11. Valerian
— ? —
Valerian
The roses remember me.
I’ve been working the gardens at night, after Posy sleeps.
It began a few nights ago with a single overgrown bed beneath her window, and it is becoming a campaign, one bed at a time.
Tonight, dead wood cleared and the first wild canes trained back to their trellis.
The soil turned by moonlight. My hands were made for swords and scepters. It turns out they also serve for this.
The gardens were her grandmother’s pride. I know because I watched her tend them for decades through the fragments the seal allowed me, her shape moving between the beds each morning, faithful as weather. Perhaps someday someone will love it back to life, she wrote.
I am someone. The nights are long. And when the roses bloom again, they’ll bloom for Posy.
Tonight I’m not working. Tonight I’m standing in the cleared heart of the garden with my face tipped to a sky full of unfamiliar stars, trying to talk myself out of climbing the stairs.
It’s past midnight. She’s awake. I can hear her heartbeat through the walls, restless, circling, refusing sleep the way it has every night since the bathroom. We orbit each other all day, careful, five feet, courteous. And every night the house fills up with everything we’re not doing.
The kitchen door opens.
I don’t turn. I track her by sound, bare feet on cool grass, the whisper of the sleep shirt she wears, her heartbeat arriving before she does. She stops beside me, close enough that her warmth reaches through the night air.
“You’re up late,” she says.
“I do not sleep much.”
“Because of the box?”
“Because a hundred years of darkness cured me of my taste for it.” I keep my eyes on the sky. “In my world, the stars are different. Familiar. These are strangers. I’ve been learning them.”
Silence. Then, softly: “You did all this.”
I glance over. She’s not looking at the sky. She’s looking at the garden, at the cleared beds and the trained canes, the shape of order emerging from a decade of grief.
“Your grandmother wrote that she hoped someone would love it back to life.” My voice comes out lower than I intend. “I had nights to spare.”
“Valerian, what are you thinking about? Right now. Honestly.” She turns to face me fully.
“Honestly?”
“Brutally.”
“You. I am always thinking about you. It has become my affliction, and the finest use of a mind I’ve ever found.”
I hear her breathing change. In the moonlight her eyes are dark, her hair loose around her shoulders, and the sleep shirt bares the line of her collarbone, and I make myself look at the roses.
“Then why won’t you do anything about it?” she asks.
The question lands in my chest and detonates quietly.
“Posy, don’t ask me that.”
“No, I mean it.” She steps in front of me so I have nowhere to look but her. “You watch me all day. You listen to my heartbeat through walls. You rebuilt a garden in the dark because a dead woman asked someone to. And every time I get close, you retreat and quote your own promises at me. Why?”
“Because I’m trying to be honorable.” The words scrape coming out. “What happened on that chaise was survival. Necessity and venom. I won’t build anything on that foundation. I won’t take advantage of a bond you didn’t choose and a magic you can’t refuse.”
“There it is again.” Her chin comes up. “You keep deciding what I can handle.”
“Because if I’m wrong, I could hurt you.”
“And if you’re right, you’re just hurting us both.”
The night holds its breath around that sentence.
“I’m tired, Valerian.” Her voice doesn’t waver. “I’m tired of being careful. Tired of five feet. Tired of you protecting me from the only thing in this whole cursed situation that I actually want.”
Want. The word goes through me the way silver goes through flesh, and heals instead of burning.
“You should be certain,” I manage, “of what you’re asking for.”
“I’m asking for you.”
“If you come any closer,” I say, and my voice has dropped to gravel, “I will not be able to stop. Not this time. There will be no venom to blame and no survival to hide behind. Only the two of us, and everything I have wanted since you opened that box.”
She holds my eyes.
She steps closer.
The last of my restraint doesn’t break. It simply bows, deeply, and leaves the room.
I pick her up. She makes a small sound against my mouth, her legs wrapping around my waist, her fingers driving into my hair, and I kiss her the way I’ve been not-kissing her since she opened the box, starving and slow, carrying her across the garden and into the house without breaking apart.
Stairs. Hallway. My shoulder takes the doorframe because I refuse to stop kissing her long enough to steer.
I lay her down on my bed.
Moonlight through the tall windows. Her hair dark against the linen. She looks up at me, flushed and certain, and I have to stop for a moment, just to bear it.
“Tell me this is real,” I say. “Tell me it’s more than the bond and the venom. You, Posy. Choosing this.”
“I’m choosing this.” She reaches up and pulls me down. “I’m choosing you. Now stop asking and come here.”
I go.
Her sleep shirt vanishes somewhere between one kiss and the next, and then there’s skin, warm and endless, and I map her with my hands while she arches into every pass. She’s soft where I’m hard, warm where I’m cool, and each place we touch reports the difference and files it under miracle.
Her hands are on me too. That’s the part I wasn’t prepared for.
Her palms slide up my chest, over the scar, down my stomach, tugging my shirt over my head, and she touches me the way she looked at me in that bathroom, greedy and unashamed.
She finds the old scars and doesn’t flinch from them.
She spreads her fingers over the silence where my heartbeat should be and leaves them there, deliberate, claiming even the broken parts, and no one has touched me in a century, and no one has touched me like this in the whole of my existence.
She has reached past the king and the monster entirely, and her hands are on the man.
“You keep shivering when I do this,” she murmurs, dragging her nails lightly down my ribs, running the experiment again, shameless little scholar.
“Then you understand why your hands are a strategic threat.”
“Noted.” She does it a third time.
