9. Blade
Chapter nine
Blade
Sunlight came through the window at an angle that suggested early morning. I was using Skip’s chest as a pillow. His hand was on my ass.
I lay still for a moment and took inventory.
Status: Alive.
Location: Skip’s quarters.
Current position: Draped across a man whose body I had spent the previous evening cataloging with extreme thoroughness.
His eyes were still closed. His breathing was deep. His jaw was dark with stubble. His chest rose and fell beneath my cheek.
His hand tightened slightly. Still asleep. Still certain.
Then his eyes opened.
“Your hand,” I said, “did not leave my ass once during the entire night.”
Something softened in his expression. He looked genuinely amused.
A knock came at the heavy wooden door. Three efficient beats.
Whoever stood outside had knocked on this door before and did not seem to consider the answer especially important. The door was already opening before I fully understood that permission had not been requested so much as briefly acknowledged.
I pulled the sheet up.
The woman who entered wore chain mail and carried her helmet beneath one arm. Duty had called her out before dawn, and it showed in the tension around her eyes: tired, but fully alert.
She had walked into the room as though the High Commander’s immediate availability were simply expected.
She was perhaps twenty-five, dark-haired, and compactly built.
She made it three steps into the room before she understood what she was seeing.
She stopped.
Her eyes moved to Skip, shirtless and untroubled. Then to me, with the sheet pulled to my chin and what I strongly suspected was a comprehensive case of bedhead. Then back to Skip.
I watched her understand the situation in real time.
It took about four seconds.
Her posture shifted into something apologetic, professional, and very determined not to have noticed anything she had absolutely noticed.
“High Commander.” Her voice was admirably level. “I am so sorry. I had no idea that you were…”
A brief pause, during which she selected her vocabulary with care.
“Indisposed.”
She was not completely successful at keeping her expression neutral.
I decided I was not worried about it. I was the one with the ring conversation pending.
“It is of no concern,” Skip said, with equanimity. He had been running a military fortress for six years and had developed a useful capacity for addressing whatever the morning presented. “What happened during the night watch?”
She straightened, the awkwardness vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.
Soldier again.
“The creature did not emerge from the crypt last night,” she said.
Skip nodded. “I assumed as much, since no one woke me. Were any of the stones disturbed?”
“Yes. It tested them. We saw movement beneath the stones several times during the night.”
“Then it knows it is not yet strong enough to push them aside.” His expression hardened. “Let us hope that remains true. It has two more men to feed from.”
“How much stronger can it become?” I asked, fully aware that I was nude and covering myself with a sheet.
“I have never seen one feed from three people in so short a span,” he said.
“I have only read accounts from before the outpost line was built, when they had better access to victims. My understanding is that they become extremely lethal. When the armies first moved against Morvanna, she was so well fed that she broke through a stone wall with her fist.”
I stared at him.
“That seems like an issue.”
“It is.” He sat up.
The sheet moved.
Her gaze went briefly to the ceiling.
“This outpost line slows their access to blood,” Skip said. “If this creature feeds freely below us, we may be facing something far beyond an ordinary turned soldier.”
He turned back to the woman.
“I want more stones moved over the crypt door. Heavier ones. Add additional archers to every watch position overlooking the courtyard. If it emerges, I want it pinned beneath fire long enough for the men with hunter’s hooks to take the head.”
The woman nodded. “Yes, High Commander.”
“Every soldier on night duty wears full armor from dusk. No exceptions. Every soldier carries a hunter’s hook, belt-carried and accessible at all times. If the beast somehow gets past ten soldiers and heavy archer fire, no one in this garrison should face it empty-handed.”
“Yes, High Commander.”
She glanced at me once more.
She almost smiled.
Then caught herself.
Before her professional composure returned, something passed across her face—an expression that said, Well. Good for her.
She moved toward the door, report complete, orders received. The door closed behind her. She departed with significantly more material for her imagination than she had arrived with.
Skip looked at me.
“Varia,” he said. “One of my most trusted lieutenants. She has been with this garrison for four years.”
I considered this.
“I think,” I said, “that she has a fairly comprehensive picture of what happened in this room last night.”
“She is observant,” he said. “It is why I trust her.”
