Chapter Twenty-Seven
M ason shakes his head. He takes a step back. He never lets go of my hand.
“Clean up… I don’t want to help them. Why should I—Why should—”
“You helped me. You saved me. Today, even.”
“But I—” Mason looks at me with imploring eyes. “Leave here, you mean? Go out there and—”
“And give those survivors a chance. They don’t have the magic you have. They’re fighting just to live through this. What happens when the Citadel comes for them?”
“They’ll die.”
“Why don’t we stop that, then? You wanted power over life and death, but you already have it, Mason. You’ve always had it.”
He stares down at the ground, but I know he’s not looking at grass and earth. His gaze is fixed somewhere beyond all that.
“You… You’ll come with me? We’ll do this together?”
“Yes.” The word comes easily. There’s no world where I exist without him anymore, strange as that might seem. And something else is building in my chest, something separate to Mason and all the still-confusing feelings he alights in me.
Excitement.
The idea of something new. Something tangibly helpful. I sigh and lean slightly left, resting against his shoulder.
“I’ll never leave you,” Mason murmurs. “I promise you that.”
“Mason…”
“If we die, we die together.” His tone is steel. “But I do not plan on that happening anytime soon.”
I huff. I’m leaning more of my weight against him, each blink slower than the last. Mason turns his head and kisses my temple.
“Let’s get you inside. I should heal you.”
“Could’ve started with that,” I mutter, and Mason pulls a face but takes me back into the church. I expect him to sit me on a pew, but he helps me down the stairs and into his room, then kicks the door shut behind us.
I groan when he sits me down on the bed. Everything will hit me again later. I can already feel it. It’s happened before, after a bad job, but there’s a shining edge to this dark cloud, as much as I hate to admit it.
Otto and Autumn and Blake should never have died.
But I tried to stop it. I tried to save them.
Dane and the Citadel are to blame for all that, not me or Rae or Mason.
I’m certain he’s not lying about what happened with his mother, and if the Citadel thought any different, they would have gone after him properly, instead of sacrificing people in their secret war for control.
“Do you want it all?” I ask as Mason kneels next to the bed. He turns his face up to mine, and I swallow when I remember that Dane took him too, that he was probably injured.
“All what? All of you, little lamb? You know the answer to that.” Mason reaches up and eases my jacket off my shoulders.
“No. Control. Like the Citadel has. All of that.”
He snorts. I stare at him, puzzled, but he just takes my jacket entirely off, then leans down to work on my boots.
“I don’t even want that here ,” he says. “That’s Nia’s job, and she’s happy with it.”
He pulls off one boot, then the other, then my socks. I grimace. We need to wash up still, but everything hurts, and my head is swimming.
“Come here, Isaac,” Mason murmurs. He kneels between my legs and runs his hands up under my T-shirt. The touch is barely there, but not to tease. His mouth pulls down when I wince, though I can’t help it at all.
Warmth spreads through me, easing from his fingertips and under my skin. It washes away the pain but not the exhaustion. My eyes close and stay that way.
I feel Mason gently tug off my T-shirt and then my trousers. He positions me on the bed and then presses up next to me, no space at all between us.
“Sleep, little lamb. You’ll always be safe with me.”
When I wake, the room is dark. Mason is half on top of me, breath tickling my throat, and my first thought is how right this all feels, that this is the only moment I need for the rest of my life.
I sweep a hand up and down his back and he comes awake in increments, rubbing his face against my skin.
“How do you feel?”
“Tired,” I murmur. It’s a bone-deep exhaustion, one I think only time will cure. “You fixed everything else.”
Mason kisses my shoulder. “I always will.” The candle flickers to life and I huff a laugh. “Come on. Let’s clean up.”
He takes my hand to lead me through into the other room, where we wash in front of the small mirror. Mason’s hands don’t wander too much, but they linger, and so do mine.
Once we’re done, he wraps himself around me from behind and hooks his chin over my shoulder. His fingers dance along each rib, pressing the bones like he’s testing their strength.
“All good?”
“You know they are.”
“I mean us, little lamb. Earlier today… Everything…”
I swallow. I’ve not seen Mason lost for words, not yet, but then I get the feeling that no one else has seen him like this, either. I sigh and rest my weight back against him.
“Yeah. Yes. I mean, I’ll probably have more questions—”
“I’ll answer anything.”
“And I think I’ll probably have more to say about it all once I’ve had a chance to think things through—”
“I’ll listen.”
