Chapter 4
Dayan
She gets in the car like she's done it a hundred times, like the seat was always hers, and now she's folding into the leather beside me and the whole interior smells like her. The scent of summer as it changes to fall, gold and warm with something a little spicier beneath it.
"You're quiet," she says as I pull onto the road and head out of the estate.
"Yes." Straight to the point in as few words as possible has always been my way of communicating.
The car eases out past the gate and the lights of Pietty's borrowed estate slide off her face one by one until there's just the dashboard glow and the long dark road. She watches it come at us through the glass.
"You can still change your mind," I tell her. "I had Pietty's man wait at the gate. One word and we turn around."
"You really want me to leave?"
"No." The honesty surprises us both. "I want you to know you can before this goes too far."
She turns her head and looks at me in the dark. I feel it on the side of my face like heat off a stove. Don't look back, I tell myself, the way Rovin taught me when I was a boy with too much feeling in my fists. A man who looks too long has already lost the room.
I look back.
"You cut yourself," she says. "Writing my name."
"Tradition," I say simply. “Blood is binding.”
“Even if I decide to turn back?”
I shrug. “Binding for me.” Because it is. I know she is all I want.
"You didn't even wrap it." She reaches for my hand, stopping herself when she realizes she is about to touch me, willingly for the first time. I focus on the traffic and the road ahead, but the thought of her touching me already has my mind going places I’ve managed to keep it away from all night.
"Does it hurt?" she asks.
"No."
We hit the highway. The city pulls up on the horizon, all the lights smeared and shaking, and she watches it the way I used to watch borders as a kid. Like crossing one means you don't get to come back the way you were.
"Tell me something true," she says. "Since you only seem to deal in one-word answers, here's an easy one. Why no negotiation?"
"Because I know what I want, and I’m willing to give you whatever you want in return," I say.
"I’ve been to four of those auctions now.
Watched men with those folders, picking women apart by the line item.
Hair. Family. Childbearing." The word tastes like rust. "Like buying a horse, you said.
They make it that. I didn't want to make it that with you. "
"So instead, you bought me outright, no discussion." Her brow lifts. "That's the moral high ground, is it?"
"No." I keep my eyes on the road. "It's the only thing I could do that wasn't picking you apart. I saw you across the room and I knew. I wasn't going to sit there and pretend I needed a dossier of information to be sure."
Silence fills the car.
“What if we don’t want the same things?” she asks, her voice the smallest I’ve heard it all night.
I don’t answer. I don’t think I have an answer. The truth is something in me recognizes something in her and whatever that calm, soothing feeling is, I’m letting it guide me.
She turns in the seat to face me full on now, knees angled toward mine, and her chin comes up in that way she has. Defiance worn like good manners.
"We're ten minutes out," I tell her, because I have to say something and the truth's too big for the car.
"Okay," she says, and that one soft word does more damage than anything sharp she's thrown at me all night.
The road narrows. Trees close in black on both sides and the city falls away behind us like something I'm done needing.
I keep my eyes forward. I have to. Because every lamp we pass throws her at me in pieces and I can't afford the whole picture, not while I'm driving, not while my hands have a job to do.
A streetlight slides across her and I get her anyway. The line of her throat. The way the dress pulls when she breathes. She's softer than that bright loud room let on, fuller, the kind of body a man doesn't get handed, he earns the sight of it. My mouth goes chalk dry.
The car's AC is chilly, the cold air finding her. Her nipples tightening under the silk.
I see it all at once, too clear. Two soft points pressing up against the fabric, there in the light, gone in the dark, and God help me I clock the next lamp coming just so I can slide my eyes back to her at the exact right moment to see them again. There. Gone. There. Gone.
My cock strains against the zipper of my trousers.
Eyes on the road.
My eyes are not on the road.
She catches me. I feel her notice and expect a cutting remark, but it doesn’t come.
Instead, she adjusts slightly in her seat, turning her body just enough that I get a better view.
She lets me look. Lets the quiet go thick and hot, like the half second before a storm finally cracks the sky.
"You're staring," she says.
"Yes."
"That's it? Yes?" Her voice has dropped though. Gone rough, like she swallowed sand.
"You're cold." My own voice comes out wrecked. I don't know it. "I can see you're cold." I lean forward to turn the AC off, regretting being so obvious.
She doesn't pull her arms around her. That's the thing that nearly kills me.
She lifts her chin instead and lets the cold keep doing what it's doing, and the look she gives me says she knows exactly what I'm seeing, and she's decided I get to keep seeing it.
On her terms. Everything with her is on her terms.
My jaw's clenched so hard my back teeth ache.
Her mouth curves in a dare.
The steering wheel has gone slick under my palms and I'm a grown man coming apart over nipples like I’ve never seen them before.
I've held my nerve through worse than this.
Rooms full of men who'd have put me in the ground.
None of it ever cost me what she is costing me now, one streetlight at a time.
The gate is already sliding open. My men saw the headlights and they know better than to make me wait.
She sees the house rise up out of the dark. Stone and lit windows. Her breath snags.
"That's yours," she says.
"Yes."
I bring the car to a stop. The engine ticks down. In the quiet there's just her breathing and mine, both gone ragged, the corners of the windows fogging from the heat we've made without either of us even touching the other.
I turn to her. She's already turned to me.
"This is your last chance," I tell her, low. "You can still..."
She fists the front of my shirt and pulls.