Chapter 15
MARIS
The sign is already turned when he knocks.
I see him through the glass — tall, grey-skinned, road dust on his cloak — and my first instinct is to keep wiping down the counter and pretend I didn't. My second instinct wins. I cross to the door and open it two inches.
"We're closed."
"I know." His light eyes drop briefly past my shoulder. "I need to talk to you about something new."
The flick of his gaze toward Elin is enough. I step back and let him in.
Elin is on her stool with her doll, finishing the last of her supper bread. She looks up at Kaedrin and tilts her head, a smile crossing her lips.
"You came back," she says.
"I did." He stops a few feet from her stool, not crowding her. "Is that all right?"
She considers this seriously. "Yes," she decides, and holds up the doll. "Pip says yes too."
"Pip has good judgment." He looks ver her head at me, and whatever is in his expression, I don't examine it long.
"Finish your bread," I tell Elin. "Then bath and bed."
She protests the bath, and I end up just as wet as she is, and twenty minutes later I'm carrying her damp-haired and clutching Pip, her small body warm and heavy against my shoulder. I feel Kaedrin's eyes following us up the stairs. The back of my neck stays warm the whole way.
I settle Elin into her bed, tuck the blanket around her and the doll both, and stay until her breathing evens out.
The lamp on her nightstand throws soft light across her curls.
The grey at her temples catches it differently than the dark strands do, the way it always has, and I press a kiss to her forehead and let myself out quietly.
Kaedrin is standing by the window when I out of Elin’s room. He turns away from it when he hears me, arms loose at his sides, waiting.
I sit in the chair by the hearth and fold my hands in my lap. "Tell me."
He sits across from me. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and looks at me directly. "I think Fenwood plans to leave someone behind to take the blame when he goes."
"Me."
"You and Elin." He says it flat, no softening. "The animal deaths stop when the artifacts he’s smuggling leave the forest. That happens the same time he leaves town. But if the town's attention is on something else — if there's a more final explanation for why the deaths stopped—"
I go very still. "You think he'd—"
"I think he's careful." Kaedrin’s eyes reveal nothing. "And I think a dead woman and her cursed child is a cleaner exit than a missing merchant and unanswered questions."
The fire pops in the hearth. I look at it for a moment.
"You're certain," I say.
"No." He doesn't offer false comfort. "But certain enough that I'm here instead of watching Fenwood's wagons tonight."
I stand up. Sitting still isn't working. I move across the room and look out at the dark lane below, the cobblestones wet with evening mist.
"You need to leave," he says. "You and Elin, for a week, maybe two. Long enough for me to bring Fenwood in and close this."
"I can't close the bakery on a week's notice."
"It's a week, Maris. Not a year."
"It's a week with no income." I turn around.
"It's packing up a young child who has never slept anywhere but her own bed, who will ask me every hour where we're going and when we're coming back, and who has a doll she cannot sleep without that I will somehow have to remember to pack along with everything else.
" I cross my arms. "Where would we even go? "
"Brennor's wife has family in the next valley."
"You've already looked into it?"
"Yes."
The presumption of it hits me wrong. "You made plans for me without asking me?"
"I gathered information." He keeps his voice even. "You make the plans. I thought you'd want options."
"I want—" I stop. Press two fingers to my forehead. "I want this to not be happening."
"I know."
"This is your fault." I say it before I've decided to, and even as it comes out I know it isn't fair. "You came here. You brought this investigation here, and now my daughter is a target because a criminal needs someone to blame when he runs."
"He was here before I arrived," Kaedrin says. "The artifacts were in the forest before I rode into Brindle Hollow. The rumors about Elin—"
"I know." I cut him off. "I know. I'm aware it isn't rational." I sit back down because my legs are tired and the anger has nowhere useful to go. "I just needed someone to be angry at."
"Use me." He says it without irony. "I've earned some of it."
The fire settles into quiet crackling.
"Is that what this is really about?" he asks. "The danger, or me being back?"
I gaze at the hearth.
"Maris."
"Both," I say. "It's both."
He waits.
"One night." I drop my voice, keeping it soft and level.
"You were here one night, and I held onto it longer than I should have.
Longer than made any sense." I look at my hands.
"You made me feel — like I was worth being seen.
Like the evening meant something to someone other than me.
" I press my palms flat on my knees. "I waited.
For months I waited for something. A letter, a message, anything.
And when nothing came, I told myself I'd imagined the whole thing. "
He doesn't speak.
"Then Elin started looking more like you every month." My voice stays steady by effort. "Every time she tilts her head a certain way, or her eyes catch the light — it's you. And I'd spent all that time trying to stop thinking about you, and I couldn't, because she made it impossible."
The room is quiet enough that I can hear the lamp flame moving.
"That's what you asked," I say. "That's the answer."
He stares at me, those pale eyes burning through my clothes, through my skin, to my soul. I squirm under his gaze and get to my feet again, moving around the chair as if the piece of furniture can protect me.
He crosses the room and puts both hands on my shoulders.
I don't move toward him. I don't move away either. His hands are warm through the fabric of my dress, and he holds the contact without pulling, just present, just there.
