Chapter 6 #2
She makes a sound that is half protest and half surrender, and I let go of her hands and I take my time.
My mouth at her throat, where the pulse is going hard under the cool skin — she runs cold everywhere, I am learning her temperature the way I learned her tells, and the contrast of her cool against my heat is its own kind of friction, every place we touch a small shock of difference.
I learn the line of her collarbone with my lips.
I learn the place below her ear that makes her breath stutter and her cold fingers dig into my shoulders.
I bring my hands up the cold curve of her ribs and find the soft cold weight of her breasts and she arches into my palms with a broken sound, the cold of her tightening against the heat of me, and when I lower my mouth to her the gasp she makes is the first time I have ever heard her lose a word entirely.
She is trembling, and for once it is not a tremor I have to decide whether to name, because it is the same one moving through me.
The rest of our clothes go in the dark, hers and then mine, her cold hands finally getting my belt open, finding the bare heat of me and learning the shape of it the way she learns everything, with a slow ruthless attention that nearly ends me where I stand.
I pick her up — she is lighter than the way she carries herself suggests — and her bare legs come around me, the cold press of her thighs against my hips, and I carry her the few steps to the bed and lay her down, and then I let the rest of the control go.
Completely. The man who governs every movement, every word, every stroke of every blade, lets go, and what is underneath is not chaos, because there is no chaos in me — it is precision turned to a different purpose, every touch deliberate, every place I put my mouth chosen, the same exactitude I bring to a stripped weapon brought now to the slow uncovering of her.
She gasps my name when I find the cold scarred palm of her hand and press my mouth to it, because somehow that, of all of it, is the thing that undoes her — that I have noticed her hands the way she noticed mine.
"You see everything," she breathes, and I say, against her wrist, "Only you," and it is the truest thing I have said since I came to this mountain.
I move down her, slow, learning the map of her the way she will later learn the map of me — the scar low on her side she will not explain tonight, the cold flat of her stomach jumping under my mouth, the way her spine bows off the bed when I settle between her thighs and put my mouth where she is no longer cold at all, where she is the only warm place on her whole cold body, and the sound she makes then is not a word in any of her languages.
I take my time there, learning what makes her hands fist in my hair, what makes her hips chase my mouth, building it slow and deliberate the way I do everything until the careful sister is gone entirely, until there is only a woman with a steel spine coming apart against my mouth, shaking, my name and then Swedish and then nothing, the first time falling through her like a wave I feel break against my lips.
I hold her through it. I bring her down slow.
And only when she is loose and gasping and reaching for me do I rise back over her, the heat of my body settling along the whole cold length of hers, and she pulls me down by the back of the neck and says, against my ear, in the broken Russian she learned in Odessa, the word for now.
And when I finally come into her, slow, the two of us going still at the joining like the world has paused to let it happen — the cold tight clutch of her around the heat of me, the way her breath stops and then breaks loose, the way my own control finally, completely, ends — she makes a sound I will keep for the rest of my life, and her cold hands find my face in the dark, and the wolf — disciplined, controlled, obedient to no one but her now — goes utterly silent and certain, the way it has been trying to tell me it would since a motel doorway.
I move in her slow and then less slow, and she meets me, her cold heels at the backs of my thighs urging the pace, her body learning mine the way it learns everything — methodical even here, I discover, finding the angle that makes her breath catch and returning to it, building it, the same patience that kept her in a shipping container for seventy-two hours turned now to the slow ruthless construction of my undoing.
The bed, the dark, the heat of us and the cold of her meeting everywhere we touch.
I feel her tighten again, climbing, and I get a hand between us and hold her there at the edge until she is saying my name like it is the only word she has left, and when she goes over the second time she takes me with her — and I have never in my life been undone, not once, not on the mat or the ridge or in a fight, and I let her do it, and it is the first thing I have ever chosen for myself with my whole heart and no oath behind it.
After, she lies against my chest in the dark, her cold ear over my hammering heart, and her breathing slows, and I think she has gone under until she says, quietly, "I'm supposed to expose your club."
"I know," I say.
"I don't want to."
My hand moves slow through her hair. The wolf is silent and certain. The oath is somewhere below us in the dark, fulfilled or unfulfilled, I am no longer sure it matters the way I was taught it mattered.
"I know that too," I tell her.
And we lie there, the weapons master and the woman who came to take everything from him, in the plainest cabin on the mountain, and neither of us pretends there is a clean way out of what we have just become to each other.
There is no clean way. There is only the third thing the wolf has been promising me since the beginning, the door in the room I have stood in for seventeen years and finally have a reason to look for.
I close my eyes. For the first time in my life, I sleep without keeping watch.