Chapter 36
At His Speed
Elara
On the way back, I spot it.
His motorcycle stands half-buried near the edge of the compound, dark and sleek against the snow. My heart jumps.
“Can we?” I ask, pointing before I think it through.
“No,” he says immediately.
I turn to him, grinning. “Just a short ride.”
“No.”
“Lucan.”
He gives me a look. I step closer, lowering my voice. “Please.”
He exhales slowly, eyes flicking to the bike, then back to me. “If you fall—”
“I won’t.”
“If you try to run—”
“I won’t.”
He studies me again, longer this time. Then, against his better judgment—and mine—he nods.
“Helmet,” he says.
He disappears back toward the hatch and returns with a helmet that looks like it’s been used hard and cared for anyway—scratched black shell, visor clear, straps intact. He holds it out without ceremony.
I take it with both hands like it’s fragile.
“Put it on,” he says.
I fumble with the straps, fingers clumsy in the gloves.
He watches for a beat, then steps in, impatience restrained by something else.
He lifts my chin with two fingers, not gentle, not rough, and tightens the strap under my jaw with quick, precise movements.
The closeness makes my breath catch. It’s absurd how little it takes.
“There,” he says. “Don’t touch it.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I lie.
His eyes flick to mine. I can’t see his whole expression with the helmet on, but I feel the weight of his gaze anyway, like pressure against my skin.
Then he turns to the bike, clearing the snow with his boot, checking something at the side.
Every movement is efficient, practiced. He makes machines look like extensions of his body.
I hover, restless, watching him. The bike is a dark animal half-buried in white, sleek and patient, waiting.
“When you get on,” he says without looking up, “you hold on. You don’t lean unless I do. You don’t move unless I tell you.”
“I know how motorcycles work,” I say.
He watches me another second longer than necessary, as if weighing the word, testing it for weakness. Then he swings a leg over the seat, settling in with the ease of someone who belongs on it. He pats the space behind him once.
“Come.”
My stomach flips. I climb on carefully, boots slipping slightly on packed snow, and then I’m seated behind him, closer than I should be, my knees bracketing his hips. The physicality of it hits me—how there’s no polite distance on a motorcycle, no safe buffer. It’s body and heat and proximity.
“Arms,” he says.
I slide my arms around his waist, hesitant for half a heartbeat, then tighter. The jacket he lent me is thick, but I still feel the solidness of him under it. His breath shifts, barely perceptible, like my touch is data he’s processing.
“Like that,” he says, voice low.
The engine turns over, a growl that vibrates through my bones. The sound is obscene in the quiet landscape, and I laugh involuntarily, the noise trapped inside the helmet.
He glances back at me. “Enjoying yourself?”
I nod too quickly.
He doesn’t smile. But the corner of his mouth changes; an almost-smile, a flicker of something that might be amusement if it wasn’t so controlled.
He eases the bike forward, slow at first, tires biting into the snow-packed ground, then faster as we hit the flatter path that curves away from the compound.
The cold air slices around us, immediate and ruthless.
It finds every gap in clothing and reminds me of my skin.
My eyes water behind the visor. My hands tighten reflexively around his waist.
He accelerates.
The world stretches. The snow becomes a blurred sheet of white beneath us, the horizon widening like a held breath finally released.
We cut across deserted flat grounds where nothing moves except us, where the land is stripped down to shapes: dark rock, pale snow, a smear of black water far off, the jagged silhouette of mountains like teeth.
It is darkening quickly. Up here, winter eats the day early. The last light hangs low and thin, a bruised ribbon along the edge of the sky.
I press my helmet against the back of his shoulder for a moment, not because I need to but because it feels right, because the vibration of the engine and the steady line of his body under me make something in my chest loosen.
The fear that usually hums under everything—constant, persistent—goes quiet.
Or maybe it just changes tone.
He rides like he does everything else: with certainty. He doesn’t flinch at patches of ice. He doesn’t hesitate at uneven ground. He reads the landscape the way he reads bodies, the way he reads me—anticipating, adapting, controlling the trajectory before the threat even arrives.
It occurs to me, suddenly, that I am trusting him with my life in a way I never consciously agreed to.
And then I realize I’ve been doing that for a long time.
He slows as the path narrows, curving toward a rise. The engine’s pitch drops, the vibration easing. We climb a small incline and the land opens up again, an overlook near the fjord, higher than before, the water far below a dark sheet framed by ice.
