28. Ember
EMBER
The plan is laid and the clock is running and I can't sleep, so I get up in the dark and I go to Cass's door.
Part of what's keeping me awake has a name.
If the Eastons come up this mountain, Ardric comes with them, because men like Ardric don't send for what they've bought.
They arrive to inspect it. Six years and I can still hear how politely he said the word evaluated, and some animal part of me has been waiting all this time for the day he'd come to conduct one in person.
I've come to all of them now. Rhys in the rain.
Knox in the woodshed with the wolf right at the surface.
Gideon on the kitchen floor, relearning how to be held.
Each one in his own time, in my own time, on terms I set, which is the only way a thing like me was ever going to do this.
And I've left Cass for last, and I've known I was leaving him for last since before I understood I was choosing it, the way you save the thing that matters most for when you're sure you can carry it.
His door's shut. I stand in front of it in the cold hall and I understand that this is the same door, philosophically, as every door in this house, the one he wouldn't come through while I burned, the one he sat against all night with his back to my back and his hand never on the handle.
He has spent this whole thing waiting on the other side of doors for me to open them. So I open this one.
He's awake. Of course he's awake, the night before a war, the pack alpha doesn't sleep.
He's sitting up against the headboard in the dark, and the cold-coal-and-leather scent of him is everywhere, and he looks at me in the doorway and doesn't say anything, doesn't ask why I've come, just waits, the way he's waited for everything.
"You've been letting the others go first," I say. "All this time. You could have made it you. You're the alpha. One word and you'd have been first instead of last." I close the door behind me. "Why didn't you."
"Because last is the one that means you chose it.
" His voice is low and even in the dark.
"First is easy. First is the heat and the want and the nearest body.
Last is the one you walked past three other doors to get to.
" He shifts, makes room, doesn't reach for me.
"I've waited a long time, Ember. I can wait through one more night if last isn't what you came for.
The door works both ways. You can open it and close it again and I'll still be here in the morning standing where you put me. "
The thing is, I know how long he's waited.
Not just the weeks since the ravine. He told me once, sideways, that he set a kind of trap years ago for something he never believed would actually come.
He's been waiting for me longer than I've been able to imagine wanting anyone.
And he will, I understand with total clarity, sit in this bed and let me leave and never once make me feel the weight of that wait, because making me feel it would be a way of taking, and Cass does not take.
I cross the room. I get up onto the bed and into his lap, slow, and his hands come to rest light at my waist, and even now he's not pulling, he's just holding the place I put myself.
"It's last," I tell him. "I came for last. I've been saving you."
Something moves through him at that, the stillness breaking just slightly, and he brings one hand up and cradles the side of my face like I'm something that took years to find, and he kisses me.
And it's nothing like the others. It's slow.
It's so slow it undoes me. Where Knox took and Rhys grieved and Gideon let himself be cared for, Cass just gives, patient and total, like a man who has all the time in the world and has decided to spend every second of it on this.
He undresses me like the act itself is the point, not the destination, his hands unhurried, his mouth following every inch of skin he uncovers, and he waits at every step for the small permissions in how I move against him.
I give them, one after another. His mouth finds my throat, the curve of my breast, draws one nipple in slow until my hips lift off the bed looking for him, and even then he doesn't hurry.
He slides one big hand down my belly and cups me, palm still against the heat of me, and holds it there until I'm the one moving, grinding against his hand, taking what I need from his stillness.
"There," he murmurs against my skin, low, like I've answered a question he's been asking for weeks. "Like that. Show me."
I show him. He learns me with two fingers, patient as winter, curling them until he finds the place that pulls his name out of me, and then he stays, working me with his fingers and his thumb slow on my clit while he watches my face come apart in the dark.
When I break the first time he takes it the way he takes everything.
Quietly. Completely. Like it's his because I handed it over.
Then there's nothing between us, and he lays me back with the rain long gone and the stars out the window, and the blunt heat of his cock notches against me and stops there, a breath from where I want him, while he braces over me and waits one last time.
"Ember." My name in the dark, wrecked and level at once, the voice through the door made flesh. "Look at me."
I look at him. He pushes into me slow, one long unbroken giving, the stretch of him stealing the air out of me, and we watch each other the whole way down, and neither of us makes a sound louder than breathing because anything louder would break it.
When he finally moves it's deep and slow and devastating in its restraint, a man holding back a thing the size of years so that what reaches me is only ever as much as I can take and want.
I wrap myself around him. I set the pace and he follows it, lets me, the most powerful person in this house handing me the whole of it, and the giving is the most erotic thing I've ever felt because I know exactly what it costs him to hold this gentle.
It builds between us like nothing has built before, slow and enormous, and when it finally takes me it takes me apart in long waves, dragging him with me, his face in my throat and my name barely a breath on his mouth.
He doesn't knot me. Even now. He holds back from the one thing his body wants most, gives me only what we agreed, because the bond is a thing for all of us together and he won't steal it for himself in the dark.
The restraint of that, the last and largest withholding, is the truest thing he's ever told me.
After, we lie tangled in the dark, his heart slow under my ear, and he speaks into my hair, quiet, like it's a fact and not a plea.
"I love you," he says. "I have for longer than makes sense. You don't have to say it. I didn't say it to hear it back."
And I don't say it back. Not because it isn't true.
Because I'm not ready to hand over the last word I've got, not the night before a war, not when saying it out loud might be the thing that makes me afraid to die, and I need to not be afraid tomorrow.
He knows all of that. I can feel that he knows it, in the way his arms don't tighten, the way he doesn't wait for the words, the way he just holds me having said his piece and asked for nothing.
He already knows. That's the whole of Cass. He already knows and he loves me anyway and he'll wait for the word the way he's waited for everything, without making me carry the waiting.
So I don't give him the word. I give him the only other thing I have.
"My mother died when I was four," I say into the dark.
The first time I've said it out loud in my life.
"I kept three things of her. A voice singing low.
A hand smoothing wool under my chin. And the shape of her standing in front of my father's study door with me behind her.
" His arms come around me, careful, the way you hold a thing that exists in one copy. "Nobody alive knows that. Now you do."
It isn't the word. From me, the night before a war, it's more, and the slow press of his mouth to my hair says he knows exactly what he's been handed.
I'm almost asleep, safe in the dark for the first time in six years, when a branch breaks outside.
One sharp crack in the treeline.
Cass is up and out of the bed with a knife in his hand before I've finished flinching, naked and silent and absolutely lethal, at the window with his body between me and the glass, reading the dark.
A long moment. Two.
"Deer," he says. "Probably."
But he doesn't come back to bed. He pulls his pants on in the dark and he sits down in the chair by the window with the knife in his hand and his eyes on the treeline, and he stays there, between me and the night, and we both lie awake in our separate ways until the sky starts to go gray.