20. Ember
EMBER
"I know I shouldn't be out here," I say. "I came anyway. We've established I do that."
Knox doesn't turn around. The axe stays buried in the block.
The cold's raising gooseflesh on the bare skin of his back and he doesn't seem to feel it, and the stack of split wood beside him goes on being absurd, a winter's worth of fuel cut in a single sleepless night by a man trying to put something somewhere.
"Go back inside, Ember."
"The others held the line all night." I take a step into the shed, out of the wet. "Did you?"
His shoulders go tight. "I was on the roof."
"That's not what I asked."
He turns then. And the look on him stops me, because it isn't the cool flat thing he wears in the house.
The yellow's right up at the edges of his eyes, the wolf sitting close to the surface, and underneath it there's something raw and exhausted and barely held, a man who spent the night in the cold splitting wood he'll never burn because the alternative was coming down off that roof and through my door.
"No," he says. "I didn't sleep. I split wood.
You can see how much." His grip flexes on the axe handle.
"Now go back inside, because every other man in that house has more practice than I do at being near you and keeping his hands to himself, and I've got the least, and the shed is the only place far enough from your door that I trusted myself in it.
So you coming out here is about the worst thing you could do. "
The heat banked low in me uncurls a little at the rawness in his voice. The pull I felt in the spare room points dead at him, has pointed at him since the porch, and I'm done pretending the direction's a mystery.
"Gideon told me how it works," I say. "The heat. That it's going to run for days, in waves, and there's no stopping it now. He told me I can ride it out alone behind a door, or not." I hold his eyes. "I'm choosing not. And of the four of you, you're the one I came to find."
Something goes through him like a current. The ozone note sharpens in the cold air. But he doesn't move toward me. If anything he goes more still, the stillness of a man holding himself in place by main force.
"You don't want me for this," he says. Low. "You want one of the others. Cass. Rhys again. Gideon's gentle, he'd be good to you. Pick one of them."
"I'm not picking the safe one. I spent my whole life being handed to the safe one." I take another step. "Why won't you touch me, Knox. The real reason. Not 'I've got the least practice.' That's the polite version. Give me the true one."
He's quiet for a long moment. The wood-smoke and earth of him, the sharp ozone, fills the small space. When he answers his voice has dropped to something flat and bare.
"Because if I touch you, I lose my edge.
For a day. Maybe more." He says it like a fact he's hated for a long time.
"The others, they have you and they walk it off, they're themselves again by morning.
Not me. The thing in me that came back from feral wrong, the part Cass never quite finished pulling out, it gets the leash if I let myself want something this badly and then have it.
And once it's got the leash it doesn't give it back for a day at least. I go soft in the head and sharp in the teeth and useless for the only thing I'm actually good for.
" He looks at me, and there's the whole truth in it now.
"And both packs are within arm's reach of this cabin.
Sutter's already noticed his man went quiet in Forks.
The Eastons have walked our line twice. Which means the next day or two is exactly when this pack might need me to be the most dangerous thing on this mountain.
And I cannot be that and have you in the same twenty-four hours.
I have to pick. So I picked the roof. I picked the axe.
I picked keeping my edge, because keeping my edge is how I keep you. "
It lands in me somewhere the cold hours of last night already softened.
Every other thing a man has ever wanted from my body, he wanted for himself.
Knox is standing in a freezing shed denying himself the thing we both want because having it might cost him the sharpness he'd need to put his body between me and a bullet.
He's not protecting his control. He's protecting me with it.
"How long do we have," I say. "Before they come. Your best read."
"Day. Two." He frowns, not following.
"Then we have time." I close the rest of the distance between us.
The heat's coming up now, no longer banked, answering the nearness of him, and I let it, I stop fighting the pull I've fought since the porch.
I put my hand flat on his bare chest, over the hard slam of his heart, and I feel him shudder under it, the whole rigid length of him, the wolf surging right up behind his eyes.
"If the worst of it's a day from now, then a day from now you'll have your edge back.
And if I'm wrong, if they come tonight, then I'd rather have had this once than ridden out my heat alone in a locked room being careful.
I've been careful for six years. Careful is a cage too. "
"Ember." It comes out wrecked, a warning and a plea at once. His hands have come up to my waist without his permission and they're shaking with how hard he's holding them still. "If I start I'm not going to be gentle about it. That's not in me right now. You understand what you're asking."
"I'm not asking for gentle. I had gentle last night." I fist my hand in the chain around his neck and pull him down until his forehead drops to mine and the ozone is everything and the heat roars all the way up. "I'm asking for you. The wrong part included. Touch me, Knox."
He doesn't.
For one more second he holds, the last of him, the careful eleven years of him, every wall he built in the wild and kept in this pack.
"Touch me, Knox."
He does.