23. Riley
RILEY
The lodge sits at the dead end of a logging road Gabriel swore wasn't on any map worth trusting.
One room, mostly. An iron stove going cold in the corner, a sink that coughs rust before it runs clear, two windows with the glass gone milky at the edges.
It smells of woodsmoke and damp wool and the antiseptic Nico's already pulled from a tin first-aid box that looks older than the road.
"Locks," I say.
"Front's a deadbolt. The back you can wedge. Sit down, Riley."
"Bossy." But my legs are doing a thing I don't authorize, a fine tremor that runs up into my hands, and I'm tired of arguing with my own body tonight. I drop onto the bench by the stove.
He's at my side without seeming to cross the distance.
He crouches so we're level, and I watch him notice every cataloged injury the same as I noticed the exits — the split in my lip Lucien put there, the gash above my brow gone tacky, the bruised cuffs of skin where the iron held my wrists.
His fingers hover near my pulse, and I give him the wrist on purpose so he doesn't have to take it.
"You're cold," he says.
"You're worse."
A breath that might be a laugh, if he let it finish.
He cleans the brow cut first, slow, his thumb bracing my jaw so the antiseptic doesn't run into my eye.
It stings. I don't flinch, because flinching feels like handing Lucien one more thing.
His attention snags on my wrists when I try to fold them out of sight under my sleeves.
"Don't," he says.
"It's nothing."
"It's not." He turns my hand over, careful as a man defusing something, and presses two fingers flat to the inside of my wrist. Counting again. He keeps doing that — checking the beat under my skin like he needs proof the thing that almost stopped tonight is still running.
I let him have it for a few seconds. Then I pull the thread I've been holding since the chapel.
"He has a piece of the resonance now. He has names. He has whatever he stripped off that box. You could've ended it, and you didn't, because I was chained down."
"I know what it costs." He sets the cloth he's using to clean me down.
When he looks at me, his look has gone bright at the edges, the thing under his skin surfacing.
"I have closed many situations. Removing the variable.
The clean line was always the answer." A muscle works in his throat.
"You were the variable. I chose the variable. "
"Don't say it like that. Like I'm a math problem you got wrong on purpose."
"You're not a problem." Rough now, the control fraying at the seams. "You were the only thing in that room I wasn't willing to lose. I would make the same choice with a gun to my own head. That terrifies me more than Lucien's ulterior motive."
I want to be only grateful, but I'm not built for only one feeling at a time. "And if he uses those seconds to win? If people die because you picked me?"
"Then they die and I picked you." He says it quietly, with none of the relief of a man absolving himself. "I won't pretend that's noble. It isn't. It's the most selfish thing I've done, but I'd do it again."
I keep myself unguarded, but look away at the unnervingly obsidian, silent.
"Here's my problem," I say, steadier. "The second somebody decides I matter, they start building me a cage.
A nice one, sometimes. Padded. But the door still locks from outside.
My father did it with secrets. Lucien wants me for what my hands can open.
Your leadership would put me behind glass as a prop.
And you — you've tried to do that a little more than once.
Dolomites. A box in the mountains. Stay safe while the men handle it. "
"I shouldn't have."
"I need to know you mean that." I lean in. "If there's some pull, whatever it is you've been not-explaining since—" I stop and start again. "I won't be some errand. I'm not a thing the universe gave you."
He's silent a beat. Then he takes my bruised hand again, gentler than before, and turns it palm-up like he's reading it.
"There is a pull. I won't lie about that." His thumb traces the line of my wrist, avoiding the worst of the marks. "But the pull doesn't work like that."
"What is it then?"
"It means my blood recognizes you," Nico says carefully.
"Not as property. Not as some pretty fate I get to hide behind.
A mate bond is instinct, pull, recognition.
It makes everything in me aware of you before thought catches up.
But wanting you? Choosing you? That isn't the bond, Riley.
That's me. And if you ever tell me no, the bond can scream itself bloody. I'll still listen to you."
I came in ready to fight him, and he disarmed me without raising his voice. I hate, a little, how well it works.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
"I choose you back." I tighten my fingers in his so he understands it's mine.
His mouth brushes the unhurt corner of mine, asking.
I answer by pulling him in. His lips are cool silk against the fever of my own.
I melt into him on the worn bench, the stove's crackling heat licking at my back while his marble-cold chest presses to mine.
His fingers thread through my hair, gentle yet possessive, as if afraid I might vanish like morning mist.
A low groan vibrates in his throat when my tongue teases his sharp fang. Heat rises from low in my belly. I lean closer, craving more—his eternal hunger, my willing surrender—lost in the smoky warmth and the dangerous promise of his bite.
My fingers trace the hard lines of his chest through his shirt, feeling the unyielding marble of immortal muscle. He tastes like midnight and secrets, his lips claiming mine with growing urgency as the fire pops and hisses nearby, casting flickering golden light across our skin.
