32. Gideon
GIDEON
I wake at three with the mark at my throat pulsing painfully.
I list possible causes: the radiator, an illness, a change in weather. I reject each one before admitting the real cause. The partial bond has triggered my rut, and I knew it when I woke.
She said it out loud in the nest, in the flattest voice she owns, with two of my packmates in the room. An active partial bond can trigger rut. I need you to understand that clinically because your packmates will react emotionally.
I understood the warning but dismissed the risk as unlikely because I believed I could control my response.
The boiler room is forty degrees colder than the rest of the building. By four I am there with the panel removed from a machine that has not needed maintenance since November. The cold reduces my arousal for about an hour. Then it stops helping, and I can smell her through two stone floors.
Rowan berries and sweet cream. She is asleep four rooms and a stairwell away, and my body reacts strongly to her scent.
I put the panel back on. My hands aren’t steady enough for the screws. I do it anyway and strip one, which is a thing I’d take off a man’s wages for. Get a hold of yourself, Hale.
Soren’s at the pass when I come up. He takes one look and sets the knife down.
“How long?”
“Since three.”
“Right.” He doesn’t ask what. He wipes his hands, and I’ll be grateful for the fact that he doesn’t come one step closer for as long as I live. “Far wing’s got four rooms occupied. Rhys can have them down in the village by noon and he’ll do it charmingly. What do you need?”
“Distance.”
“You’ve got it.” He turns back to his board. Then, to the board, “She’s in the reading room.”
“Soren.”
“I’m telling you where she is so you can go the other way.” He picks the knife back up. “That’s all I’m telling you.”
County mixed-designation duty of care says occupied rooms move beyond scent range during an uncontrolled rut.
Rhys empties my lodge in three hours flat, on full vouchers and a boiler-inspection story that protects the guests from details they do not need.
Through the office wall I can hear him being sunny at people who’ve paid for a week. Not once does he come and look at me.
That’s the pack. Nobody circles. Nobody fusses. A season ago they’d have done both and I’d have hated it, and they’ve learned better since, mostly off a woman who refused to be handled herself. Now they’re doing it back at me, and it is the loneliest kindness anybody has ever handed me.
By two I’ve made my decision, and my decision is the west wing.
It’s cold. It’s sheeted. The door’s old growth and there’s a bolt on the outside of it my grandfather fitted for reasons this family never discussed at a table.
I carry water up. I carry a chair up. I’m halfway through working out whether a man can bolt a door from the wrong side of it when I stop and look at what my hands are doing.
A locked room. A woman in the building. A pack that would have to listen.
I am deciding in advance what I can’t be trusted with. I’m making choices again about who gets to stand near what. I have made one of those in my life. It cost a woman years of no-contact orders and it cost two men their whole understanding of me.
I put the chair down.
She finds me anyway. Of course she does. The arc’s a two-way road, and I’ve spent the entire day standing in the middle of it broadcasting.
The west wing door opens, and she’s in it with her sleeves pushed up, and the first lungful of her undiluted nearly buckles my knees. I get a hand on the sheeted furniture. I don’t go down. It’s near.
“Out.” It comes out with the growl already through it, and I hear the sound I’m making, and it’s the sound of every alpha I’ve ever had removed from my lobby. “Briar. Get out of this wing.”
“No.”
“You don’t know what this is.”
“I’ve supervised eleven of them.” She shuts the door behind her, the wrong direction entirely, and puts her back against it.
“Four were worse than what you’re currently running.
Two of those men were in restraints and neither of them was you.
So we’ll skip the part where you explain a rut to the bond mediator. ”
“Then you know what it wants.”
“I know exactly what it wants.” Firmly. “It wants my nape. It wants to close the bond while you’re not lucid enough to be asked and I’m not obliged to answer. Yes. I’ve read every page you’ve read, and I’d bet my license that you read yours in one night, recently, for somebody else’s file.”
“Then you know why you have to go.”
“I know why you want me to.”
That’s when it goes.
I’d like it clear that I lasted longer. The truth is she said I know why you want me to in the voice she keeps for people about to be handled, and I lost the last of my control, and I make a sound I have never made before.
My back hits the wall hard enough to take the sheets off two chairs.
I stay there because it’s the furthest point in this room from her, and my legs will not move.
“I’m not asking you to leave for your sake.” There’s gravel where my voice was. “I’ve spent my whole life not becoming the man standing in this room. If you stay, you watch me lose. Then I have to live in a building where you’ve seen it.”
She crosses the room. Slowly. The whole way.
“Gideon.” Close enough that the scent of her goes through what’s left of me. “Look at my face. Am I frightened?”
She isn’t.
