Chapter 15 #2
Behind me I hear Julian say, "Quarterly reminder that I outrank everyone remaining at this table and I'm ordering a full recess," in the voice of a man who has given up on the dignity of his commanders entirely and made peace with it.
I hear Elena's laugh, quick and bright, hidden behind Marcellus's shoulder.
I hear Simone say "Excuse us" to nobody and everybody and pull Alexei toward the garden.
I hear Mira say nothing, which from Mira is approval.
The family evacuates. With the practiced coordination of people who have watched this happen before and have developed an evacuation protocol that nobody wrote down and everyone follows.
The war can wait an hour. It does.
The door closes and I shove him against it, and his back hits the wood and the surprise on his face lasts a breath before I'm climbing him, both hands in his hair, my mouth on his, and whatever the dining room left of his composure dies in the sound he makes against my lips.
I pull his shirt over his head and his hands find the hem of mine and the crescent marks blaze the moment skin meets skin, crimson flooding the dark room.
The shadows move. His, not the room's. They rise from his hands, pouring from his fingertips as they trace the curve of my hip, dark following his touch across my skin like afterimages of his palms, and everywhere they pass they leave a coolness that makes the heat of me feel sharper by contrast.
I push him toward the bed. He goes where I put him, and the willingness is its own kind of power, a man who commands armies letting a woman a fraction of his age steer him across a room because the steering is the thing he wants.
He sits on the edge of the mattress and I swing my leg over his hips and settle into his lap, and the moonlight catches the swell between us, and his hands find it, and everything in him changes registers.
The shadows flow along my arms and lace through my fingers where my hands grip his shoulders, holding without pinning, and somewhere low in my chest the gift rises to meet it, further than it has ever come.
He feels it. The corner of his mouth moves against my collarbone.
"That's new," he says. Against my skin. The words vibrating against the place where the crescent meets the curve of my breast, and the vibration runs through the mark and into the bond and comes back amplified.
It has been reactive during intimacy before.
Small things. A pillow lifting off the bed.
The sheets sliding without anyone pulling them.
Once, memorably, the bathroom door slamming shut from across the room at exactly the wrong moment, which Julian heard from the corridor and has never once mentioned and will never let either of us forget.
This is different. This is the power responding to the bond's signal, humming at a frequency that matches the marks' pulse, and the result is a vibration I can feel against my entire body, a low sustained thrum that makes every point of contact between us resonate.
"That's the gift saying hello." My voice is rough. "You should probably answer."
He answers. His mouth finds my throat, the soft place behind my ear, the line of my jaw, and his hands frame the swell of me while his thumbs trace the skin above my hips, learning the new fullness there, the places that have changed enough that his old maps don't match.
The pregnancy has rewritten my body's sensitivity and he's finding the new lines.
His thumb grazes the underside of my breast and I jolt, a full-body shudder, because that spot was barely anything before and now it's live.
He registers it. I feel the attention sharpen in the bond, and he comes back to it, his mouth this time, his lips barely grazing, and the lightness is devastating.
Sixteen weeks. Everything is closer to the surface.
The places that needed pressure before now buckle under his breath, and he figures this out in about ten seconds and proceeds to use it mercilessly, his mouth and his hands mapping the changed body while I'm in his lap, and I let him worship because the worship is doing things to him that come through the bond like a furnace door opening, and I want all of it.
Then I'm done waiting.
I rise up on my knees and reach between us and take him in my hand, and the sound he makes when I grip him is the one I'd burn buildings for, and I guide him to me and sink down slow, taking him in on my terms, at my pace, and the angle from above is different from anything we've done, deeper, the fullness hitting a place that makes my breath stop.
His hands grip my hips and his forehead drops against my collarbone and for one breath neither of us moves.
I hold his face. I tip it up to mine. Moonlight and crimson and eyes with all his old walls in them and one woman's worth of door, and I am the door, and he walks through me every time, and I let him.
"Stay," I say.
There's no command in it. The word means something different in his language than anyone else's, and I've learned it. Stay means come back. Stay means choose this. Stay means the war ends and the house gets built and the two loud children run in the yard and none of it works without you.
"Always," he says.
And I move.
I set the rhythm, and the rhythm is mine.
Rolling my hips against his, finding the angle that makes us both groan, and his head falls back and his hands grip my hips and I watch centuries of discipline come apart underneath me.
The marks pulse between us, crimson on crimson, and the shadows rise from his skin and curl around both of us, dark and cool against the heat we're generating, and the gift presses outward from my chest until the air sings with it.
I ride him with the same economy I fight with, finding what works and staying with it, and he lets me lead, his hands mapping my ribs, the curve of my stomach, the places the moonlight catches.
His mouth finds the crescent over my heart and when his lips touch the mark the flare goes through me and back into him and the sound he makes against my skin is the one nobody alive has heard.
His hands slide to the swell between us, cradling it while I move, and the tenderness of the touch and the want in the bond and the crimson light make something that has no name and doesn't need one.
I lean back and brace my hands on his thighs and the angle changes and the depth changes and the sound that comes out of me is not language.
His hips roll up to meet mine and I gasp and grip harder and the pace climbs.
His hand comes to my face, his thumb at my cheekbone, holding my eyes while I move above him, and I hold his, and we watch each other come apart, and the watching is the intimacy, not the act, the two of us seeing everything the other has and not closing our eyes.
The peak builds from both of us at once.
I feel him climbing as clearly as I feel myself, the bond carrying the ascent in both directions, his pleasure feeding mine feeding his, and when it crests it takes us in the same breath because it has never once let us go alone.
It cascades through both of us, and I press my forehead to his and we breathe the same air and neither of us moves until the wave passes and the room settles back to moonlight and the quiet after.
After, he pulls me against him, cool chest to warm back, and his hand finds my hand over the swell, two of the four hearts under our palms, and I'm too heavy-lidded and too warm to deflect, and he presses his mouth to my shoulder and says something so quiet I almost miss it, his lips against my skin, a sentence meant for the two of them and not for me.
I hear it anyway.
I take it in, jaw set, with the Moreau stubbornness that says the dark in it does not get to win because the dark has met the wrong woman. I keep it to myself. I don't repeat it.
The marks glow soft in the dark. The compound sleeps. The war will be there in the morning. Tonight we are just a family, and the warmth is so total it aches, and I let it ache, and I don't make a joke of it, and that is the bravest thing I've done all week.