Chapter 11 #2
“I know.” He repeated it, slower this time, like a man laying down a burden he’d been carrying for too long. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
I wanted to ask. Did he watch William die? Was he in the trees that day, close enough to hear the screaming? Could he have done something — warned them, driven them back, stepped out of the shadows for once in his life and saved a man who had a wife waiting at home?
But I swallowed the questions. I couldn’t afford to ask, because the answer might change what I was about to do, and I needed to do it. I looked away first. Picked up my cup and drank and swallowed hard against the thing rising in my throat.
This was it. It had to be now. Before I got used to this. Before the performance became the truth. Before I looked at him and saw a man instead of a means of escape.
He set the bow aside and crossed to the counter.
Pulled a handful of dried rosemary from the shelf and reached for grandmother’s mortar, the old stone stained rust-red from decades of madder root, dark and heavy and worn smooth where women’s hands had gripped it for longer than anyone alive could remember.
The red that marked us and the red that mended, all from the same root, ground in the same stone.
He started grinding. The rhythmic scrape of pestle against mortar filled the cottage, and the smell of rosemary cut through the wood smoke and the pine, sharp and green and alive.
I stood up from the table.
He glanced toward the sound, but I was already moving. I crossed the room and came to stand in front of him, between him and the counter, so close that my chest nearly touched his.
“Dietrich.” His name left my mouth without an edge for the first time since I’d learned it.
His hands froze. The pestle stopped mid-grind. His eyes found mine and I watched his pupils blow wide, watched the amber shrink to a thin burning ring, watched every wall he’d spent rebuilding come apart like wet paper.
I reached up and touched his face. My palm against his cheek, my thumb tracing the scar across his cheekbone.
His skin was warm beneath my palm, the coarse hair of his beard rough against my fingers.
He leaned into my hand before he could stop himself, a small, involuntary movement, the tilt of a man who hadn’t been touched with tenderness in so long that his body couldn’t resist it even when his mind knew better.
“Don’t.” But the word had no force left in it. A door kicked too many times to latch properly.
“I’m tired of fighting,” I whispered. The lie tasted like ashes. “I’m tired of hating you.”
His breath hitched. I could feel his pulse jumping under my fingertips, could feel the tremor running through him like a current through water.
“You don’t mean that,” he managed.
“I do.” I slid my hand from his cheek to the back of his neck, fingers threading into his hair. Drew his forehead down until it rested against mine. His breath was warm and unsteady on my face and his hands hung at his sides, shaking, clenched into fists that wanted to open.
“Talia...” My name in his mouth sounded like something breaking. “If you do this and you don’t mean it...”
“I mean it.” And I kissed him.
For a moment he was stone. Absolutely still, every muscle locked, like the thing he’d been starving for had walked up and offered itself and he was too terrified to reach for it in case it disappeared.
Then he broke.
His hands grabbed my waist and pulled me against him hard enough to empty my lungs.
His mouth opened over mine and he kissed me back with a hunger that bordered on violence, nothing gentle, nothing careful, just years of loneliness and need pouring out of him in a flood he couldn’t control.
His hands slid up my back and into my hair and he kissed me like I was air and he’d been drowning.
He walked me backward until my shoulders hit the wall beside the shelf and his body pressed the length of mine, every hard plane of muscle, the heat of him through our clothes, the unmistakable evidence of what I was doing to him pressed against my stomach.
His hands gripped my waist hard enough to bruise and his mouth moved from my lips to my throat, his beard dragging against my skin, teeth scraping against my pulse point.
I gasped. My head fell back against the wall and my fingers dug into his shoulders and the sound that came out of me was real, horrifyingly, undeniably real.
My body had stopped performing. It had stopped taking directions somewhere between his mouth on my throat and his hands in my hair and now it was just responding, answering his hunger with its own.
His hands found the neckline of my shift. His fingers trembled against the fabric, hovering, asking a question his mouth was too busy to voice.
I didn’t stop him. I needed his hands occupied. I needed his attention buried so deep in sensation that the rest of the world ceased to exist.
He pulled. The fabric tore and cold air hit my bare skin like a shock.
For a heartbeat we both froze, his eyes dropped to what he’d uncovered, to the swell of bare skin and the nipple already tightening in the cold air, and his breathing stopped.
Just stopped. Like his lungs had forgotten how to work.
Then his mouth was on me.
His lips closed around my nipple and my back arched off the wall so hard my shoulder blades cracked against the stone.
A sound tore from my throat, half moan, half sob, and my fingers twisted into his hair and held him there because my body had stopped listening to my mind entirely.
His tongue was warm and wet and desperate, circling and pulling, and the pleasure was sharp enough to cut, rolling through me in waves that buckled my knees and turned my thoughts to white noise.
