Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
By the time we reach the conference room that evening, Adrienne has Konstantin’s whole filthy architecture spread across the table, and she looks at it without flinching. She lived inside it.
The diagrams are hand-drawn. Adrienne works from memory, not files, because the files were kept inside wards she can’t reach anymore and the memory was the thing she brought out when we cut her free.
The lines are clean and precise and the handwriting is small, and every node in the network is labeled with the name of the witch who maintains it and the leverage Konstantin has over them.
Daughters, sisters, parents, debts. Every line of ink is a person trapped by leverage they can’t break alone.
Since we pulled Lira out of the facility where Konstantin held her, the freedom shows in Adrienne’s hands, which are still now where they used to shake, and in her eyes, which stay on you where they used to slide away.
“He doesn’t bind them all the same way he bound me,” she says, tapping three points on her own diagram.
“He had my daughter. That’s the cleanest leverage there is, terror with a face on it.
But the others, the ones working his wards, he’s got tied a dozen different ways.
Debt. Addiction he manufactured. One I’m fairly sure just believes him, which is the hardest knot of all.
You can’t free someone who doesn’t think she’s caught.
” She looks up at me. “I know what the inside of every one of these feels like. That’s the one useful thing he made me.
If anybody can talk them loose, it’s the woman who got loose. ”
“Then we build it around you,” I say, pulling the diagram toward me. “We go knot by knot. The ones tied by terror, we take the terror away. The ones tied by debt, we find out what he’s actually owed and whether we can pay it or break it.”
Knot by knot. How you take apart anything built to last.
A warmth starts at the back of my neck. I ignore it, because the pregnancy has been changing my temperature one degree at a time and warmth is nothing new.
Then the warmth spreads. Down my spine. Across my collarbones.
Into my hands. I lose my place on Adrienne’s diagram and read the same knot three times without taking in a word of it, and my heartbeat picks up speed for no reason a war council has ever given me.
For half a second I brace, expecting the current, expecting the twins riding it up from below. But the two small fast heartbeats under my own stay even. It isn’t them.
So I run the checklist. No fever climbing my spine.
No pressure behind my eyes. No pull from below the navel.
Nothing on the list of things that have gone wrong with this body, and the heat keeps spreading anyway, and somewhere in the middle of ruling things out I become aware of my husband across the table.
The line of his shoulders. His hands flat on Adrienne’s diagram.
The sound of his voice doing things to my concentration that a war council has never once done.
Oh.
Oh, you have got to be kidding me.
Want. Sudden and total and absolutely inconvenient, arriving all at once and whiting out the diagram and the war and the entire concept of Konstantin’s contracts. My body has decided that what it needs right now is my husband, and it needs him immediately.
Terrible timing. Just spectacular.
I consider fighting it. I’m decent at fighting things. Then Maximus turns a page of the diagram with those hands, and the argument’s over.
I decide to lose.
The want hits the bond before I’ve finished deciding, because the bond doesn’t wait for decisions. Across the table, Maximus stops mid-sentence.
Mid-sentence. The man has briefed war councils through artillery.
His eyes come up and find mine, and I watch it land on his face, and what it does to him is something no enemy has ever managed. Adrienne is still talking about the eastern knot. He hasn’t heard a word of it since his eyes found mine. Neither have I.
“We’ll pick this up in an hour,” I announce, in a tone nobody argues with.
I stand. I cross to my husband. I take him by the collar of his shirt, two-fisted, and I look up at the most controlled creature on the eastern seaboard, the man who has commanded armies and outwaited empires and never once in his existence moved before he chose to.
“Celeste,” he says.
There’s a war in it. The war loses.
The crack starts at the eyes, and it runs down through his jaw and his shoulders and the stiff military posture in his spine, and what’s left underneath is a man looking at his wife, holding approximately zero negotiating power and unwilling to trade the helplessness for anything.
Six hundred years of discipline, and it comes apart for me.
