15. Chapter 15
Kalli
The room is small and warm, and I’m alone in it. A lamp burns low on a chair in the corner. My hands are wrapped in fresh cloth. I’m wearing a soft gray shirt that isn’t mine and reaches my knees.
No cuffs.
I sit up. My arms hold me. I put my feet on the floor and stand. My legs shake once and then take my weight. I walk the room end to end. Four steps, turn, four steps back. Everything works. Slower than it should, but it works.
Then I try the door.
The handle turns all the way around, and the door swings open onto a dark hallway.
I stand there with my hand on the handle, and I don’t move.
It’s not locked. It just opens, and I stand there looking into the dark hallway, and I don’t go through it.
“You’re up.”
He’s there. Right there, filling the dark of the hallway, close enough that he must have been standing on the other side of that door the whole time I slept.
I don’t say anything about that.
“I’m up,” I say instead.
“You should sit down.”
“I’ve been lying down for a day. Sitting down is not the change I’m looking for.”
He comes in and shuts the door behind him, and I get my first proper look at him.
He’s tall. I knew that—he carried me, I remember pieces of being carried—but standing in a small room with him is not the same thing at all.
He’s tall and broad, and he fills the space between the door and the bed, and there isn’t much left over.
Dark hair, pushed back and not tidy. Dark eyes.
I saw them in the truck, in the dark, with a firefight going on outside.
They’re on me now, and they don’t wander.
He has a good mouth. I notice that with my whole body, and then I catch myself noticing, because I am standing in a borrowed shirt in a safe house and the first clear thought I’ve had in days is about a man’s mouth.
Wonderful. A year of keeping my head under pressure, and this is what I do the moment I get free. I stare at a man’s mouth.
“Sit,” he says. “I want to look at your hands.”
“You could ask.”
“May I look at your hands?”
“Better.” I sit on the edge of the bed. “You may.”
He crouches in front of me and takes my wrist. His sleeves are shoved up, and I’ve got nothing to look at but his hands.
They’re big. Rough across the knuckles. The tendons stand out on the backs of them while he works the cloth loose, and there’s a vein that runs up the inside of his forearm and disappears under the shirt. He’s careful with every turn of the wrapping.
I watch him do it because watching him is easier than thinking about how his hands feel on my skin.
“Who taught you to wrap a hand?”
“A lot of years of people getting hurt near me.”
“Near you or because of you?”
“Both.” He gets the last of the cloth off. “Hold still.”
The blisters have closed. New skin, pink and tight. He turns my hand over and checks the other side. His thumb moves across my palm once, light. My breath goes wrong in the middle.
I’m sure he notices. He doesn’t stop working.
“Does that hurt?”
“No.”
“Then what was that?”
“Nothing. Keep going.” I keep looking at my hands. “How did we get out?” I ask, because I need something to say. “The wall was shut.”
“The man who runs that valley opened it himself. He sent men out to hunt for us, and the gate has to open to let them out. We were waiting beside it when it did.”
“Renwick,” I say.
He looks up from my hand.
“That’s his name?”
“That’s what he told me to call him.”
He nods once and goes back to the wrapping.
“And where are we now?”
“A rented house, a long way from that valley. Nobody knows it exists but the three of us and a man I pay in cash.”
Two questions, two answers. He wraps my palm back up, neat, and ties it off. He sets my hand down in my lap.
“Did I talk? Coming out. I remember talking.”
“You talked.”
“What did I say?”
“Enough that I made Kent promise not to repeat any of it.”
He reaches down beside the chair and comes up with a plate that’s been sitting there the whole time. Bread, cheese, cold meat, an apple cut in quarters.
“Eat. You’ve had nothing solid in days.”
“You kept a plate ready?”
“You’re a dragon. I’m told you’re always hungry.”
“Who told you that?”
“You did. On the drive out. Twice.”
God. I must have been totally out of it.
I eat. I eat all of it, fast, with my wrapped hands. He watches me do it. The apple is the first fruit I’ve tasted in over a year, and I close my eyes on the last piece. When I open them, he’s looking somewhere else, giving me that much room.
I laugh before I decide to. At nothing. At the plate. It comes out rusty. His eyes come up from my hands to my face and stay there. Neither of us says anything, and it goes on longer than it should.
He really has a very good mouth.
That’s when the heat arrives. And there’s no sedative left in my system to help me ignore it.
It rolls up through me from low in my belly. My skin goes tight and too warm everywhere at once. The room is suddenly small in a way it wasn’t a minute ago. I shift on the edge of the bed. I can’t find a way to sit that my body agrees with.
And I can’t stop looking at him.
His mouth. His hands, still resting on his knees, close enough to reach. The open collar of his shirt. The line of his throat. I know exactly how cold his skin is, because I rested against it for an hour. My whole body wants to find out again.
“Kalli.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
“Okay, I’m not. Thanks for making a thing of it.” I press my wrapped hands flat on my thighs. “It’s warm in here.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then it’s me.”
“It’s you,” he agrees, and his voice has dropped, which doesn’t help at all. It’s rich and deep and rolls over my tingling skin.
