutters in his chest when she shifts, pillowing her cheek on his shoulder. Her touch is electrifying, charging the air with anticipation. He smiles an easy, genuine smile—he could never name the tension between them, he could never identify why he feels the way he does about Cirilla.

Now he can.

No woman has ever made him feel this way. He followed her into Caladan for a reason. He wants to be with her. Forever. "You mean the world to me." The words feel like a weight off his chest. They feel both alien and natural on his tongue—a secret he's cuddled for so long that it doesn't really feel like secret anymore.

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For a moment, Cirilla feels all her pain, anguish and anger melt away. The dogs that bit at her throat, urging her on in recklessness and foolhardy actions, seemed to back away, and the confusion ran through her paws into the ground. It thawed into the moisture beneath, grasping onto the muddy earth like a moth to a flame.

Cirilla could hear her heart pounding against her chest. She could hear the harsh thrum of the blood as it gushed around her ears, around her cheeks, around her breast. She could hear the intensity of the rain dripping from the roof of the hideaway, as it fell metres to hit the ground beneath, so easily as it shattered. But above the cacophony of miniscule noises that seemed to drown out the silence, she could hear the racing rhythm of @Ambrose's heart against the cavity of his chest.

She does not look at him as the words fall so easily from his lips. They move around the hideaway as though they were birds fleeing the nest for the first time, eager to make their first flight away from everything they had always known. They might be eager to escape, but the utterances fall on Cirilla as a blanket, as a comfort, as home, and she smiles. It is a genuine smile - one that has not crossed her lips in a long time. She allows them to keep her warm for a moment longer, her claws almost clutching onto them as they disappeared back into the silence of the hideaway. You mean the world to me, too. She eventually whispers, her words small doves departing. They feel foreign on her lips, but they also feel so right, so much that she is not afraid to let go of them.

And with that, the scarred woman lowers herself to the ground, inviting Ambrose to join her. What he chose to do was up to him, now, but what Cirilla did know was that she was ready to have Ambrose - the whole of him - and she was not prepared to share him with anyone else.

Fade and exit?

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His words linger in the hideaway, sitting comfortably between them as the rain continues to chastise the frozen earth outside. They're still weighted over his tongue, coiling in the air like sediment as he resigns himself to the silence, listening to the subdued downpour. How they seem to nest within her, her self-criticisms and insecurities—he would put them all to flight if he could.

A scoundrel and a cutthroat; how did they ever go from being rivals to this? She's gotten beneath the skin; her scent, her voice, and all her peculiarities. Even the disapproving looks she periodically throws his way. Especially those.

Her familiar voice cuts through the cavern, and he smiles again. He produces a small hum in response—words aren't needed to express the glowing tenderness between them. He has never seen her so vulnerable before, her emotions cracked wide open in the bright silver glow of the moon. A rare moment, and one he intends to savor.

It's love and that moves him next, and there, in the closeness of the hideaway, he pays his reverence.

-exit-

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