26. Clara
CLARA
My stomach announces itself somewhere between the fifth kiss and the sixth, a growl loud enough that a bird takes off from the nearest fir.
Aldric pulls back and raises an eyebrow at my midsection. “Your body has the timing of a siege drum.”
“My body has been through a lot today. Visions. Declarations. Gate-based cardio.” I glance at the sky, already turning purple behind the treetops. “Also it’s getting dark, and I’m not spending my first night of freedom being eaten by whatever lives in the forest.”
“Wolves,” he offers helpfully. “Boar. Possibly descendants of my hunting dogs, gone feral.”
I roll my eyes at him. “Great. Love that for us. Inside.”
Aldric carries me halfway across the courtyard before I make him put me down, and even then, he tucks me into his side like he’s afraid the curse will change its mind and snatch one of us back.
And that’s when the thought slithers in.
What if it’s not me he’s afraid of losing?
It follows me through the atrium, past the roses, into the kitchen, where Aldric rolls his sleeves and starts pulling things from the pantry. I sit on the edge of the big worktable and watch his forearms do their usual crimes, and the thought keeps circling like Shmoo around a fish basket.
He said he loves me. He shouted it across a courtyard, loud enough to scare the crows. And I believe he believes it.
But I’m also the first woman he’s touched in centuries. The only living human to walk through his gate since before color TV. Of course he loves me. A starving man loves the first meal put in front of him. That’s not a compliment to the meal. That’s just hunger.
And now the gate is open. The whole world is out there, and it’s a world full of women who aren’t me, women who haven’t spent days arguing with him about consent and freedom. What if he walks out there and realizes his sample size was one?
Or… what if he knows the odds? What if the cold, strategic warlord part of his brain has already run the numbers and concluded that no other woman on earth is going to look at exposed ribs and a crystal heart and think hot, no one else is going to lick the bone and mean it, so he might as well keep the weird one who does?
I don’t want to be somebody’s only option. Marco chose me because I was pretty and had nobody—no family to object, no friends to warn me. Being selected for lack of alternatives is not romance. It’s logistics.
“You’ve stopped talking.”
I blink. Aldric is looking at me over a pan of sizzling butter, one functioning eye narrowed.
My lips curl into a smile against their will. “I talk constantly. I’m probably talking right now.”
“You have said a dozen words since the courtyard.” He cracks eggs one-handed, and adds the leftover potatoes, chives, the last of the smoked trout. “You spoke more the night you thought I might murder you.”
“Fond memories.” I hop off the table and busy myself with plates so I don’t have to look at him.
He lets it go, which is new for him. We carry everything to the great hall, and I set the table on autopilot.
The food is stupidly good, as always, and I eat and make appropriate noises at appropriate times. Halfway through the meal, he sets his fork down with a clang.
“Clara.”
“Mm?”
Aldric takes a deep breath. “I have interrogated men strapped to chairs who volunteered more than you are volunteering.”
“Wow. Romantic dinner conversation from the eleventh century,” I say dryly.
“Fourteenth.” He leans back. “Something has soured in you since the gate. Tell me what it is.”
I push a potato around my plate for a few seconds before opening my mouth.
“I just don’t know what happens now. The gate’s open. You can go anywhere.” I hate the way my voice sounds right now, but I barrel on. “Everything’s different, and I don’t know what our future looks like anymore, and I hate not knowing things.”
Aldric considers this for a long moment, one eye slightly narrowed.
“Then allow me to resolve the greater part of your uncertainty,” he says. “I have no interest in going anywhere.”
I look up. “What?”
He raises an eyebrow. “You seem surprised.”
“You’ve been locked in this castle for seven hundred years. The door just opened. Most people would at least want to see a McDonald’s.”
“I do not know what that is, and based on your tone, I have not been deprived.” He tears off a piece of bread, like this is a completely normal conversation to have.
“I will enjoy walking the forest. I want to see the far side of the lake, the old road to the valley, whether the village I remember left any stones behind. The land, yes. But people?” He shakes his head slowly. “Clara. Look at me.”
“I’m looking. I look constantly. It’s becoming a problem,” I deadpan.
The corner of his mouth twitches, but he doesn’t take the bait.
“The curse broke, but my body did not miraculously repair itself. I am still this.” He turns his hand palm up on the table, showing me the naked fingerbones, the missing flesh.
“What would you have me do out there? Walk into your century and explain the eye? The glowing ribcage? Queue at your shops while children scream? I have no desire to be a spectacle, and less desire to be a specimen. I have spent centuries being stared at by no one. I find I prefer it to the alternative.”
I blink at him. “So you’re just going to stay here?”
“We are going to stay here.” He pauses. Winces.
“If you wish to. What I want is for you to bring your world to Blackthorn Keep. Whatever you require. The water heater. The electricity Tesla failed to make free. The oat milk you mourn. Bring the entire twenty-first century through my gate, Clara, cart by cart. I will carry it up the stairs myself. I have experience with buckets.”
