Chapter 36 #2
I build her back up. Slower this time, crueler about it, holding her exactly where I want her, and she gives up arguing and just holds on and lets me.
Somewhere in it, her hands come up and frame my face, and she keeps them there, her thumbs at my cheekbones, watching me while I move in her.
Nobody has ever watched me like that. Like I’m the one who needs keeping.
“Bastien.” Her voice has gone ragged. “Bastien—”
Then she says something else.
“I’ve got you.”
The same three words she said on a concrete floor with blood coming out of her nose.
And that is when I know.
It goes through me all at once, and I stop moving.
I have known for weeks that I wanted her. I told a room full of people that she was an investment. I sat in a corner waiting for the sun with her name in my mouth, and I called it regret.
It isn’t any of those things.
I love her.
It turns out it is not complicated at all. It is the plainest fact in this house.
And half a second behind it, arriving quietly, comes everything the fact is going to cost.
“Why did you stop?” She’s got both hands on my face. “Bastien. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve gone—”
“Everything is fine.” My voice comes out hoarse. “Hold on to me.”
She holds on.
I move again, and don’t hold anything back—not my weight, not my strength, not the thing I just found out and can’t say.
I put it into her instead. She takes it.
She takes every bit of it, gasping into my shoulder, her arms locked around my neck like she means to leave marks, and I feel her break again, the whole of her tightening down the length of my cock.
It takes me with her.
It starts at the base of my spine and goes up through the whole length of me and out. My hips drive in and stay there. My mouth is open against her throat with the fangs down, and I don’t sink them into her. The sound I make against her throat is low and tormented.
For a few seconds, my mind is blank.
Then there’s her, breathing hard underneath me, with her hand moving up and down my back. Her heart is loud, working its way back down. I stay where I am and listen to it longer than I should. Keeping it. I have more memories than I ever chose to keep.
I’m keeping this on purpose.
I come off her carefully and pull her onto my chest.
“You’re shaking,” she says.
“Yes.”
“You never shake.”
“I do lately.”
She laughs. It moves against my ribs. Then she settles her cheek down and puts her fingers over the place where a heart should beat.
“Marthe’s decided you’re an invalid,” she says.
“Marthe has been waiting forty years for me to be an invalid.”
“She made me eat two bowls of broth this morning. Two. She stood at the end of the bed until I finished the second one.”
“She can’t make me eat anything. You’re paying for that.”
She laughs again, and then she’s quiet for a while.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“In that room. With the sun. Before I got there.” Her voice goes quieter. “What were you thinking about?”
“You.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not being charming. That’s all there was in my head.” I get my hand onto her back. “I was fairly annoyed about it at the time.”
“Annoyed.”
“I had so many years of material available. None of it turned up.”
She’s quiet for a while.
“I knew where you were,” she says. “The whole time. Nobody believed me except Crowe, and I don’t think Crowe believed me either. He just went anyway.”
“He would.”
“Viktor said no. Grace said no.” Her thumb stops. “She’s going to be so angry with me.”
“Yes.”
“Worth it,” she says.
“Serenity.”
“Mm.”
“When she stops being angry.” I keep my hand where it is. “What will she want?”
“Me at that mountain, eating something, for about a year.” She yawns. “Why?”
“No reason.”
“Liar,” she says, and she’s asleep inside two minutes.
She sleeps like this every night now; twelve hours, fourteen, gone the moment she stops moving. Whatever she spent in that room to save me, she’s still recovering from.
I lie there with her weight on me. Then I look at her shoulder again.
A thumbnail of pink skin, front and back, on a woman who took a rifle round through the top of her lung three days ago.
The doctor stood in this room and couldn’t believe she’d only had the wound a day.
Faine put two fingers on it in a boiler room and then decided not to have a conversation with me about it.
She should be dead. She isn’t, because of what I did to keep her heart going. There is a Court law about that with both our names in it now.
I move her hair off her face.
They didn’t take her the first time because of me. They took her for what’s in her veins, and that hasn’t changed. Anyone hunting her would start by watching me.
Six hours north, there’s a mountain full of people who spent a year trying to find her.
Her sister is inside it. There are walls, and guns, and good people behind both.
Better people than I am. Everything she was taken from is up that road.
The only thing this house has that the mountain doesn’t is me, and I’m the thing she needs the least.
She’d stay anyway. She’d stay here and never ask for the rest of her life back, and I would let her, and I would call it love, and it would be the last selfish act of a very long life.
She’d fight me on it. She’d win. She has never lost an argument with her hands on my face.
So she isn’t going to get the chance.
I put my hand over the back of hers. I don’t move again for a long time. Behind the shutters, the light comes up on another day. I already know how I’m going to spend it.