He made sounds against my skin, low, broken, starving sounds that vibrated through my flesh and into my ribs and lodged somewhere behind my heart.
His hands gripped my waist and held me upright when my legs tried to give, his mouth pulling at my nipple with an intensity that told me he’d been imagining this, that every night he’d hovered his hands over my sleeping body this was what he’d wanted.
And I was drowning in it, sinking into it, losing the edges of myself in the heat and the pull and the terrible, ruinous sweetness of being wanted this badly by someone this desperately alone.
I forgot the plan.
For ten seconds, maybe fifteen, I forgot everything. Forgot the mortar and the door and the life waiting for me on the other side of the forest. Forgot Sophia and the boards and the cage.
There was only his mouth and my skin and the sound of both of us breathing like we’d been running for miles. My hips pressed forward against his and his grip on my waist tightened and a groan rumbled through his chest into mine and I felt it everywhere, and I wanted — Thomas.
His face flashed behind my eyes. The blood. The dirt. The neck bent wrong. Emma on her knees.
The heat didn’t die. It couldn’t — my body was too far gone, too flooded with sensation to come back that quickly.
But something cold and hard dropped through the center of it like a stone into a hot spring, and the stone was shaped like a little boy’s face and it sank to the bottom and sat there and reminded me what I was here to do.
My right hand loosened in his hair. Slid from the back of his head to his shoulder. Kept moving — out, away, reaching blindly along the wall while his mouth was still on me and his eyes were still closed and every nerve I had screamed at me to pull him closer instead of reaching for the shelf.
My fingers brushed across jars. Dried bundles. The rough edge of wood.
Then cold stone.
Grandmother’s mortar. Heavy in my palm. Stained dark from decades of madder root and medicine and the hands of every woman in my line who had used it to heal.
I was going to use it to break a man’s skull.
His tongue circled my nipple and another wave of pleasure crested through me so hard my vision blurred. I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood and tightened my fingers around the stone and pulled it from the shelf.
I’m sorry, Grandmother.
I brought the mortar down on his temple with every ounce of strength I had. The crack echoed through the cottage.
He went rigid against me. His mouth pulled away from my breast and his eyes flew open, confused at first, unfocused, his lips still wet from my skin.
And then the understanding arrived. I watched it land.
Watched it move across his face like a shadow, confusion to clarity to hurt to betrayal, each one worse than the last, each one cutting deeper than the blow itself.
He looked at me. Looked at my face with my breast still bare and the nipple still glistening from his mouth and the mortar still in my hand and the blood already running down his temple in a dark line, and the expression in his eyes wasn’t anger.
It was grief.
Grief that doesn’t rage or fight or argue. It just goes quiet and lies down and waits to die.
The light in his eyes died right there while I watched.
Then his eyes rolled back and he collapsed.
I stepped aside in time. He hit the floor hard and lay there motionless, blood seeping from his temple and pooling on the packed earth. One hand still reaching toward where I’d been standing. His fingers curled loosely around nothing.
I stood over him with the mortar clutched in my hand and my shift torn open and my body still pulsing with what he’d been doing to me moments before.
The pleasure and the horror churned together in my stomach until they became the same thing, a sick, hot wave that climbed up my throat and made me gag.
The mortar slipped from my fingers and hit the floor. The stone was wet — fresh blood mixing with the rusty red of madder, the old red and the new running together until I couldn’t tell which stain was grandmother’s and which was mine.
He was breathing. Shallow, uneven, but breathing. I hadn’t killed him.
I pulled the shift up but the fabric was torn and wouldn’t hold. I wrapped the red cloak around my shoulders and used it to hold the ruined shift closed, then grabbed the grimoire from under the bed and pressed it against my chest.
The door was unbarred.
I looked back once.
Dietrich lay on the stone floor with blood spreading from his temple, his face slack and empty. His mouth was still swollen from kissing me.
I could still feel his mouth on my nipple.
Could still feel the ghost of his hands on my waist, the rumble of his groan against my ribs, the wet heat of his tongue circling and pulling.
My body ached with wanting him. A real, physical ache that had nothing to do with the plan and everything to do with the traitorous, shameful, undeniable truth that part of me had meant it.
Had wanted him. Had kissed him back with hunger that wasn’t a lie and had arched into his mouth with need that wasn’t performance and had whispered I’m tired of hating you and meant at least half of it.
A deep, physical pain that sat behind my ribs like a fist and squeezed, and I knew, with a certainty I would carry for the rest of my life, that the look on his face when he understood what I’d done would follow me into every dream I had from now until I died.
I turned away.
And I ran.