I should tell him to leave. That’s the sensible instruction. I know it. I look at his mouth instead. He watches me do it. He doesn’t move, and that just makes things worse.
So I say the truth, because it’s the only thing I can think of.
“I want you.”
He goes still.
“I want you, and I don’t know if that’s me or the stuff they poured down my throat.” My chest hurts by the time I’ve finished saying it. I keep going anyway. “My whole life, I have known why I do things. And I’m sitting here wanting you, and I can’t tell you why, and I hate it.”
He doesn’t answer for a while.
“That’s the most honest thing anyone has said to me in years,” he says.
“Don’t be kind about it.”
“I’m not being kind.”
“Then what are you being?”
“Careful,” he says. “And I’m losing at it.”
I move.
I get a hand in the front of his shirt and pull. He comes forward off the chair. His mouth meets mine halfway.
It isn’t gentle. His hand comes up into my hair and closes there. I get my arms around his neck. He makes a sound low in his chest that I feel more than hear. He tastes cold, and my mouth is burning, and the difference makes me shiver.
He comes up onto the bed edge beside me without letting go. His free hand finds my waist through the shirt, and it isn’t careful anymore; it’s wide and certain, pulling me in. I’m against him from knee to chest. He’s cold everywhere and solid everywhere. I press closer instead of pulling back.
“Kalli,” he says my name against my mouth. His lips leave mine and go along my jaw, down, to the side of my throat. I tip my head back and let it happen. There are teeth behind those lips. Sharp ones that can kill. That should frighten me. It doesn’t.
His skin is cool against mine, and my breath is coming fast. His hand at my waist tightens. For a moment, he leans into me, all of him.
“Gideon…” My fingers are in his hair. His hand is at the small of my back, under the hem of the shirt now, cool against bare skin.
He stops.
Everything stops at once: his mouth, his hands, his skin against mine.
He goes completely still. Then he takes me by the shoulders and sets me back from him.
Gently. Firmly. All the way back, until there’s distance between us.
He stands up off the bed. He puts the chair between us and keeps his hands on the back of it.
“No,” he says.
“But—”
“Not like this.” His voice is rough and even at the same time. “You just told me you can’t tell if it’s you. That took guts, and I’m not going to use it against you. I won’t be something you wake up to tomorrow and have to wonder about.”
“Maybe I want—”
“I want you.” He says it flat. “I’ve wanted you since the door of that truck came open and you looked at me and started giving orders.
And that is exactly why I’m standing behind this chair.
Because this version of it—the drugged version, the version you can’t check—isn’t the one I’m taking. Not when there might be a real one.”
The room is very quiet.
My skin is still burning. My mouth still tastes cold. And he’s right. I reached for him first, and he’s the one standing behind furniture with his knuckles white on the chair back.
The white knuckles help, a little. Not enough.
“Get out,” I say.
“Kalli.”
“You’ve made your decision; it’s a very honorable decision, and I would like to be furious about it in private. Get out.”
He doesn’t get out.
He takes the chair he’s been holding, carries it to the far wall, sets it down, and sits in it. Out of reach. Facing the door, not me.
“I’m not leaving you alone in a strange house just after you woke up,” he says. “Be furious. I’ll be here.”
I lie down with my back to him.
“For the record,” I say, to the wall, “I’ve killed men for less than what you just did.”
“Turning you down?”
“Being right at me.”
“I’ll add it to the list of things that want to kill me,” he says. “It’s a long list. You’ll be in good company.”
I don’t laugh, though I want to.
The hours drag by. The heat comes and goes in long slow waves. I ride each one out with my teeth shut, and my hands fisted in the blanket. I hate him through every single one. Underneath the hating there’s something else that I am not going to think about tonight.
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t speak. Once, when I make a sound into the pillow, I hear the chair creak—his whole body wanting to get up—and then it stops, and he stays where he is.
Nobody has ever stayed in a room with me and wanted nothing from me.
The lamp burns down. The house goes quiet around us; boots somewhere, a door closing, then nothing.
“There’s water on the table beside you,” he says, into the quiet. “When you want it.”
“I know. I saw it.”
“All right.”
That’s the entire conversation for an hour, and it’s somehow the easiest hour of my night.
The waves come further apart. Somewhere in the middle of the night, I can think in whole sentences again. My skin belongs to me, mostly. I’m too tired to be angry and too awake to sleep.
“Why did you come for me?” I ask the ceiling.
The chair creaks. He’s been awake the whole time. Of course he has.
“I made a promise,” he says. “To a friend of yours. Serenity Sangrey. Val-Serein’s consort. I told her I’d find you.”
“Serenity,” I murmur. The little wolf.
I think about that. A promise to a woman I knew through a wall, a heartbeat I counted on bad nights. It’s a good answer. It’s a true answer. I can hear that it’s true.
“That’s not why,” I say. “There’s more.”
The room stays quiet. He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t deny it either.
I fall asleep waiting, and he’s still in the chair when I go under, facing the door, watching over me when I didn’t ask him to.