15. Chapter 15
Serenity
I wake up because the air in the room has changed. I’m sitting up before my eyes open, back against the headboard, the butter knife out from under the pillow and in my fist. It took a couple of days before I could sleep soundly in this bed; now I’m regretting it.
My heart slams. I pull air through my nose on instinct: radiator dust, laundered cotton, the apple core going sweet in the bin. Beneath it sits a cold, clean mineral trace.
I know that trace.
My heart bangs twice more, then starts settling before I’ve told it to.
My eyes adjust. There’s a man sitting in the chair by the window.
“You’re awake,” he says from the chair.
“Get out.” My voice cracks on it. I clear my throat.
“That’s a butter knife.”
“It’ll still take an eye.”
“It would.” He stays where he is, hands in view on the arms of the chair. “I arrived ten minutes ago. You were asleep. I was deciding whether to wake you.”
“Ten minutes.” I breathe through that. “Do all of your kind let themselves into locked bedrooms, or is it a money privilege?”
“Locks are a courtesy between equals.” He says it mildly. “I’ve never met one.”
I look for my wolf and find her sitting up in my chest, ears forward, watching him. Her hackles are down. She’s curious. She’s been curious about him since the start.
Some help you are.
“The card reader works for you,” I say. “Good to know the bolt was decoration.”
“The bolt keeps out the others. It was never going to keep out the man they answer to.” He pauses, then: “I’m not here to hurt you. That’s finished.”
“Which part is finished?”
“All of it. What happened while I was away won’t happen again. No one touches you. No one moves you. If a guard raises his voice to you, I want to hear of it.” He turns his head and looks at me across the dark. “You’re under my protection, Serenity.”
My name again. This time I let it stand.
“Until when?”
“Until I choose otherwise. I won’t offer you promises. But you can trust me.”
For now.
He doesn’t have to say the words for me to hear them.
I set the knife on the nightstand and push my hair back off my face. My hands stay steady doing it, which surprises us both, I think.
“You came to feed,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Then feed.” My head is high, my shoulders squared.
He crosses the room without a sound and sits on the edge of the bed. The mattress dips under his weight. The cold reaches me off his skin.
I take the hem of my shirt and pull it off over my head. That’s different from how we do things, but I don’t care. Tonight, I get to choose at least one thing in this picture.
The window gives gray moonlight, and he looks at me in it. He takes his time about it. I hold still and let him look, until I realize I’m holding my breath and let it out. My chest lifts with it, and he watches that too.
He’s never touched me. Not in that way.
And I want him to.
God, I really want him to.
And maybe that’s twisted and sick, but no part of my life has been normal or healthy in the past year.
He reaches out and moves my hair back over my shoulder. He leans forward, and I’m holding my breath again as his cheek brushes my jaw. His lips find my pulse. His teeth press through.
“Oh!” The jolt goes straight through me, and my eyes fly wide. I suck in a gasping breath that shudders down my throat.
He draws long tonight, and every pull lands deep between my legs, hard enough to bow my back. The sense of my own blood rises, warm salt and iron. My wolf lifts her nose to it and stays easy.
Then his hand comes to rest on my waist. Bare skin. His palm settles there and waits.
I could lift his wrist away. Instead I cover the back of his hand with mine and press it harder against me.
“Touch me,” I whisper.
His hand moves up my ribs. By the time it closes over my breast, his palm has gone warm; I don’t know if it’s my blood or my body heat, but it’s coming back to me through his skin. It builds again, and now it’s matched by the sensation under his hand.
“Ah!” My fingers twist into the sheet. His thumb drags across my nipple. Heat spikes from it straight down to my clit, and my head goes back into the headboard hard enough to knock. His mouth keeps its rhythm at my throat through all of it.
I go for his shirt. His teeth stay in my flesh while my knuckles fumble the buttons, one, then another, then two at once.
Why does he have this many buttons, dammit?
On purpose, probably.
I’ve never truly touched him either; it’s always been clinging or clenched fists.
Now I take my time. His skin is smooth everywhere, over the muscle of his chest, down the lean line of his stomach.
My arms carry months of needle scars; his body is completely unmarked.
He’s beautiful. I’ve known it since the corridor and refused to think it. Tonight I think it.
