Chapter 29 Nes
Nes
There was no sound as Nes slid back through the window and into the bedroom on the third floor of the Siren’s Hair.
It was a packed house on the ground floor. She didn’t have to see the waitresses in their feathered bodices flitting about like birds or the coins on the tables skipping like stones or the patrons harrumphing with every unexpected move. She could hear it all perfectly.
Maybe that was why she didn’t hear Toran.
“You left.” His voice came from the bed, and she startled.
“I did,” she said plainly.
“Why?” Ire ricocheted in his inflection.
“There was something I needed to do.”
“I thought—” He cut off, and she took a hesitant step closer. “I thought you wouldn’t come back.”
In a rush, he was standing. He crossed the room to the window. “You left me, and I thought something happened to you. I thought you died out there, all alone, and you left me unable to do anything but grieve and curse your name.”
With his back turned, she saw the way the muscles in his neck tensed. This wasn’t because she’d gone after Phineas without him. There was more, so much more, buried in his bones.
“What happened to you, Toran?” Her voice came out a whisper, softer than the swish of sheets.
“I lost…” He trailed off. He gripped the window ledge, knuckles turning white. “I lost nearly my whole legion—my closest friends—on a mission I was in charge of.”
She knew that. Everyone knew the tragedy of the Aeos mission. But she hadn’t realized the guards killed had been his friends.
“Then I came home and found out—” He stopped again. Against the window frame, his hands shook.
She strode forward and put a hand on his back. Beneath her touch, muscles settled, and nerves paused.
“I found out the person I thought would be with me forever—the one person I didn’t want to live without—I learned I’d lost her, too.”
The anguish that gripped him was visceral. She could feel it overtaking him, feel it slithering around her own heart, squeezing it. Nes let loose a trembling breath and wrapped both arms around him until her cheek pressed into the space between his shoulder blades.
“After that, I wanted to die. Like Malia and Bastian and Kai and Safie. Like Loriana.” His hands came down on hers, his fingers clutching her tight.
“I started drinking. And I didn’t stop.” He nodded to the nightstand, where she noticed, for the first time, a pair of shots waiting.
“When I drank there was only me, the drink in my hand, and the one I would get next. I had no past, no wrecked future. I became…I don’t know what I became. Lost, I guess.”
She shook her head. “You weren’t lost,” she said into the waves of his wool cloak. “You were waiting.”
“Waiting?” She could hear the skepticism in his tone, the ring of it like an errant sharp in a melody. “Waiting for what?”
“For someone to help you.”
He shuddered against her cheek, and she hugged him tighter, taking in the vibrations of his sorrow, the spasms of his guilt. They stayed like that for a long moment.
“I won’t leave you,” she whispered. “Not again.”
She could find a way. To stay in Gadore after her father was freed. With Toran backing her, she could find a way.
And she wanted to. She wanted nothing more than to stay here, tucked inside his embrace. No matter the consequences. With him, she could believe there’d be none.
Toran turned in her arms until they were face-to-face. His hand cupped the side of her neck. Her body flushed with heat, quick and strong.
She broke their circle, spinning away from him. She made for the nightstand and snatched up the two shots. When she turned back to him, he was frowning.
“We’re not drinking,” she said. She walked back to the open window, the night air filled with the sounds of life. They stood there together, looking down onto the thin line of dirt and debris that was the dumpstreet behind the Siren’s Hair.
“If we’re not drinking,” he said, “what are we doing?”
She handed him a shot glass. “Toasting.”
His brow raised.
She held her glass high. “To the end.”
“The end of what?”
“Of waiting.”
Then she dumped the shot of liquor out the window. She slammed the empty glass down on the windowsill and grinned up at Toran. The horror on his face tasted better than the liquor would have. His expression melted away to something contemplative.
He held his shot glass between them. “I promise you, Nes, I’ll get your father out of prison. No matter how this ends. Because you’ve been waiting, too. Probably far longer than I have.” He raised his shot glass a little higher. “To the end of waiting.”
Her gut turned solid as her heart melted into it. How easily he’d seen her. How easily she’d forgotten he could.
“To the end of waiting,” she echoed.
Toran’s smile was small and intimate, but the power of it ran through her. He held the shot over the dumpstreet, and she watched as amber liquor and clear glass were tossed out the window.
She burst into laughter before the shot glass hit the ground.
“What?” Toran asked.
She tried to catch her breath only for the laughter to escape her nose in a snort. She buried her face in his arm, but the laughter bubbled out of her.
“What?”