“You’re shaking,” she whispers.
“I have wanted this for longer than your language has existed. Forgive me if I’m… overwhelmed.”
“Don’t apologize.” Her hands frame my face. “Just don’t stop.”
I don’t stop.
I learn her slowly, thoroughly, with my hands and mouth, cataloging every gasp.
The curve of her breast and the sound she makes when my thumb circles her nipple.
The soft of her stomach. The heat of her when my hand slides between her thighs and finds her already wet, already ready, and she says my name in a voice I will be hearing for the rest of eternity.
“Valerian, please.”
“Patience was easier,” I murmur against her stomach, “before I knew what you sound like.”
I settle between her thighs and take her apart with my mouth, slower than the first time, no desperation to hide behind now, just want, hers and mine, until she comes with her fingers fisted in my hair and my name breaking in half on the way out of her.
She’s still trembling when she reaches for me.
“Let me…” Her hands find the waist of my trousers.
“No. Not yet.” I catch her wrists and pin them gently above her head, and she blinks up at me, pupils blown wide. “I don’t trust myself.”
“I trust you.”
“That makes one of us.” I press a kiss to the inside of one captured wrist, over the faded mark of my own fangs. “If your hands are on me, this ends embarrassingly quickly, and I’ve waited too long for this to be brief.”
“So bossy.”
“I was a king. It lingers.”
But she hooks a leg around my hip and pulls, deliberate, and the friction drags a sound out of me that I haven’t made in centuries, and her answering smile is pure villainy.
“Take them off,” she says. “That’s a royal command.”
“You are not the royalty in this bed.”
“Take them off anyway.”
I take them off.
The first press of me against her tears the breath out of us both. She’s hot and slick and mine, and I push into her slowly, watching her face, watching her eyes go wide and her lips part, giving her time, giving her every chance to change her mind.
She doesn’t change her mind. She wraps around me, limbs and heat, and pulls me the rest of the way home.
I still.
Buried in her, forehead pressed to hers, and for one moment neither of us moves.
Her heartbeat is everywhere. In her chest against mine, in her throat under my lips’ orbit, in the tight clench of her around me.
The bond hums between us, satisfied at last, and beneath the bond there’s just her.
Just this. Her hands have found my back, holding on, and she whispers my name once, not a question, just confirming I exist, and I answer by pressing my lips to her temple, because if I open my mouth I’ll say things that need daylight and courage.
A century in a box, and this is what was on the other side of it.
“Move, please,” she whispers. “Valerian, move.”
I move.
Slow at first, deep, learning the rhythm her body asks for. She meets me, matches me, and the room fills with sounds neither of us bothers to muffle, and the careful architecture of restraint collapses stroke by stroke.
The hunger stirs.
Of course it stirs. Her throat is right there, arched and bare, her pulse thundering beneath the skin, and every thrust drives her scent deeper into me.
The venom aches in my fangs. It wants. I want.
It would be so easy, one strike, her blood and her body at once, and she would let me, that’s the terrifying part, she would let me.
I turn my head and sink my teeth into the pillow beside her ear.
Feathers. Cotton. The taste of restraint.
“Did you just bite the pillow?” Breathless, half a laugh.
“The pillow volunteered,” I say through the mouthful, and she laughs properly, bright and broken-open at once, and the laugh does what laughs do to her body, and we both stop finding anything funny at all.
“You could…” She tips her chin, offering her throat, and my whole spine lights up. “If you need to.”
“Not tonight.” I release the ruined pillow and press my lips, closed, to her jaw. “Tonight is not for feeding.”
“What’s it for?”
“You,” I answer, and drive into her, deep, swallowing her moan with my mouth. “Only ever you.”
She comes apart the second time with me inside her, and the feel of it, her body gripping mine, her voice breaking on my name, drags me over after her.
I spill into her with her name in my mouth and light behind my eyes and a hundred years of dark burning off all at once, and the last coherent piece of me thinks: this. This is what I survived for.
We come down slowly.
I gather her against my chest, her heartbeat slowing by degrees, her hand resting over my scar in a gesture she probably doesn’t know she’s making. The moonlight has moved across the floor. The ruined pillow leaks a single feather, which she plucks out of my hair with great ceremony.
“You bit the pillow,” she says again, delighted.
“I will buy the household new linens.”
“With what money?”
“I’ll write to my treasury. The exchange rate may be unfavorable.”
She laughs into my shoulder, warm and loose, and then goes quiet. Her fingertips find the scars on my chest, the old ones, the ones that aren’t the anchor, and trace them one by one.
“How did you get these?” she asks softly.
The question opens doors I keep locked. Battlefields. Betrayals. The war that put me in the box.
“I will tell you everything,” I say, and mean it. “But not tonight.”
“Why not tonight?”
“Because tonight I just want to hold you.” I pull the blanket over us both and press my lips to her hair. “And prove to myself that I can do this without losing control. Ask me tomorrow, little bride.”
“I’m going to remember that promise.”
“I’m counting on it.”
She burrows into my chest, and her breathing slows, and somewhere between one heartbeat and the next she falls asleep in the arms of a monster who has never in his long existence felt less like one.
I stay awake, listening to her.
Learning this star, too.
She stirs against my chest, more asleep than not. “Tomorrow,” she mumbles. “Scars. You promised.”
“I did.”
She’s under before I can answer the rest, which is a mercy. Because the rest is this: tomorrow I have to decide how much of the truth to give her.
And every version of it ends with her looking at me differently.