My palms land on his chest. His skin is cool under my hands. His chest is silent. I slide my hands up over it to his shoulders and push the shirt wide off them.
I brush my mouth along his collarbone. His skin carries almost no taste at all.
This close, his scent should fill my nose: his skin, the day he’s had.
He smells like cold air and stone instead, and my wolf breathes him in anyway.
I press my teeth against his skin, a light echo of what he’s doing to me, and against my throat, muffled by the work of his own mouth, a word gets away from him.
“Merde.”
His teeth slide free. His lips stay on my skin. They travel up the side of my throat, open and steady, over my jaw, to the soft place under my ear. The punctures sit open behind them. My blood runs free down my neck while his mouth moves, and he’s kissing me.
He is kissing me.
“What are you doing?” It comes out as a whisper because I’m fighting for my voice.
His mouth pauses under my ear. Then it moves on, and the small hairs lift all the way down my arm.
A drop rolls warm from the open wound toward my collarbone. He follows it down and catches it with his tongue, low on my throat. Then he carries his mouth back up to the punctures, and drinks again, slower.
His hand leaves my breast, slides down my stomach, under the waistband of my pants. His fingers glide through the slick heat of me and find my clit.
“Oh!” My hips push forward. For once, there’s something to press against.
His mouth pulls at my throat. His fingers circle. The pull and the circle arrive together, one beat.
Each draw at the vein hits me twice now, once from the inside, once under his fingers, until my body stops sorting which is which.
The heat climbs fast. I get a hand between us and press my palm over the front of his trousers.
His cock stands hard under the fabric, thick, straining at it, and his hips thrust into my hand before he catches himself. His rhythm stumbles for half a stroke.
“I want… I want…” I can’t tell him what I want. It’s not part of the arrangement. But then again, I never thought this part would be either.
His free hand comes up to cup my jaw and his thumb traces my lower lip. I take it into my mouth and bite down.
He moans against my throat, and my thighs clamp on his hand. He keeps the same pace inside them. I’m gasping now, pressing up against his fingers, one hand gripping his hip hard, the other fisted in the sheets—and it hits. My spine arches and my thighs clench hard against his forearm.
“There…there… Yes! Oh, God, yes!”
I’m moaning freely now, cries echoing around the room, and probably down the hallway, but I don’t care.
He drinks through all of it. His fingers go gentle as I ease down. I end up slumped against his shoulder, damp-faced, heart banging out of rhythm. My breath is loud.
Under the last of it, the ache sets in. Deep inside my pussy, where he hasn’t been, a hollow throb the orgasm never touched. I want him inside me. The whole rest of me agrees, and my hand is already at his belt. I get the leather through the buckle before his fingers close on my wrist.
“No,” he says.
“Why not?” I almost wail it, but I’m beyond pride right now.
He seals the small bite marks, then hstands and steps back from the bed.
His shirt hangs off his shoulders where I pushed it, and the moon is silver on his pale skin.
He looks like marble, hard and smooth and impossibly beautiful.
His fangs are down. His hands close at his sides, open, close again.
He looks down at them for a moment. He takes one slow breath he doesn’t need and lets it go.
Control. He’s fighting for it.
I did that. Me. To him.
“Why?” I repeat, because I know he wants it.
“Because tonight you’d let me,” he says.
“That’s a reason to stay.”
“It’s the reason to go.” He works his shirt closed. His fingers shake the whole way up the row of buttons, and he lets me watch it. “When I take that, it will be because you asked me for it without what the bite does to you, and without gratitude for the room.”
“I should have kept the knife.” It comes out unsteady though I’m trying to be light about it.
“You should always keep the knife.” He picks up his coat from the chair. “Good night, Serenity.”
He goes. The door closes softly. I sit in the warm dark with my blood loud in my ears and wait for the card reader’s click.
It doesn’t come.
The corridor light runs in a thin line under the door. Two breaks stand in it, side by side, where a man’s feet would be.
They don’t move.
He’s standing there.
I pull the covers to my waist and watch the light. My wolf watches it with me, ears up. The ache keeps throbbing, deep and unanswered.
The two breaks in the light stay exactly where they are.