I chuckle and shake my head. “I’m not changing my mind about you. I know why you did it. And I know why you were so angry then and after. I’m angry, too.”
Mason slides a hand over my heart. “You are,” he says. “That’s not all you are.”
“No. There’s room for everything else, too. But I want to do something. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life trapped like I was before.”
“Okay.”
I’m aware he hasn’t given me a straight answer when it comes to what I want us to do together. I also am fairly sure I’ll get my own way, and that the others might be concerned when Mason says we’re going to leave for a while, but that some might even come along with us.
There’s so much to be done before then. We have to lay the team to rest, even Dane, if only to be sure he won’t get back up again. I need to get the true lay of the land here and be certain that the Citadel won’t retaliate against this mission gone wrong.
And I want… I put my hand over Mason’s. I’ve never met a person more concrete than him, and I want to be certain of him, of us. That this is real.
“Let’s go back to bed,” I say.
“You’re tired?”
“Not right now.”
Mason laughs. He kisses the side of my neck and then lets go, walking back into the bedroom. Before I can reach him, he strips the bed down, grabs a sheet from the cupboard, and covers the mattress quickly.
“You don’t have to… We’re just going to dirty it again.”
Mason comes back to me and takes my hands in his. “I’ll always take care of you, little lamb. Come here.”
He pulls me close, and I stumble into the kiss, the first touch of his mouth feeling like I’m coming home. He goes slowly at first, like we’re kissing for the first time all over again. I wrap my arms around his shoulders and sink into him.
This isn’t all I need, but it’s a large part of it. His touch. The certainty he’ll catch me when I fall.
He does, when we trip over to the bed. Mason huffs against my mouth, spread out beneath me, and I kiss him again, heart racing at his fingers pressing into my skin and the way his teeth drag against my lips.
When I pull back, we’re both breathing hard. “Need you,” I get out, and Mason’s eyes darken. He pushes up against me and kisses me again, shoving his hands into my hair.
“Always,” he murmurs. “I’ll always give you what you need, little lamb.”
I groan. That’s what I want to hear. His touch comes with more bite, my skin singing with the onset of bruises I want to litter my skin. I stroke over his shoulders, down his chest, and Mason hitches one leg around mine, thrusting his hips up.
We rock together as we kiss, air heating around us. For the first time since he went missing, I feel like I’m touching the ground again. I tear my mouth away to kiss down his jaw and Mason pants against my ear, hands sliding down my back so he can grab my arse.
“Can I…?”
“Yes.”
He kisses me again, desperately, and when he rolls us over, I wrap my legs around his hips. Mason reaches past me for the lube, and I pepper kisses over his collarbone before I scrape my teeth down his shoulder.
“Fuck, little lamb. More of that.”
I nip the top of his shoulder, then his pec. When I slide my tongue over his nipple, Mason hisses through his teeth and grabs the back of my head to keep me there.
He arches his chest into my touch, and I lick and bite until he drags my head back again. His eyes are wild when he stares down at me. “Show me.”
My face flushes. Mason shuffles back on his knees and I spread my legs, then grab the backs of my thighs to draw them up to my chest. He shoves at one arse cheek, and even with the way the shadows are flickering with the candle, I know he can see exactly what he wants to.
“I wasn’t joking before, little lamb,” Mason says. “I might just keep you here.”
“Only if I want it too.”
His expression softens. “Only ever that,” he agrees.
He grabs the lube, and my breath catches as he slicks up his fingers. Mason never breaks eye contact as he circles my hole. I whine and rock my hips, trying to push down on him.
“Relax,” Mason coos. “We have all the time in the world.”
I swallow. We do. Well, we don’t , because at some point Rae will probably come to check I’m alive, and Mason might not be in charge of Gravesend, but he’s certainly important enough that someone will want to speak to him, too, and we have to hold funerals, and I still want us to go out and end the curse and help survivors—
But we have the luxury of time here. We don’t have to rush.
He kisses me as his finger breaches me, and I groan around his tongue. I feel no burn, nothing but the satisfaction of being filled, the anticipation of what is to come.
“More,” I say against his mouth.
Another finger joins the first, both rocking in and out, crooking to stroke against my insides. I feel feverish, suddenly aching for him in a way I’ve rarely felt before. My hands are everywhere, squeezing and digging in hard enough that I’ll leave my own marks on all of Mason’s pale skin.