CHAPTER TWELVE
I Don’t Want to Run
Pytr
I can’t believe she did it.
Even as she explains all the mundane details, traveling with Old Rae to Deep’s Crossing, buying a ticket for the river barge, washing dishes at an inn near the docks, it still sounds like something out of a storybook. The brave woman who ventured to the wicked city to save her true love.
“What?” Liv asks. “Why are you smiling?”
I shake my head. There’s too much to tell her, too much to explain. It’s going to take years to make her understand.
And we don’t have years. Hells, we don’t even have hours. I glance out of my window, where the full moon looks like it’s sinking into the wall of the Towers. Once it’s gone, I need to take Liv into the kitchens and sneak her through the trash chute. Alone.
I know my friends would help if they knew she was here. Hells, they’d do anything I asked of them, and I’d do the same.
But the risks are too great. Some deep whisper of intuition kept me from mentioning my wife when the men in white robes first came to the inn with their magic-infused silver chains, and every day I’ve spent in the Towers has proven the wisdom of that decision.
If the Exemplars knew about Liv, if they knew her name and where to find her—
Well, then they’d have something of mine. Something they could use to make me cooperate. Or to find me again if I dared try to leave.
“You—” Liv begins, in a soft voice. “You said you got that woman out?”
She looks up at me with wide eyes, and something inside my chest twists.
“You could leave, too,” she continues, as if she could read my mind. “Come with me. Tonight.”
“No,” I say.
“We can run from them,” she says. “We can get on a barge, go all the way to the ocean.”
“No.” I turn to face her, taking her hands in mine. “Liv, they would find me. No matter where we went, how far we tried to run. They would find us.”
She shakes her head like she’s about to argue with me.
I lean forward, pressing my lips to hers.
She gasps, a whisper of breath across my lips, and then she opens for me, soft and sweet, the taste I’ve been dreaming about since she first let me kiss her after walking her home from the Harvest Festival.
I pull away, then stare into her wide, dark eyes.
“I don’t want to run,” I whisper.
She frowns. I run my fingers down her cheek, tracing that sweet curve.
“I want to go home,” I say. “I want to buy the farm next to your mother’s, and help her with her chickens, and have our kids grow up picking strawberries in the mountains and chasing each other on the banks of the Bright River.”
She looks away, and her cheeks darken in the moonlight. I lean closer, pressing my lips to her neck.
“And I want to fuck you under that willow tree,” I whisper. “Again and again and again. Until you can’t scream anymore. Until you can’t even walk.”
She shivers, and the air between us ignites. When she turns to meet my lips, it’s with a desperate sort of hunger, a passion I didn’t know existed until I met her under that willow tree and she begged me to lift her skirts.
And we don’t have time. I pull away, even as my cock screams for more, for the woman I’ve been dreaming about for years. Liv sighs, a sound like a heart breaking.
“We can’t,” I say. “Not now. I need to get you out of here, get you safe—”
But I don’t get to finish, because she threads her fingers through my hair and kisses me again, deep and hard and hungry, and all my reasonable objections fall to the floor.
When she pulls away, my heart is hammering like I’ve just run the length of the Ever-Reaching River.
My wife smiles at me in the moonlight, silver catching on the tears in her eyes, the shine of her lips, and she’s never looked so beautiful, not even on the day I swore my life to her.
“I’ll go,” she whispers.
My chest feels like it’s just cracked open. I’m glad, of course, I’m relieved as hell that she’ll let me sneak her out of here before the Towers find her. But still, some part of me feels broken without her.
Her hand drops from my hair to the laces across her chest. She tugs on the faded ribbon, and it gives way, opening to reveal the swell of her perfect breasts.
I can’t stop the groan that slips through my lips as she slips the dress down her shoulders.
Moonlight spills over the dark circles of her nipples, then traces a path down the curve of her belly.
Her dress falls to the floor with a whisper, the soft fabric pooling at her feet. I stare at her body, my mouth dry, a hunger pulsing through me so deep and desperate it’s almost painful.
“Gods,” I whisper, and it’s almost a prayer. Offering, thanksgiving, pleading, all wrapped together. “Liv—”
She steps forward, wrapping her naked arms around my waist. I groan again as my cock presses against the hard seam of my pants. Her hands skim my waist, diving beneath my shirt, pressing into my skin.
“Pytr,” she whispers. “Don’t make me leave without this.”