Nico's hands slide down my sides and slip under the hem of my sweater.
The contrast makes me gasp into his mouth—his icy touch against my flushed, heated flesh.
He explores slowly, reverently, thumbs brushing the undersides of my breasts until my nipples tighten painfully. I arch into him, needing more friction.
His mouth leaves mine to trail along my jaw, teasing my pulse point without breaking skin.
A whimper escapes me. One of his palms cups my breast, squeezing with perfect pressure while the other grips my hip, pulling me tighter against his growing cock in his lap.
The stove's warmth battles his cold, leaving me trembling between fire and ice, lost in the slow, torturous build of desire.
I rock against him, chasing the delicious ache he's awakening, my breath coming in short, panting as his fingers continue along my skin.
His fingers dig into my hips with immortal strength as I rock against him. All I feel is the urgent need pulsing between my thighs.
"Please, Nico," I whisper against his cool mouth.
He answers with a low, hungry groan that vibrates straight to my core.
He lifts me, and his fingers hook into the waistband of my pants.
He tugs them down slowly along with my underwear.
His icy fingers trace up my inner legs, parting them as he frees me completely, eyes dark with hunger.
He lifts again, making me sit above him, and I gasp sharply as he thrusts his cock into me—slow, thick, and relentlessly cold.
"Oh god…" I moan.
He pulls my hair, making my head fall back and he starts to move, he guides my hips in slow, but steady rhythm. Each thrust makes my toes curl. I cling to his shoulders, nails digging into his shirt as I ride him on the bench, the wooden slats creaking beneath us.
Nico's mouth finds my throat, fangs grazing my skin as he thrusts up harder, faster. His fingers roam, squeezing my breasts, pinching my nipples while he deepens inside me again and again.
I lean forward, kissing him desperately as the pressure builds, my walls clenching around his cold cock. He feels endless, unbreakable, and completely mine.
He brings my eyes to his, and we lock to each other.
Moving faster now. His lips are parted as he drives up with powerful, relentless strokes.
Something flares behind us, sending faint veins of glow across his pale skin and hard lines of his shoulders.
I feel the rise of an orgasm almost immediately as it does it. I think he does too.
The pleasure shuffles around, each thrust gets deeper, harder. I cry out as my body trembles, but I'm not there yet. I feel my walls tighten around him and his cock expanding inside.
Nico's eyes widen, his face changes and he throws his head back slightly.
I grab a fistful of hair to keep our eyes connected, a groan tears free from me.
Our hips jerk and we both let the orgasm take us.
My pussy soaks his cock, and his come shoots upward.
As our loudness increases, the obsidian glows with each sound, bathing us both in its ethereal light as we come.
It doesn't seem to stop, it keeps rushing through us. I'm sweating and we are holding onto each other like this will be the last time. Like our bodies are connected. That they won't finish.
Then I crumble onto him, burying my head in his collarbone. Breathing unnaturally. His mouth kisses my neck, and I just stay with his cock inside me and my legs like jelly unable to move.
Eventually easing off him, he gathers a stack of stale blankets, and I move to the floor by the stove.
I place my head on his chest, and I feel a warmth now — borrowed heat, mine, gone into him where the chill used to live.
One of his cool hands stays splayed over my back, not holding me in place, just there, mapping the rise and fall of my breathing like he's still confirming it works.
"Say something normal," I murmur into his collarbone, over an old scar there. "Pretend we're people who get a tomorrow."
"What does a normal tomorrow look like, for you?"
"I've never planned past the next job." I trace the scar with one finger. "Maybe a drive to nowhere. A door I don't have to case first. You, being insufferable about coffee."
"I can imagine that." Wonder sits oddly in his voice, like he's surprised the muscle still works.
"We just need to survive the week."
"We will," he tries to encourage, and I feel his mouth curve against my hair.
I almost let myself drift. Then my eye catches the table — Thomas' notebooks where I stacked them, the frost-touched one on top, its cover canted open from how I dropped it.
And the relic, wrapping beside them, gives a single low pulse.
Not the map waking. Just one beat, like a heart turning over in sleep, throwing the faintest cold across the room before it settles quiet again.
In the lamp's weak throw, a mark on the open notebook page catches the light I hadn't clocked before — my father's spiral, but doubled, a second loop nested inside the first, with three short strokes laddered through it. I get up and cross to see it properly.
"Nico." I lift the notebook. "This mark. He never drew it twice anywhere else."
He comes up on an elbow, and the recognition crosses his face. "It's an old keeper's mark."
"Meaning?"
"A dead record," he says carefully. "Something sealed by a person who knew they might not survive to explain it. Your father left a message meant to be opened after he was gone."
His phone — a new burner — buzzes once by my boots. Cassandra, three words, no greeting: Marker authenticated. It's real.
So there's more. A last voice my father saved for the end, waiting somewhere for me to be ready, and Lucien is already running ahead of us by a handful of stolen seconds toward whatever it points to.