"I cared about you," he says. "I want you to know that."
My eyes fix on the middle of his chest rather than his face.
"You opened your door to a soaking wet dark elf you'd never met.
" His voice is low and steady. "You fed me.
You gave me dry clothes. You sat with me by the fire and talked to me like I was a person rather than something to be afraid of.
" His thumbs press slightly against my shoulders.
"I didn't know what to do with that. Humans don't — " He stops.
Starts again. "Your kindness was more than I expected.
It made it too easy to stay. Too easy to fall. "
I look up at him. "Too easy to leave, too."
He exhales with a soft snort. His right hand moves from my shoulder to my face, his palm warm against my cheek, his thumb resting below my cheekbone.
"For two years I composed messages in my head," he says. "Ways to reach you. Ways to explain." His pearly eyes are steady on mine. "And every version ended the same way — with you waiting for a man who moves between campaigns on a court's schedule. I thought it would cause you more harm."
"That was my decision to make."
"Yes,” He says. "It was."
“It was all a lie, though, wasn’t it? I wasn’t worth following up with.” My stomach churns and I try to look away.
Kaedrin grips my chin and keeps my eyes on his. “It was never a lie. You were worth far more than a absentee man, which is why I couldn’t drag you into my life.”
“But you’re here now…” my voice drops to a near whisper.
“I’m here now.”
He leans down and kisses me.
The careful restraint he carries everywhere else is entirely absent. His mouth is warm and certain against mine, and three years of distance collapses into nothing. My hands find the front of his shirt, and I pull rather than push, and the sound that comes out of me is embarrassingly immediate.
I part my lips and his tongue slides against mine, slow and thorough, tasting faintly of the evening air and something else almost sweet underneath, a taste I remembered more accurately than I admitted to myself.
Heat moves through me fast — across my chest, down my stomach, settling low and insistent between my thighs.
My nipples tighten against the fabric of my dress.
I press closer and feel him responding against my stomach, hard and unmistakable, and the knowledge of it sends another wave of warmth flooding through my core.
His hands find my waist and he lifts me.
A moan escapes my throat as I wrap my legs around him, arms locking behind his neck, and he carries me out of the sitting room with the ease of someone for whom my weight registers as nothing.
The bedroom is dim, the lamp unlit, enough moonlight through the curtain to see by.
He drops me onto the bed.
"Roll over," he says.
I do. His fingers find the laces at my back immediately, working them loose with more patience than I currently have for anything.
The dress loosens. His hands run down my back, long fingers tracing my spine, and I squirm on the bed, wanting more.
He flips me back over, hands firm on my hips, and I shrug the fabric off my shoulders and push it down.
He goes still.
His bright eyes move over me slowly, and the heat that rises on my skin under that gaze brings a red flush. I lean back against the pillows and let him look.
He pulls his shirt over his head. Unties his pants and lets them drop.
He is exactly as I remember — lean and grey-pale, the muscle of him understated until he moves.
His cock is firm and demands attention, the tip glistening with precum.
He crawls onto the bed and hovers over me, and I reach up before he's fully settled, running my palms up his chest. The skin is cool and smooth, warming under my hands.
I trace the lines of him the way I did three years ago — up his chest, his shoulders, the back of his neck.
My fingertips find his ears, tracing the delicate taper to their points, and he groans against my mouth.
His cock jumps against my stomach and I feel the pulse of it.
His lips leave mine and move down my throat.
He takes his time — warm open kisses along my neck, my collarbone, down to my breasts.
He covers them with his mouth in turn, his tongue moving in slow circles before he draws each nipple between his lips and sucks until they pull into tight points.
I arch up into it and roll my hips against him, the wet heat of my sex pressing against his skin, and the contact pulls a shudder through me that I don't try to contain.
He positions himself at my entrance.
His eyes find mine, and I nod.
He pushes inside.
My back comes off the bed and I cry out as his cock strokes my sensitive inner walls.
I dig my fingers into his shoulders and he moves — deep, urgent, three years of distance coming through in every thrust. It doesn't feel like starting over.
It feels like resuming something that was never finished, all the longing I packed down and managed and told myself had faded finally given somewhere to go.
I lock my legs around his hips and roll my body to meet his thrusts, and the pressure builds fast, faster than I expect, coiling tighter with each inward plunge.
My insides quiver, and my body clenches hard around him.
The pleasure peaks in a powerful explosion. His name tears from my lips and I arch against him. My fingers grip his shoulder blades, shaking against his flawless, taut skin as waves of pleasure rock through me, and my vision blurs.
He presses his forehead into the curve of my neck. His hands grip my hips and he groans against my skin, deep and ragged, and I feel him spill into me.
We stay there for a moment, breathing.
Then he rolls to the side and I turn to face him. The moonlight through the curtain falls across his face, the sharp angles of it, the pale eyes that are watching me with the same careful attention he gives everything.
"What happens now?" I ask.
He's quiet, eyes down. "I don't know."
I meet his eyes. He looks back. The complicated truth of everything — Elin asleep down the hall, Fenwood still out there, the courts that own his schedule, the three years between us — all of it sits in the room without being named.
We both understand it. Neither of us says so.