Her breath is hot against my neck. I open my mouth to ask her if she thinks I could ever turn her down, but her hands tug at my waistband, pushing my pants down to join her dress in a tangled pile on the floor, and I don’t think I could find the words even if I needed them.
And so I kiss her instead. I kiss her with all the agony and longing of the past two years, every night I dreamt about her, every morning I woke and found myself alone in this hard bed, in this strange city, so far from where I belong that sometimes I felt like I’d been trapped beneath the ground like the elves in the legends.
I kiss my wife, and she gasps as I wrap my arms around her. I sweep her into my arms and carry her across my lonely, empty room, just like I carried her over the threshold of her mother’s barn, both of us giggling as the chickens fled before us, and my heart felt so full I thought it might burst.
I place her down on my bed. She stares up at me through bands of silver moonlight, her eyes wide, her lips parted and slick from our kisses. I want to ask her if she remembers the first time, beneath the willow tree, after I asked her to do me the favor of being my bride. But of course she does.
So I kiss her instead. Slowly, gently, as my hand runs down her chest and cups the hard bud of her nipple. She gasps, and I kiss a path down her neck and over the swell of her breasts. When my teeth close over her nipple, she grabs my pillow and buries her moan in it.
I kiss the curve of her stomach, then slide my lips and tongue across the inside of her thighs. She’s trembling now, gasping for air against the heavy weight of my pillow, and my cock is already aching to be inside of her, buried deep in the woman I love.
But first, I want to taste her.
I close my eyes and sink between her legs. My fingers trace the heat of her sex as my tongue presses that hot, hard nub, the place she showed me under the willow tree, the key to her pleasure.
Her hips rise to meet me, and I sink my fingers into her as her taste washes over my tongue. Gods, I’ve missed this. To have the woman I love open before me, trembling and beautiful, aching to be filled—
I drive into that hard little nub as she begins to tremble and moan, falling apart. My hips rock, my cock pressing into the mattress, mimicking her rhythm, the waves of her pleasure.
And then she cries out, screaming into the pillow.
Her thighs close around my head; her taste fills my mouth.
She falls back against the mattress, gasping for air.
I glance at the window, a tight knot of fear in the back of my throat.
The moon hangs just outside my window, balanced on the Towers’s crenellations.
“I wish I could do that to you all damn night,” I whisper as I spread her legs. “I’d make you come until you forgot your name.”
“I— I—” she stammers.
And then I sink into her, and she throws her head back and moans. I enter her slowly, willing the moon to stop, for the night to hold its breath. Just let us have this, I pray as I fall into my wife’s body. Just this much.
Her legs wrap around my hips, pressing into me. My hand drops to her sex, pressing the hard nub as she gasps, and I fill her again, and again, moving as slowly as I can as the moon falls out of the sky, and my gods, it is such sweet agony.
“Pytr,” she whispers as she trembles beneath me. “Please, gods, Pytr.”
And my restraint snaps. I drive into her, filling her, hard and fast, racing the moon even as I try to hold out. Liv gasps, then shoves the pillow into her mouth again. Her legs close around my hips like a vise, and she screams into the fabric as her body pulls tight around me.
I surrender. My climax swells up inside of me, driving me forward as I pound into her, frantically, desperately.
I try to swallow my cry, but it spills out of me anyway, something tangled between a sob and my wife’s name, as my seed flows into her in waves of ecstasy, and my gods, was it always this good? How could I stand to leave her?
I collapse, my head against her neck, our bodies twisted together. Her chest rises and falls against my cheek; her heartbeat echoes inside my chest. Sweat makes my eyes sting.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I never should have left.”
Liv makes a sound in the back of her throat, almost like a laugh.
“That’s true,” she replies, as her fingers thread lazily through my hair. “You shouldn’t have. But I guess I’ll forgive you.”
I almost close my eyes. It’s the most natural thing in the world, falling asleep against my wife’s naked body. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever felt to home.
But the room is darker now, and the moon is nothing but a silver sliver that gilds the bottom of my window. The night is ending. Soon, the Towers’s Guards will fill the courtyard, and I’ll have no chance of sneaking Liv out through the kitchen trash chute.
Still, some part of me hesitates. Losing her is like losing a part of myself, the best part. If only I could keep her here, in my bed—
No. I sit up, shaking my head. I have to turn away from the sight of my beautiful, naked wife spread across my bed, because if I stare too long at those exquisite curves, I know I’ll collapse.
“Come on,” I whisper, my voice rough in the growing darkness. “Let’s get you home.”