Not for armies. Not for empires. For me, in a conference room, with ink on my fingers.
“Walk,” I tell him.
He walks.
Behind me I hear Adrienne set down her pen with enormous dignity and slide the diagrams to the far side of the table.
I hear Julian, who has wandered in at the worst possible moment with a tablet, say to the room at large, “Right. I’ll just route the eastern knot myself, shall I.
” His accent thickens when he’s exasperated, and right now the Scottish is thick enough to spread on bread.
I hear Simone laugh, once, bright and unashamed.
Alexei, back from the field an hour and already at her end of the table, doesn’t laugh, but I’d bet the compound he’s filing the sound away.
We make it as far as the corridor before his composure gives out. Then his hand closes over mine and I’m the one being walked, fast, his mouth dropping to my ear.
“An hour,” he says, low, “is not going to be enough.”
I don’t hear anyone try to stop us. Nobody in this building is stupid enough or fast enough, and the war, as it turns out, can wait.
It waits longer than an hour.
The door of our quarters closes and what was left of the composed man ends with the sound of the latch.
He turns me and my back meets the door and his mouth is on mine before I finish gasping, and this kiss has nothing in common with the one on the training floor.
That one didn’t ask for anything. This one asks for everything, and I give it, both hands in his hair, pulling him down, and he makes a sound against my mouth that nobody alive has heard.
His hands are cold. My skin is burning. Everywhere he touches, his cold meets my heat, and I feel him register the heat of me the way he registers everything, thoroughly, and then stop registering anything at all.
His hands find the hem of my shirt and the shirt is gone, and his mouth is on my shoulder before the fabric lands.
I get his buttons half undone before my patience runs out and the rest of them scatter across the floor, and he laughs, low, against my throat.
My leggings require cooperation. We don’t have any.
Something tears, and neither of us looks to see what.
The crescent over my heart is glowing. I can see it reflected in his eyes, crimson, pulsing with my heartbeat, and his answers it through the last of his shirt before that’s gone too, two marks throwing red light into the dark room, brightening every time we touch.
The bond is open and flooding, and this part never stops undoing me, no matter how many nights I’ve lived it.
Wanting him while I feel him wanting me.
The want reflecting between us, his rushing into mine and mine into his, building on every pass, until I can’t tell whose hunger I’m burning with and it stops mattering.
He lifts me and carries me to the bed. And then he goes still above me, and his hands frame the curve below my navel, and everything in him changes registers at once.
Four heartbeats in the dark. His head bows. His palms rest there, careful, reverent, a man holding the only altar he’s ever believed in.
“Still even,” he says against my skin. Counting them, even now.
I give him exactly three seconds of worship.
“You said an hour wouldn’t be enough,” I remind him.
“It won’t.”
“Then stop budgeting it.”
The care leaves him in one breath. What replaces it has no patience in it at all, and I arch up to meet it.
His mouth moves over me. Throat. Collarbone.
The crescent mark, and when his lips find it the mark flares under them and the heat goes through me to the bone, and my hands fist in the sheets, and he does it again because he felt exactly what it did to me.
His tongue traces the edge of the mark and the flare doubles and triples and I feel my spine lift off the bed.
There’s no hiding anything tonight. Every touch lands twice, once on my skin and once in my chest where the bond carries it, his pleasure arriving tangled with mine until we’re both drowning in it twice over.
The room goes dark. Not the lights, which are already off.
The dark itself thickens, the corners deepening, the ambient shadow spreading across the ceiling and pooling in the folds of the sheets, and I feel it before I understand what I’m feeling because the dark carries the same cool frequency he does, the witch-dark that’s been caged behind his discipline since the conference room, finally, with the door closed and the last pretense of composure gone, let loose.
It rises through the bed beneath me. Finds my wrists.
Pins them above my head with a pressure that’s firm and gentle simultaneously, and the bond flares at the contact, the marks blazing brighter, and somewhere low in my chest the gift stirs in answer, a hum I can feel in my teeth.