Chapter Ten
AVELINE
The heat burned me from the inside out.
Not the creeping warmth I’d learned to recognize.
This was different. This was my body deciding, without consulting me, that it was done being patient.
I came out of sleep gasping, already kneeling in the nest, my fingers twisted into the furs like I’d been trying to hold onto something and lost it anyway.
The room seemed cramped. The sensation on my skin was wrong.
It was overly sensitive, and the shift’s fabric felt like a constant irritant.
I didn’t hear Thane cross the room. The air changed when he entered it.
He stopped a few feet away.
“Tell me.”
“Worse than before.” My voice came out thin. “Don’t come closer.”
He ignored me.
Slow, unhurried, like I hadn’t just told him not to. He crouched in front of me and rested his forearms on his knees, and looked at me with that steady gray gaze that I was starting to understand meant he’d already made a decision and was waiting for me to catch up to it.
“You said that last time. You were wrong.”
The heat surged, rolling through my belly, pulling every muscle tight and dragging a sound out of me that I immediately wanted back.
My thighs pressed together. My hands clenched harder in the furs.
It wasn’t pain. I kept waiting for pain, kept bracing for the thing my father had always told me came next, and it never arrived.
Just the ache. It was an intense, undeniable craving that felt less like a desire and more like a bodily necessity.
Thane watched me work through it without moving.
Then he lowered himself onto his knees.
The breath left my lungs. His large and sturdy build made him seem imposing when standing, but kneeling, he was at my eye level. The intentionality of his posture, the choice to kneel, had a profound effect on me.
“Breathe with me,” he said.
I tried. The first breath shook. The second followed the slow rise of his chest and held together better. The third steadied. The wave pulled back from its peak without breaking.
“Good.” He reached out and his hand settled at my jaw, warm and unhurried, thumb resting against my cheekbone. “When did you last let anyone touch you?”
“I don’t remember.”
His thumb moved once, slow, tracing toward my ear. It permeated everything. In my throat, my chest, low where the heat had already made itself at home.
“Then we go slowly,” he said.
His other hand slid into my hair—not gripping, just settling, a warm weight at the back of my head—and my spine relaxed by degrees. My hands loosened their hold on the furs.
“Tell me what it feels like.”
I didn’t want to say it out loud. He watched me hesitate and didn’t look away or give me a way out of it.
“Pressure. Like something that needs to—”
“Crest,” he cut me off.
“Yes.”
He held my gaze. “Let me help.”
My body answered before I did. A pulse of want, sharp and intense, made my hips shift and my face heat.
I understood, with complete clarity, that he was giving me a choice.
He was kneeling. He was waiting. He had been waiting since he walked through the door.
He would walk away if I said no. But I didn’t want to.
“Yes,” I relented.
His mouth found mine, soft and slow, not a taking but a question, and I didn’t know what to do with my hands at first, and then I found his shoulders and held on.
He kissed me as if he had time for it, as if the heat building between us wasn’t also building in him, and when his mouth opened, I followed and stopped thinking about my hands entirely.
When he pulled back, it was only far enough to breathe.
His mouth moved to my jaw, my throat, and he took his time there, lips tracing the line of my neck while one hand stayed in my hair and the other slid down my back in a long, slow stroke.
It was like a seam coming undone. His mouth reached the curve where my neck met my shoulder, and my head fell back, and I stopped making any decisions at all.
He guided me down into the nest, one hand cradling my head, and moved over me without covering me, his weight braced above me.
He pushed the hair back from my face. Kissed me again, deeper, and something between us shifted—the thing he’d been holding back beginning to unspool—and instead of frightening me, it pulled me closer.
My hands dragged at his shoulders. His mouth moved to my collarbone, the upper curve of my chest, and every press of his lips moved the heat in me from frantic toward something hungrier.
His hand traced down my ribs, my waist, over my hip, and took its time. I stopped waiting for him to rush. Started paying attention instead to what his hands found when they moved slowly, and what I felt when I let them.
