15. Caligo #2
Sweeter. Heavier. The omega-ripening that a male's rut recognises the way a thief's hands recognise a lock—not through logic, through the body, through some animal layer that seven hundred years of age and discipline has not managed to bury.
I tracked it from three corridors away before I understood what I was tracking.
My body knew before my mind did and has been building toward this, toward her, without consulting me.
And now the pressure at the base of my spine is a fist and my cock is heavy with purpose and my shadows are straining toward the east wing and I am holding all of it back by the thinnest possible thread.
The thread is: the soul before the body.
The thread is: one kill isn't enough and the garden isn't enough and she still thinks she's leaving when the debt is paid.
The thread is that I've waited seven hundred years and a partial bond is not what I waited for and I won't take her until the darkness in her is irreversible.
Not because I'm being careful with her. Because I want everything. Because I am going to take everything and it is going to hold.
The thread is fraying.
Her scent is in my throat and my cock aches and the bond is screaming and I am sitting in my throne with cracked armrests and shaking hands and all of it—every last straining inch of it—is because a nineteen-year-old thief sat among shadow-flowers and thought about staying.
Deeper than I thought. Deeper than I planned. Deeper than anything I built for.
The shadows in the throne room move. Faster. Sharper. I track them the way I've tracked them for centuries and the number that forms is—
Seventy percent.
Two points in ten minutes. Because my body remembered how to want her.
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I sit with the pre-rut building behind my spine and my cock aching toward the east wing and I hold Sybillis's question like a stone in my chest.
What happens in sixty years when she's old and you're not?
I don't know. That's the honest answer and I hate it and I've been turning it over at three in the morning for two months and I'm no closer to an answer than I was when the thought first arrived.
What I know: the heat is coming. Hers and mine.
When it hits, the bond will demand completion and the claiming will demand the body and the body will demand what seven hundred years of dormancy have been holding back—and what's been held back is not a fraction of it, not a measured careful portion.
All of it. Seven hundred years of wanting pressed into one female and the rut waking up for the first time since before the battle and my shadows already at her door, already making the bond-mate pattern, already done deciding.
If the corruption were complete I'd go to her right now.
I'd push through her door in the dark and cover her body with mine and let the rut have what it's screaming for and she would not have a choice about it and the bond would seal and the court would surge and I would finally be done waiting.
The pre-rut doesn't care about the math.
My cock doesn't care about the math. The bond is past caring.
I care. Because I've waited seven hundred years and I'm not taking a partial result because my body has decided it's done being patient.
She needs more kills. More of the dark chosen and owned and loved.
More of that cold satisfaction I watched move across her face when she came back from Pemberton—the satisfaction of someone discovering that the part of herself she's been ashamed of is her sharpest edge.
When she stops being ashamed of it entirely.
When she stops thinking she's leaving. When the darkness is in her the way the lockpicking is in her—bone-deep, automatic, hers—then the bond will give me everything.
Not fractions. Everything.
So I sit in the throne with my cock aching and the rut clawing at the base of my spine and I do what I have been doing for seven hundred years.
I wait.
But I know what I'm waiting for. I want to push through her door and cover her with my body and hear what sound she makes when she wakes to my weight pinning her down.
I want her thief's hands gripping stone while her body betrays every argument her mind is making.
I want her to understand what she is—mine, made for this, built into exactly what I need—and I want that understanding to arrive while I'm inside her and the bond is sealing and she can't do anything but feel it locking into place.
I want to put my mouth on her cunt and learn exactly what she smells like when she's wet because of me and hates herself for it.
I want her to fight and I want to win and I want the bond to seal with her fury fused into it.
I want all of her. The negotiator and the assassin and the girl who talks to locks and the female who sat in my garden and touched the shadow-flowers and didn't know I felt every second of it through the court's living stone.
My little thief.
My shadows are at her door—pressed against the stone, reaching toward the crack, curling in the protective pattern I can't stop and no longer wish to.
Seventy percent.
"Mine," I say. To the throne room. To the shadows answering me along the walls. To the east wing and the door and the female behind it who doesn't know yet what that word means when I say it about her.
She will.
I've been certain since the night her lock opened and her knife didn't waver and her hand reached back in the dark to check her brother's breathing. Certain the way the shadow court is certain of the dark—completely, permanently, without needing to be asked.
The heat is coming. The soul work isn't finished. She needs to go darker still, and I will take her there, and when she arrives I will be waiting.
I'm always waiting.
That's what patience looks like from the inside. Not restraint. Not consideration. Seven hundred years of knowing exactly what I'm going to take and making certain I take it properly.