40. Ellie #3
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. The bolt went deep. Two inches closer to the spine and the wing-joint shatters. A stronger dose and the wound spreads. I’d be alone in the canopy with a child and nothing between me and the clicking things that get back up.
He’s flesh. He bleeds. He can die. The not-being-able-to-die was a story I told myself in the dark, and the dark just took it back. And there are more of them than there are of him.
His hand stays on my belly. The hum starts—rough, damaged, catching on whatever the wound knocked loose in his chest. It sounds broken. It sounds like a voice that’s been crying. It’s the most honest thing he’s ever said.
The Eunuch left something at the boundary. A square of white cloth, folded exact. Inside, a single page—my numbers again, the worth of me, the children I’m good for. At the bottom, in the Ordained’s careful hand: The property will be recovered. Cooperation determines the cost.
I read it with his blood still on my hands.
My hands don’t shake anymore.
That night I can’t sleep. I lie against him and listen to his breathing go wrong—short, shallow, every inhale catching at the top on whatever the bolt damaged. My cheek’s on his chest. The skin’s too hot, the fever of a body burning through an injury. His heart under my ear. Steady. Strong. Alive.
The word keeps hitting me. Two inches from his spine. Two inches and I’d be lying next to a body instead of a heartbeat.
I press my mouth to the pulse in his throat. His breath changes—not the wound-hitch. Something else.
“Ellie.”
“I’m here.”
“I know.” Low, rough with sleep and pain and something under both. His good arm tightens. His hand finds the back of my skull. I know you’re here. I need you here.
I free him from the loincloth and he hisses—not pain. He’s already filling in my hand, his body wanting mine the way it always does, wound or no wound.
“You’re hurt,” I say against his skin.
“Yes.”
“Can you—”
“Get on me and find out.”
It hits me low, that rough certain command, not the rut’s blind drive, a whole mind behind it now, a male who learned exactly what his voice does to me and is choosing the words.
I straddle him. He’s at my mercy, and we both feel it—pinned by the wound, the one arm that can’t lift, all that strength held down.
I take him in my hands and feel him go hard while the body under me lies still, unable to flip me or pin me or drive.
I lower myself onto him and the stretch steals my breath even half-hard.
A groan grinds out of him, thick with the wound and the want both.
“Hnngh.” He finishes hardening inside me as I take him.
“Move,” he grinds out. Not a command—a plea from a male whose body’s screaming to thrust and whose shoulder won’t let him.
So I do. The pace is mine, the angle’s mine, and I fuck him like I almost lost him—because I did.
The bolt two inches from his spine. The sound he made when the dead thing got up and fired.
I fuck him with the fear still in my body, and he takes it, his good hand bruising my hip, his hips punching up into me even when his shoulder seizes for it, a broken grunt tearing out of him each time.
“Hgh. Hgh.” The need to fill me is louder than the pain.
“Harder,” he says, wrecked. “Ellie. Harder.”
I give it to him until I break apart on him, my whole body clenching, his name coming out of me in a sound I’ve never made.
“Riven!” Grief and relief and a desperate gratitude all tangled into one shredded syllable.
He follows me over with a groan dragged up raw.
“Hrrah.” The knot swells to seal us, his cum flooding into me hot, hotter than the fever in his skin.
And my body, which has been running on fear for a day and a night, finally stops.
I feel it work in me the way it did in the rut—the warmth spreading, the shaking draining out of my muscles, the fear leaving with it. I collapse on his chest, sealed and full, his good arm wrapping me, his heart hammering under my cheek.
“It feeds you,” he rumbles into my hair. Not a question.
“Yes.” Muffled against his skin. “It stops the shaking.”
“Good.” His hand tightens in my hair. “Take all of it.”
I take it. His blood still under my nails, his warmth flooding me from the inside, the contradiction of it, his blood outside me and his heat within, the most intimate thing I’ve ever felt.
I’m carrying pieces of him everywhere now.
His blood on my hands. His warmth in my body, pulling the fear out of my muscles the way the tea used to pull out my thoughts.
But this doesn’t make me quiet. This makes me strong.
The hum starts again—rough, broken on the wound, but it comes out. It always comes out. He hums for me the way he rebuilt language: stubbornly, through the pain, because the need to say mine is louder than the cost of saying it.
We sleep, still sealed, his blood on my hands and his heart against my face.
And under the grief and the warmth, the cold patient thing in my chest goes on burning.
They took Lira. They sent things that don’t die to do it.
They left their note with their numbers and their word—recover—like I’m something they mislaid.
When I wake, I’m going to start taking the whole thing apart.