When his fingers reached the hem of my shift dress, I went still.
He stilled with me. “Yes or no.”
“Yes.” Steadier than I was. “I want—yes.”
He pushed the fabric up slowly, watching my face.
The cool air hit my bare skin, and then his palm covered the inside of my thigh and the warmth of it turned the shiver into something else entirely.
He stroked upward without rushing to the destination.
The inside of my thigh, the crease of my hip, back down. My hips moved without instruction.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said. Factual, not patronizing. He could feel the tension in my legs.
His fingers found the center of the ache and I gasped.
He didn’t pull away. He stayed, the touch light, and the heat answered it like a flame catching.
He read me—what made my breath break, what made my thighs try to close around his hand, what made me push up toward him instead of away—and he applied it with a patience that should have been unbearable and instead was the thing my body had been starving for. Not rushed at. Given to.
“I can’t hold—” I started.
“Don’t hold anything,” he said. “Let go.”
He lowered his head.
The first press of his mouth against me took my voice.
Warm and certain and unhurried, his hands steadying my hips—not pinning me down, holding me together, and the difference was everything.
He coaxed rather than demanded. Every time the tension peaked, he eased back and let it rebuild higher than before.
Somewhere beneath the heat and the wanting, I understood what he was doing, understood he was giving my body time to learn that the cresting didn’t mean destruction.
My fingers pressed into the back of his head. I wasn’t guiding him. I was holding on.
The pressure built enormously and brightly and unstoppable, and I turned my head.
The door was not fully closed.
Malric stood in the gap, his shoulder against the frame, still as stone in the dark of the corridor. His face was a controlled shadow. But his eyes found mine immediately and held, and what was in them was not cold or distant or tactical. It was something he hadn’t managed to put away in time.
I didn’t look away.
The wave broke.
Pleasure tore through me in a long, obliterating rush, my back lifting from the furs, my voice fracturing into something I didn’t recognize.
Through it all, Malric’s gaze stayed on mine and something moved across his face that his composure wasn’t fast enough to catch—something raw and real, then hidden before he’d let it fully surface.
I held his gaze until I couldn’t hold anything.
The release moved through me in diminishing waves, each quieter than the last, until I was flat on my back breathing like I’d been running. The heat that had lived under my skin for days had banked. Not gone. Settled. A fire that had stopped trying to consume everything in the room.
Thane came up beside me and drew me against his chest without speaking. His hand moved through my hair in slow passes. His breathing was controlled and I could feel what that control was costing him, yet he didn’t ask for anything in return.
After a while, I looked toward the door.
Malric was gone.
The corridor was dark and empty. The door sat at the same angle it had before, like nothing had shifted behind it. I was aware of the exact moment he changed internally before he put it back, and the feeling persisted. It sat in my chest like a splinter—too small to extract, too present to ignore.
Thane’s hand moved through my hair again.
“It doesn’t have to hurt. You know that now.”
I understood it now. That was the thing sitting strange and new in my chest, stranger than anything else that had just happened. Not the pleasure. The moment just before—Malric’s eyes on mine, my eyes on his, and what had passed between us in the space where neither of us said a word.
Malric
Iknew I should walk away.
I’d told myself I would. When Thane went in and closed the door, I’d stood in the corridor for thirty seconds, decided I was done, and walked twelve paces toward the stairs before her scent hit the back of my throat and stopped me cold.
That was an hour ago.
I hadn’t moved since.
I stood with my back against the stone wall, arms crossed, jaw clamped shut, and I cataloged every tactical problem currently facing the rebellion.
Supply lines. The gap in our eastern contacts.
The two conflicting intelligence reports about the king’s troop movements that I hadn’t reconciled yet.
I ran numbers in my head. I composed the letter I needed to send to Caerwyn’s second when we got out of this tower.
None of it worked.