My throat is suddenly tight, and I clear it. “That’s the thing, though.”
Aldric frowns. “What thing?”
I take a deep breath and bare my heart to the monster who owns it.
“Aldric, I’m the only woman you’ve seen since the Ottomans were a concern.
You don’t have a basis for comparison. What if you love me because I’m just…
what was available? What if you’re keeping me because you’ve figured out that nobody else on this planet is going to look at your ribcage and get turned on, so you might as well hang on to the freak who does?
I don’t want to be chosen because I’m the only choice. ”
Aldric is silent for a few seconds, his expression neutral. Then he laughs and my eyes narrow in affront. Is he mocking me?
“Clara. You have everything backward.”
“Excuse me?”
“You think scarcity made me love you. Woman, I had scarcity for centuries. Servant girls lived under this roof for four hundred years. Pretty ones. Willing ones. There was scarcity and availability and every arrangement loneliness could invent, and I felt nothing that survived the morning.” He leans forward.
“Then you fell through my gate, insulted my décor, ate my strawberries, called me rapey to my face, renamed my cat, and lied about being able to fillet a fish. Do you truly believe I love you because you were the only woman in reach? I love you despite the fact that you are the single most exhausting creature to breach my walls since the plague.”
“That’s…” I blink furiously. “That’s the worst nice thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“I am not finished.” He stands, comes around the table, and crouches beside my chair so we’re eye to eye.
“If the gate had opened onto a thousand women, I would walk through them to reach you. Not because you tolerate the bones. Because you argue with me. Because you set my table and light candles and pretend they are functional. Because you looked at the ruin of me and demanded to see more. I did not choose you for lack of options, little intruder. I would choose you over every other option.”
I stare at him until he gets blurry, then blink.
“Okay,” I manage to say despite my chest being squeezed like someone parked a horse carriage on it. “Okay. Noted. Duly recorded.”
“Furthermore.” He rises and returns to his seat, picking up his fork like he hasn’t just eviscerated me.
“The premise is flawed. You claim no other woman would want me. And yet you want me. Therefore, women who want me demonstrably exist, and I have a full one hundred percent success rate with the ones I have met this century. Statistically, I am irresistible.”
The laugh bursts out of me before I can stop it. “That is not how statistics work. Your sample size is one!”
“My sample size is perfect.”
“You know what?” I push my chair back. “You’re right. I’m the only woman on earth deranged enough to want this.”
And I slide off my chair and under the table.
“Clara.” He sounds mildly scandalized. I crawl closer and fit myself between his knees, then run my palms up his thighs, feeling the muscle jump under the fabric. “Clara, we are at dinner—”
“You’re at dinner.” I find the buttons of his pants. “I’m at dessert.”
“By the saints.” The table jolts as his knee hits the underside. Cutlery rattles.
He’s already hard when I free him, and I take a second to appreciate the view even in the near darkness under the table.
The curve, the thickness, the ladder of barbells gleaming faintly blue in the light bleeding through his shirt.
His whole body has gone rigid above me like he’s bracing for artillery.
“You do not have to—”
“Aldric.” I press a kiss to the base of his cock, making him growl. “Stop interrupting my meal.”
“Fuck!”
I take him into my mouth, and the table jumps again.
He’s both warm and cool, silken skin and metal adornments, and I work my way down slowly, letting each barbell roll past my lips, one rung at a time, until he hits the back of my throat with plenty of him still left over. My hand wraps around the rest. Above me, his breathing has gone ragged.
“Clara… your mouth.” His hand fumbles under the table, finds my hair, but he doesn’t push. Just holds me, trembling. “We were having a civilized meal.”
I hum around him, and his hips buck. A plate skitters overhead. I do it again, louder, hollowing my cheeks on the way up, dragging my tongue along the piercings on the way down, sloppy and deliberate, all spit and no shame.
He makes a sound that’s wrecked and helpless and mine, and the crystal in his chest must be blazing, because blue light pours down through the gap between the table and his body and washes over my hands where they grip him.
“Clara. Clara. If you do not stop—”
I grip the back of his thigh and pull him toward me, which is my answer, and has been my answer since the bathtub.
He comes with a roar that rattles the candelabra, flooding my mouth in thick pulses, too much as always, spilling past my lips no matter how fast I swallow.
His fist tightens in my hair, his boot heels dig into the flagstones, and above me, all his dignity collapses into a string of gasped, broken syllables that might be my name and might be prayer.
I ease off him slowly, letting the last barbell slip free, and wipe my chin with the back of my hand. Then I crawl out from under the table, resurface at his elbow, and sit back down in my chair like nothing happened.
I pick up my fork.
Aldric is slumped in his seat, chest heaving, his hair a mess from his own hand, staring at me like I just handed him the keys to a kingdom. His pants are still open. He looks like a cathedral after an earthquake.
“So,” I say, spearing a potato. “We were discussing renovations.”
It takes him three tries to find his voice.
“Bring the entire century,” he rasps. “Bring two. I will build you a road.”