Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The communal hall rang with laughter, and Njkall found himself watching his mate laugh along with it.
Not my mate, he corrected himself, for perhaps the hundredth time that day. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. That is her choice, not mine.
But it was hard to remember that when she looked like this.
Polly sat across the long stone table from him, wedged between Cera and one of the younger warriors’ mates, a bowl of stew steaming untouched in front of her because she was too busy talking to eat it.
Her cheeks were flushed with warmth and laughter, her grey eyes bright in the firelight, and she was gesturing with both hands as she described something—a jewelry technique, he thought, judging by the way she pinched her fingers together and mimed twisting wire.
The clan had gathered for the evening meal, as they did several times each week.
Three long tables filled the great hall, packed with warriors and mates and children and elders, the air thick with the smell of roasted meat and simmered roots and the sharp herbal tea the clan favored in the cold months.
Firelight danced across the vaulted stone ceiling.
Somewhere near the far end, someone had begun a low humming song, and a handful of voices had joined in.
It was chaos. It was warmth. It was family. And she was in the middle of it. His clan, so suspicious of outsiders, had taken her into their hearts just as he had. She was clan.
He lifted his cup of tea and watched her over the rim, saying little himself, content to observe.
This was his favorite way to spend an evening—not because he disliked conversation, but because he liked watching.
He’d always been a watcher. It was how he’d learned to lead.
You couldn’t guide people you didn’t understand, and you couldn’t understand people you didn’t take the time to see.
“You’re staring,” said a low voice beside him.
He turned and found that Cera’s mate, an older warrior named Vhalt, had settled onto the bench beside him with a fresh cup of tea, his weathered face crinkled in amusement.
“I am aware,” he said.
Vhalt chuckled. “The whole clan is aware, Njkall. You look at that little human like she’s the first sunrise after a long dark.”
“Do I?”
“You do.” Vhalt took a slow sip of his tea. “It’s good. About time. Cera’s been despairing of you for months. She says you have the patience of stone and the courage of a frightened pikka.”
His mouth twitched. “Cera says many things.”
“Cera is usually right.” Vhalt’s amber eyes found Polly across the hall, then returned to him. “She’s happy tonight. Your human. Happier than I’ve seen her.”
“Yes.”
“Something’s changed.”
He said nothing. But Vhalt was an old warrior, and old warriors saw more than they said. He simply nodded, once, and clapped a heavy hand on Njkall’s shoulder.
“Don’t rush it,” Vhalt said, rising. “But don’t stand so still that she thinks you don’t want to move. There’s a difference between patience and hiding, Njkall. Sometimes they look the same from the outside.”
Vhalt ambled off and Njkall’s gaze returned to Polly.
He wanted her. Not just her body, though the memory of last night still burned in him like a banked coal.
He wanted her laughter and her stubbornness and her quiet courage, her small hand in his and her dark head on his chest and her voice, sleepy and warm, murmuring his name in the dark.
He wanted to claim her, to bind himself to her, to stand before the clan and declare that she was his and he was hers and nothing in all the cold reaches of Hothrest would ever take her from him.
He wanted her as his mate. But wanting it did not give him the right to assume she did.
So he would wait.
The meal wound down. The fires burned low.
One by one the families drifted back towards their own quarters, calling soft goodnights, gathering sleepy children into their arms. Polly found him again as the hall emptied, appearing at his side with her cheeks still flushed and her eyes still bright, and she slipped her hand into his without hesitation.
“That was nice.” She leaned against his arm as they walked, and he adjusted his pace to match her shorter stride, the way he always did. “I like dinners like this. I didn’t use to like them. Now I look forward to them.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“I watch you,” he said simply.
She glanced up at him, and something in her expression softened. “Yeah,” she said. “You do.”
They walked the rest of the way in comfortable silence, through the winding corridors lit by glowing crystals, past the murmur of other families settling in for the night.
The mountain seemed to breathe around them, ancient and patient, holding the warmth of the caves close against the cold that pressed at every entrance.
When they reached their quarters, she went to build the fire back up. He watched her from the doorway and felt the wanting rise in him again, warm and insistent. But with it, the discipline.
“Polly,” he said.
“Mm?” She didn’t look up from the fire.
He crossed to her, lowering himself onto the furs beside the hearth, close but not touching. This was important. This needed to be said clearly, so there could be no confusion, no hidden weight of obligation.
“Last night,” he began.
Her hands went still. She looked at him, wary now, and he cursed himself for the wariness even as he pressed on.