That’s the part I can’t survive: she isn’t braced, pretending bravery or managing me. A woman standing inside arm’s reach of an alpha in rut with her chin up and her pulse running ordinary, watching me without fear.
“No.”
“No.” She reaches up and lays her palm flat over the mark she put on my throat. “Now I’m going to give you terms, and you’re going to say yes or say stop, and either way you say it plainly. That’s the entire rule tonight. Can you do plainly?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t touch my nape.” Her other hand comes up.
She gathers her hair, twists it off her neck, pins it in front of me, and then she does what I’ll still be seeing when I’m dead.
She fastens the top button of her collar.
Covers her nape. “Understand me, it isn’t that I don’t want it.
I want it lucid, with all three of them in the room, on a day I picked.
So it’s off the table tonight, and you don’t have to be the one keeping it there.
I am. That’s my job this evening, and I’m very good at it. ”
“And if I can’t.”
“Then I’ll stop you.” Matter-of-factly. “I’ve stopped larger men in worse condition, and I’ve never needed a fire iron for it. Say yes or say stop.”
“Yes.”
“Louder.”
“Yes.”
“Good.” And then her expression turns hungry all at once, and what I feel it is hungry. “Now get your hands on me before I lose my nerve about being the composed one.”
“Fuck,” I say, and it’s all the vocabulary I have left, and it turns out to be enough.
We don’t make it near a bed.
There’s a sheeted table against the west wall my grandfather ate his breakfast at for forty years, and I clear it with one arm.
Her clothes come off in a manner I’ll be apologizing to a seamstress about.
Her hands go into my hair. My mouth’s on her throat, her collarbone, her shoulder, every place that isn’t the one place, and she keeps saying my name, and every time she says it another piece of what I’m holding goes.
“Gideon.”
“I know.”
“You’re allowed to want it.”
“Don’t.” It comes out ruined. “Don’t tell me that tonight.”
I get her up on the table with her legs around me, my hand between her thighs. She’s already soaked, already open, and the sound she makes when two fingers go into her cunt fills the sheeted room.
“Now.” Her heels lock at the small of my back. “Don’t be careful. I don’t need careful tonight. I need you to stop pretending you aren’t this.”
So I stop pretending.
I fuck her on my grandfather’s breakfast table with her hands fisted in my shirt.
It isn’t gentle. It isn’t slow. She takes every stroke and asks for the next one.
The growl doesn’t stop. It runs underneath all of it, and instead of flinching from the sound, she presses her face into my throat where it’s coming from, and she clenches around me hard enough that my vision goes.
“That.” She’s gasping it. “God. Do that.”
She comes on my cock with her nails opening my back and my name in her mouth. My knot’s already swelling, catching at the rim of her on every stroke, and my mouth is at her collarbone, and every animal instruction I have left is pointed at the back of her neck.
I don’t go there.
That’s the achievement of my entire life. Four generations, a charter, a lodge with my name on the deed, and the only thing I’d want on the stone is that on the worst night my biology ever ran I kept my teeth off a woman’s nape because she asked me to.
My knot pushes fully inside and locks. I come hard, holding her hips against mine while she clenches around me and reaches another orgasm. She sobs my name into my shoulder.
I keep my teeth against her collarbone, far from her nape, until both of us stop shaking.
I don’t go there.
Afterward we’re on the floor between the sheeted chairs, because standing stopped being available to both of us at the same time.
She’s got her back against me, my arms locked around her, the knot still holding.
She is, as far as I can measure with an instrument as unreliable as me tonight, completely fine.
Her being fine, not the rut, is what does it in the end.
She twists as far as the knot allows and looks at my face, and whatever she finds there puts her voice somewhere I’ve never heard it go.
“Don’t.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re drafting.” Her hand comes up to the mark. “I can hear it through the bond, Gideon. Whatever that sentence is, don’t.”
I tell her I won’t.
It’s the second lie I’ve ever told her. I tell it into her hair with a bond humming between us. She believes me, because she’s warm and half asleep and she’s spent an entire day being the only unfrightened person in this building.
By dawn the far wing’s empty and the worst of it has come off its peak.
I sit down at my grandfather’s desk and square the lamp. The voice I buried in the storm, and buried again this afternoon, gets up off the floor of me one more time to say the only sentence it has ever had.
It took her tonight. It will take her again. And the next time, she may not be the one holding the line.
He’s wrong. I know he’s wrong. The medical guidance say so, and so does the woman asleep two floors up who ran this entire day off her own nerve and came out of it steadier than I did.
No number has ever once talked me out of a decision I made standing in a corridor.
Goddamn me for a fool three times in one season.
So I take out a clean sheet, and I start.