He brings the bike to a stop near a massive tree that stands alone like a sentinel.
At first, in the dim light, I think it’s stone.
Then I see the branches.
The tree is enormous, old, thick-trunked, its bark dark and furrowed.
Snow clings to its limbs like bones. Ice has laced itself along the lower branches, catching what little light remains.
It looks impossible out here, like something that shouldn’t survive in this cold, but it has.
It’s carved its existence into the landscape through stubbornness alone.
Lucan kills the engine. The silence that follows is so sudden my ears ring.
I loosen my arms slowly, not wanting to let go all at once. My body feels strange without the vibration, like I’m still moving even as the world goes still.
He swings off the bike first and holds a hand out—not to help me, exactly, but to steady me. I take it, and the moment my gloved fingers close around his, heat sparks through the fabric like memory.
When my boots hit the snow, my knees wobble slightly. The ride left my blood buzzing.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Yes,” I breathe, and it comes out more like awe than an answer.
We walk a few steps toward the tree. The snow crunches under our boots.
The air is even colder here, sharper because of the wind coming off the fjord.
The last light has almost drained from the sky, leaving a deep navy that is not quite night, not quite day.
The first stars are beginning to show, faint and indifferent.
I tilt my head back and stare.
The sky feels endless in a way that makes my chest hurt. In the bunker, ceilings always exist. Walls always exist. Here, the world opens up so wide it’s almost frightening.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” I whisper.
Lucan stands beside me, hands in his pockets, posture relaxed but alert. “Yes,” he says.
But he isn’t looking at the sky.
I turn my head and catch him watching me instead.
My stomach flips, slow and heavy. It’s not the same as being watched in the bunker. There, his gaze feels like a restraint. Here, in open air, it feels like a choice. Like he’s looking because he wants to, not because he’s monitoring a captive.
I swallow. “Why are you staring?” I ask, trying to sound casual and failing.
I don’t know what to do with someone noticing me this precisely. My instinct is to deflect, to shrink, to become furniture again.
Instead I step backward, closer to the tree, letting its trunk at my back give me something solid.
My shoulder bumps the bark, and the roughness bites through my jacket. The small jolt makes me aware of my body in space again, of how close he is. Lucan steps in, not abruptly, but with the inevitability of tide.
The tree towers above us, branches spread wide like dark wings. The fjord below is a black mirror. The sky is deepening toward full night, the last remaining light stretched thin across the horizon like a final breath.
Lucan stops in front of me, close enough that I can see the faint frost collecting at the edge of his lashes. Close enough that our breaths mix in the air.
I look up at him.
He looks down at me with that unreadable expression that always makes my pulse stutter; part restraint, part hunger, part something I can’t name without making it softer than it is.
“You shouldn’t have brought me up here,” I say quietly.
He doesn’t flinch. “Why?”
“Because,” I whisper, and my voice trembles, “now I’ll want it again.”
Something shifts in his eyes. A flash of understanding that feels like a blade.
“I’d give it to you, you’d just have to ask me with those pleading icy eyes.” he says.
The cold air makes my cheeks sting. My helmet feels suddenly too heavy, too in the way. I reach up and pull it off, fingers clumsy with the strap. The moment it comes free, the wind hits my face directly, raw and real.
My curls whip loose around my cheeks. My eyes water again, but this time it’s not only from the cold.
Lucan watches me do it. He doesn’t stop me.
I tilt my head back against the tree, swallowing hard. “Are you going to kiss me?” I ask, and I hate myself for the need in my voice.
His gaze drops to my mouth, then back to my eyes. “Do you want me to?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say.
He moves then, slow, deliberate, closing the last inch of space like he’s claiming it. One gloved hand comes up to the side of my jaw, not gentle, not rough, controlling, anchoring. His thumb brushes the corner of my mouth once, a quiet test.
We watch each other, understanding the line here, but not respecting it.
Then he kisses me.
The kiss is not sweet. It’s not soft. It’s steady and consuming, his mouth firm against mine, the cold air making the heat of it feel sharper by contrast. I grip the front of his jacket, pulling him closer, and he answers with a pressure that pins me to the bark.
The world narrows to breath and cold and the taste of him—clean air and something darker underneath. My body remembers him instantly. The way it always does. The way I hate and crave.
The way I crave Lucan Grímsson.