I looked at him. He looked back. He appeared aware of what had just been on Varia’s face.
The orders were moving now. Varia would see them done. The garrison was effective.
He turned to me.
“Now,” he said. “Back to you.”
His hand moved beneath the sheet and found my breast. His thumb brushed over my nipple, then began moving in slow circles.
“Look at me,” he said.
I held his gaze.
He kept going with the same unhurried pressure, his eyes on mine, watching with focused attention. The heat started low and spread slowly, pulling my breath out of rhythm.
His other hand moved beneath the sheet. Two fingers slid into me without preamble. I made a sound I had not planned to make.
I reached for him.
He was already hard.
I stroked slowly down the length of him. The full, genuinely unreasonable length of him. He exhaled against my throat.
We found a rhythm—his fingers and mine, moving together with reciprocal focus.
Then his mouth found mine.
His tongue moved against mine, slow until it wasn’t, the restraint giving way to something rawer underneath it.
My hand tightened on him. His fingers pressed deeper. We were both breathing harder.
He pulled back just enough to look at me—dark eyes, jaw tight—and then he came back, and the kiss was deep. Hungry. There was an animal quality to it that bypassed every analytical framework I had.
His grip on me tightened. I tightened mine in response. My hand moved over him in slow strokes, feeling him grow harder with each stroke.
He was already substantial. He was becoming more so.
My thumb dragged over the head of him, and he broke the kiss with a sharp exhale.
His fingers curled.
I stopped thinking.
***
We lay tangled together in the aftermath, his arm around me, my cheek against the broad plane of his chest. His heartbeat was steady beneath me. His hand was at my hip.
I was aware of exactly what I had not yet done. What his body had not yet done to mine.
What the claiming required. What was waiting on the other side of a ring.
I was also aware of exactly how much I wanted it.
I wanted the claiming. I wanted the ring on my finger, the bond forming, and his eyes on mine in the moment that theology said the world was built for.
I wanted to feel him fill me—all of him—and I wanted to watch his face when he did, and I wanted him to watch mine.
My body had filed its recommendation. The recommendation was urgent and not remotely ambiguous.
My brain, which had been the department responsible for significant decisions for thirty years, was attempting to make a case for patience.
The claiming was not a small thing. It was lifelong. Permanent. Empathic. A bond with no quiet exit, no careful separation, and no convenient Mytharo divorce attorney.
My brain was screaming I need to think about this while my body was screaming something else entirely.
The case for patience was correct. I knew it was correct. I was making it to myself with full conviction. I understood exactly what was at stake, exactly what the theology required, and exactly why the restriction existed.
I looked at the ceiling. I looked at the ring on his left hand.
Then I looked at the broad terrain of his chest beneath my cheek and turned the word claimed over in my mind.
A man’s ring on my hand. His heart open to mine. My desire answered. I wondered what it would feel like to stop circling the word and mean it.
He reached over and moved a piece of hair out of my face. I let him. I was discovering that I had a limited and rapidly depleting supply of objections to things he did with his hands.
“Tell me something,” he said. “Your world. The one you came from. What was your life before all of this?”
I considered giving him the simple version.
I had been a doctoral student. I had lived in Philadelphia. I had written about dead Roman generals and attended conferences and knew exactly which grocery store sold the rotisserie chicken I liked.
All of that was true.
None of it was the answer.
“Small,” I said.
His hand stilled slightly against my hair.
“My life was small, quiet, and contained. That said, it was engaging intellectually. I had a doctoral thesis I believed in, and work I found genuinely consuming.”
I paused.
“But I was living inside the lines of a life that had been approved for me. Sensible. Productive. Defensible. A life nobody could object to, which is not the same thing as a life I had chosen.”
Skip was quiet.
“I ended an engagement eighteen months before I arrived here,” I said. “He was adequate. In the way things can be adequate and still be wrong. By every metric my parents applied, he was the correct choice. By every metric I actually cared about, he was…”
I searched for the word.
“Insufficient.”
“He was a fool for letting you go,” Skip said.
“He was not equipped for me,” I said. “That is a different thing.”
“You were making yourself small?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You are not small.”
“I am aware of that,” I said.