Nadia #2
My hips moved again, harder this time, and his fingers dug into me as if he was one breath away from forgetting every noble, careful, maddening rule he’d ever made for himself.
I felt the shape of that forgetting in the tension of his body.
In the tremor that went through his arm.
In the way his mouth clung to my throat like stopping would kill him and continuing might ruin us both.
I was close. Gods help me, I was so close.
The edge rose bright and brutal, fed by his mouth and his hands and the hard length of him against me.
One more roll of my hips. One more pull of his mouth.
One more broken sound from him, and I would come apart in a copper bathtub with his teeth at my throat and my hands in his hair and absolutely no dignity left to speak of.
Then he just… stopped.
His mouth went still first. His hands froze on my body.
For one terrible second, he stayed exactly where he was, lips against my throat, breath shaking over the blood he hadn’t yet licked clean. Then he made a sound into my skin—almost a curse, almost a sob, the closest thing to defeat I had ever heard from him.
And he lifted his head.
“No,” he whispered, though I didn’t know whether he was saying it to me or himself.
His thumb pressed to the cut. I felt the hot sting of his blood meeting mine, felt the wound close beneath his touch in the space of a breath. Then his hand slid from my throat to my jaw.
For one half-second, I thought the worst was over.
He’d taken what he needed. He’d stopped before either of us went over the edge completely.
The terrible, bright thing between us was still alive and shivering, but maybe that was all right.
Maybe we were both going to breathe for one more second and then decide, together, what happened next.
Then he moved.
His hands closed around my waist, and he lifted me off his lap with the same careful precision he used for saddles and weapons and every other thing that required control. He set me at the far end of the tub.
Gently.
That made it so much worse. He didn’t look at me while he did it.
Water sloshed between us, cooling fast. I sat where he’d placed me in his soaked shirt with the throb of his mouth still in my neck, the ache of unfinished pleasure still shaking through my body, and watched him choose distance with both hands.
Then he stood.
Water sheeted down the hard length of him. For one stupid, humiliating second, my body noticed. Of course it did. My body was apparently a treacherous thing with no sense of timing, dignity, or self-preservation.
He stepped out of the tub. Walked past me. Reached for the towel folded on the bench and wrapped it around his hips with hands that shook once before he fisted them still. His back was rigid. His shoulders were locked.
And not once did he turn around.
The bathing chamber went quiet in a way I felt under my skin—the kind of quiet that came after a door closed and sealed itself shut.
I sat in the cooling bath, drenched in his shirt, with my blood still warm on his mouth and his rejection settling over me colder than the water. Because that was what it was.
Maybe he would call it restraint. Maybe he would call it honor. Maybe he would dress it in centuries of rules and protocol, and all the pretty, polished language men used when they wanted to make abandonment sound like virtue.
But he’d touched me like he wanted me. Fed from me like he needed me. Then put me away like wanting me had been the mistake.
My face wanted to do something. I didn’t want to let it. I almost managed it, too.
Almost.
One tear slipped free before I could stop it, hot and humiliating against skin that had already been touched too much tonight. I caught it with the heel of my hand and dragged it away hard enough to hurt.
There. Gone. Nothing left to see.
I’d learned too young that asking was its own kind of bleeding. That people who stepped back didn’t come closer because you begged. That warmth could vanish between one breath and the next, and the only thing worse than being left was letting someone see that it hurt.
My mother had taught me by dying. My father had taught me by letting his wife hunt me down. The Court had taught me the rest. I had forgotten that this week.
I wouldn’t forget it again.
My legs shook as I climbed out of the tub. I steadied them. My hands trembled once when I reached for the towel. I made them stop, too. Then I made myself stalk past him to the bench where my dry clothes were stacked.
He still hadn’t turned around.
Fine.
I peeled his soaked shirt over my head, the linen dragging wet against my skin, clinging like it had a right to stay there. It didn’t. Not now. Not ever again. I dropped it on the stone floor at his feet.
That made him flinch. A small thing. Barely there, but I saw it anyway.
I didn’t give that first fuck.
I dried myself with a fresh towel and dressed quickly. My shirt. My trousers. My coat. My weapons rig buckled tight enough to remind me where all my edges belonged. Boots laced. Blades checked. Pack shouldered.
Piece by piece, I put myself back together.
None of the pieces belonged to him.
I crossed to the door.
My hand was already on the latch when his voice came from behind me, low and ruined.
“Nadia.”
My feet stopped even when I wanted to run as far away from him as I could, but I didn’t turn around.
“Don’t.”
The same word he’d given me in the bath.
The same word he’d said before he put his mouth on my throat and drank from me. Before he pulled me onto his lap. Before he touched me like he’d die if he stopped and then tossed me aside.
I had given him his “Don’t” once tonight.
I had walked into that bath with a knife and an offer and the last fragile, stupid piece of trust I had left. I had given him the right to refuse me.
He’d refused. Then he took. Then he’d thrown me away.
I had nothing more to give him.
So I opened the door and walked out.