(Isla)
I didn't know why I was crying.
Not really. Nothing bad had happened. Nobody had hurt me. The night had been good, genuinely good, the kind of good I was still learning to trust when it arrived without something underneath it waiting to pull it back.
And yet here I was with tears on my face and Caius's forehead against mine and no explanation for any of it.
I laughed at myself a little. "I don't even know why I'm crying."
"You don't have to know," he said.
"It's embarrassing," I said. "In Ashcrest I learned not to cry where anyone could see it. Even when they whipped me in that yard I didn't give them the satisfaction." I looked away. "And now I'm sitting here on a mountain with a full stomach crying over nothing."
He didn't say anything for a moment.
"Maybe that's why," he