“What happened between us,” he said carefully. “It was good. I want you to know that I—” He paused, searching for the words, hating how clumsy they felt in his mouth. “That you gave me something I did not expect to have, little one. And I am grateful for it.”
“Njkall—”
“But I need you to understand something.” He held her gaze, steady and calm, the way he faced every difficult thing.
“Wanting me does not obligate you to anything more. You owe me nothing. Not a bond, not a promise, not your future. If you want my hands and nothing else, that is enough. If you want to stop, that is enough. You are free, little one. Whatever happens between our bodies, you remain free. I need you to know that. I need you to be certain of it.”
He’d expected relief. He’d rehearsed this in his mind a dozen times, and in every version, she’d looked at him with those wide grey eyes and thanked him for understanding.
Instead, her expression went cold and hard.
“What?” she asked, her voice low and dangerous.
“Polly—”
“No.” She sat back on her heels, and there was a spark in her eyes now that he’d never seen directed at him before. Not fear. Not gratitude. Something sharper. “Say that again. What did you just say to me?”
He felt the ground shift beneath him. He proceeded with the caution of a male who suspected he’d stepped onto thin ice. “I said that wanting me does not obligate you to—”
“To anything. Right. I heard you.” She stood up.
She actually stood up, folding her arms across her chest, looking down at him where he sat by the fire.
There was something almost absurd about it, this small human female glaring down at a warrior three times her size, but he did not find it absurd at all.
He found it arresting. “You know what I hear, Njkall? Every time you open your mouth lately? I hear you deciding things for me.”
“I am not—”
“You are.” Her voice didn’t shake. That was the thing that struck him most—it didn’t shake at all.
“You decide I need reassurance. You decide I’m scared.
You decide that if I sleep with you, I must be secretly worried that it means something I don’t want it to mean.
You decide, you decide, you decide.” She threw up her hands. “Did you ever think to ask me?”
“I was trying to protect you.”
“From what?” She stared at him. “From feeling something? From wanting something? From making a choice you’re afraid I’ll regret?”
The words landed like blows, precisely because they weren’t wrong.
He rose slowly to his feet. He did it carefully, keeping his movements unhurried, keeping his voice calm even as something churned uneasily in his gut. “You have been hurt before,” he said. “By people who took choices from you. I will not be another—”
“Then stop taking them from me!”
The shout rang off the stone walls. In the sudden silence that followed, they stared at each other across the space of a few feet that suddenly felt like a chasm.
Her chest heaved. Her hands had curled into fists at her sides. And those expressive grey eyes that had haunted him for a year were bright with anger and something that looked like hurt beneath it.
“Don’t you see?” she asked, quieter now but no less fierce. “You think you’re protecting my freedom. But you’re the one deciding what I want. You’ve decided I only want your hands. You’ve decided I’m too fragile to want more because I’m broken.”
“I have never thought you were broken.”
“Then stop treating me like I am!”
He fell silent. Because she was right. Gods help him, she was right, and he’d been so certain he was doing the honorable thing, the protective thing, the good thing, that he’d never once considered the fact that he’d taken her choice and made it his own.
“I want you to hear me,” she said, and her voice had dropped low and steady, all the childish tentativeness gone from it, burned away by the heat of her conviction. “I am not the woman who came here a year ago. I’ve changed, Njkall.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” She took a step towards him. “Because you keep treating me like I might shatter. I know you think you’re being kind.” Her voice cracked, just slightly, and steadied again. “But it doesn’t feel kind, Njkall. It feels like a cage. A soft one. A gentle one. But a cage.”
A cage.
The one thing he’d sworn she would never feel with him. And he’d built it himself, bar by careful bar, out of his own fear and called it protection.
He was quiet for a long moment. The fire crackled between them. Somewhere deep in the mountain, the underground river rushed through the darkness.
“You’re right,” he said finally, his voice rough. “I thought I was protecting your choices. Instead I was making them for you.”
Some of the anger left her face.
“Why?”
He opened his mouth, and discovered he didn’t have an answer. Or perhaps he couldn’t face the answer.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
Her expression softened slightly.
“Then maybe you should figure it out.”
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
The fire popped. The shadows shifted across the cave walls.
Then, slowly, she crossed the space between them.
She stopped just in front of him, close enough that he could see the firelight caught in her lashes, close enough that he had to look down to hold her gaze, and she reached up and pressed her small warm palm flat against his chest, over his heart.
“I want more than your hands, Njkall,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what I want yet. I’m not ready to say the big words. But I want more. And I need you to let me want it. I need you to stop deciding that I can’t.”
He looked down at her for a long moment.
“Then I will try.”
“Good.”
She took his hand. And this time, he let her lead.