She waved a hand out the window, then at her empty shot glass on the sill. “You weren’t”—air trickled down her throat and into her heaving lungs—“supposed to throw the glass, too.”
He blinked at her. Laughter of his own bloomed. And then the two of them were cackling like seagulls at a fish market.
She leaned against him as their laughter died down to quiet chuckles. Minutes passed, and his warmth seeped into her. She tried to focus on the sounds of the Ditch, but like a drop of dye in a pail of water, he consumed her.
“What are you thinking about?”
She squirmed. “Nothing.”
“Didn’t look like nothing,” he said. “You looked like you were one second away from sighing.”
“In exasperation or pleasure?”
His lips quirked. “Pleasure.”
“Like this?” She let out a long sigh, peppering in a soft moan. It rose into the night, filling the air like a howl that left all loneliness behind.
Toran choked on a cough and cleared his throat. “Exactly.”
She rolled her eyes. “Please tell me you’re stronger than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at you. You’re all flustered.”
“Am not.” He tilted his head down toward her, chasing away the cold.
“Are too. I bet if we lit a lantern in here I’d see just how red your cheeks are.”
“By all means, light away,” he challenged. “My cheeks won’t be the only things coming to light.”
She stiffened.
Even in the shadows, she couldn’t stop her eyes from taking in the parts of him she could see—the stretch of his broad chest and the fold of his muscled biceps—and imagining the parts she could not.
Mikaud had been her first. Together they’d explored each other, letting their bodies get the better of their minds.
Before him, there had been a girl from the Bark with curls like vines of ivy and a mouth so dexterous she had thought she might drown in it.
Nes had believed either of them could be the one she first fell for. But neither were.
Because here, now, was Toran, staring at her like she ought to know exactly what he meant, and she wanted nothing more than to find out if she was right.
She shouldn’t. Because this was Toran. And beyond who he was, there would always be what he was. A guard. The Crown.
But underneath that uniform, he was the one who’d kept his promise that day on the ocean. The one who’d rescued her from its depths. And the one who’d made her another promise now. She did not feel foolish for believing he’d keep it.
None of the rest mattered.
Nes didn’t feel herself sink to the floor, didn’t see him crouch down to her level. All she saw was Toran before her, saw him kneel between her legs. She reached for him, but he was already there. His lips, soft and supple, were heavy with promised rain as they came down on hers.
The kiss was worth the drought she’d endured to get here, to this moment. Worth all the times they’d turned away, letting the rest of the world settle itself between them. Now there would be nothing between them.
She drank him in with every touch, every drop of his mouth filling hers. This, this was what she’d been waiting for. Nothing else mattered save for Toran and this thirst he quenched with every fall of his lips on hers, every surge she sent right back.
And then he flooded her.
He was everywhere and nowhere. His lips were on hers and his hand was mapping routes through her tangled hair and it was under the hem of her shirt and at her neck and sinking lower. Though the buttons of her pants had come undone, her legs straddling him, it was one place his hands didn’t venture.
Her fingers scraped at the clasp of his cloak until she managed to snag it. It fell from his shoulders and pooled in a heap over the backs of his calves. She ran a hand down his torso, down between his legs, her fingers tracing the length of him.
Her shirt was gone in the next second, the fabric swishing as he pulled it over her head.
The cold air was a whisper on her bare skin for only a moment before it was cut off by the words of Toran’s hands.
Feeling her, speaking to her. They moved over her in a language she hadn’t known she spoke, forming sentences full of meaning against the lilt of her neck and along the accent of her hips.
But she did speak this new language. And she shouted it back to him.
For she responded in kind—her fingers, her mouth, her tongue swirling symbols across his skin.
She gasped when his fingers dipped lower and touched her the way she desperately wanted. Though his fingers were larger, rougher than her own, his strokes were smooth, precise, and she writhed under his hand.
More. She needed more.
She wasn’t sure if Toran had slipped into her heart—if he had filled the hole in her chest as she’d always believed her father would—or if, because of him, she had simply forgotten the hole was there.
There was a difference. And it mattered.
But her voice was lost to his lips, with no hope of being found.
So she tore at his shirt, at the laces keeping him wrapped away, at the fabric hiding him from her.
There was no point in lying anymore. Not here.
Not now that she could feel him and he could feel her.
These secrets were not meant to be kept.
Not anymore. So they shared, tearing away layer after layer.
And then they were completely bare before each other, and even the walls stopped watching them. They didn’t need the bed. Their cloaks and clothes became the kindling beneath their fire as Nes wrapped herself around Toran and burned.