34. Chapter 34
Kalli
The meeting breaks up the way they all do, into three smaller ones.
Creed has Viktor and Craven cornered by the window.
Bastien is still arguing about something with a man in a gray coat who keeps saying the word jurisdiction.
Odile already has Torbjorn on his feet and moving toward the door, still asking him about roads.
Nobody is looking at me. It’s the first time in days that’s been true.
Gideon catches my eye across the table and tips his head at the door, and we go.
I know the way to his room. Third door, second floor, past the alcove where somebody has put a plant that isn’t doing well. I walked it early this morning with my hair still down, and I’ve thought about it more times since than I’d say out loud.
He shuts the door behind us, and the noise of that building goes away.
I don’t sit down. I stay standing in the middle of his floor with my arms crossed and let myself shake, which I have not let myself do since I said my cousin’s name out loud in front of nine people.
He doesn’t come over. He stays by the door and lets me get through it.
“Somebody’s going to write that down,” I say.
“Probably.”
“It’ll be in a file with my name on it. Sereth Ondrathe sold his cousin.
Somebody I’ve never met will read it over lunch.
” My teeth are chattering, which is ridiculous.
“He taught me to read a wind off the north face. I was nine. He sat out on that ledge in the cold for three hours because I asked him to.”
“I know it hurts.”
“Does this part stop?”
“No.” He says it plainly, the way he says everything. “It stops being the first thing you think about when you wake up. That’s all. It takes longer than anyone tells you.”
I get my breathing back. He waits until I’ve done it, and then he crosses the floor and stops in front of me, close, not touching.
“There’s something I never told you,” I say.
“You don’t have to do this tonight.”
“I’m going to.” I look at his hands instead of his face, because it’s easier. His knuckles are calloused. They were probably that way the day he was Turned. “I saw Kaevor before I left. Before my mother. He was the first person I told I was leaving.”
Nothing moves in him at all, which is how I know I have his whole attention.
“He’d already worked it out. He asked me flat out whether it was you.” My mouth is dry. “I told him the truth. Not all of it, because I didn’t have all of it. Enough.”
“And he let you go.”
“He didn’t make a single argument.” That’s the part I keep going back to.
“He could have. He’d have been within his rights, and half that mountain would have backed him.
He just stood there and told me to go and find out what I needed to know, and that if it came to nothing, nothing at his end would have changed. ”
Gideon takes that. I watch him take it.
“That’s a decent man,” he says.
“Yes.”
“I’d rather he’d been a bad one.”
“So would I.” It comes out of me before I’ve decided to say it, and it’s true, and it’s an ugly thing to be true. “Then leaving him would have been easy.”
He turns away from me then. Not far. Two steps, to the windowless wall, where there’s nothing to look at.
“He can give you a life,” he says.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not being noble, and I’m not fishing.
I want to say it once, out loud, so it isn’t waiting under every conversation we have.
” He stays facing the wall. “Children. A family name that your clan already respects. A man who could stand up in front of them and be everything they want. He can do every one of those things. I can’t do any of them. ”
“I’m not making a list.”
“No. You’ve never asked me for anything, and I can’t tell whether that’s because you don’t want it or because you already know what I haven’t got.”
The thing I want to say is right there, and it’s only three words.
Just three little words.
I don’t say them.
Not in this room, not tonight, not with my hands still twisting. He’d hear the state I’m in underneath it, and he’d spend the rest of his life not knowing whether I knew what I was saying. He deserves better than a shattered woman’s confession of love.
He turns around, and I can tell from his face that he knows I’m holding something back.
He doesn’t ask.
“Your turn,” I say. “You’ve been carrying something since you got here. I watched you not say it all through that meeting.”
“It’s not a good subject.”
“Say it. I can take it.”
He’s quiet for a second.
“You already know what Branna told me,” he says. “I’m not making you hear it again. But I’ve had two nights of driving with it and nothing else to do but think.”
“Gideon.”
“I’ve done this work for more than a lifetime.
” His voice has gone lower. It doesn’t rise when he’s angry.
It drops, and every word comes out level.
“I’ve walked into rooms most people couldn’t stand to look at.
I did the dirty jobs and slept fine afterward.
None of it ever stayed with me. This has. ”
“You’re allowed to be angry.”
“It isn’t anger.” He looks straight at me and doesn’t soften any of it.
“There is a man alive right now who wants to kill you and make it look like an accident. And if he’d acted on it while you were out there alone, I would have been three days away, and I wouldn’t have saved you.
I can’t stand that, Kalli. I haven’t been able to stand it for one hour. ”
His hands are open at his sides, and he isn’t moving at all. That’s what he does instead of shaking.
I go to him.
“Look at me,” I say.
He does.
“I’m here. Nothing’s happened to me. Put your hands on me.”
Something breaks in his chest, low. Then he has me by both arms and pulls me in against him with his face down in my hair. Days of frustration go out of him while I stand there. He holds on harder than he means to. I let him. I’ll have the marks tomorrow, and I want them.
“Say something,” I tell his collarbone.
“I can’t.”
“Then don’t.”
I get my hands into his hair and pull his head down and kiss him, and whatever he’s been gripping onto since the meeting, he drops.
He isn’t careful with me. I don’t want him careful.
My shirt tears at the shoulder and neither of us notices until later.
He gets my jaw, then the side of my neck, then the shirt is off me and on the floor.
He lifts me clean off my feet and puts me down on the bed with his weight following me, and for the first time in months, all that’s in my head is this moment.
Then he stops, braced above me, his pupils blown so wide his eyes have gone black. There’s a flash of white at his lip before he retracts his fangs.
“You’re starving,” I breathe out, not knowing why that excites me so much.
“I haven’t fed in days,” he admits.
“I know. I could see it in the meeting.”
I turn my head on the blanket and give him the whole line of my throat.
“Take what you need.”
“Kalli…”
“Why must you always argue about this?” I pull his head down.
His teeth go in. There’s one sharp second, pressure and puncture, and then there’s no pain at all.
Heat comes up out of my chest and floods everything—down my belly, between my legs, all the way to my fingertips.
My back leaves the bed. My hips grind up against his thigh on their own, finding friction and taking it, and he presses back against me and lets me use him while he drinks.
My hands are fisted in his hair, and I hear myself, and I don’t care who hears it.
And I feel him change while he’s drinking. I didn’t know it did that. The cold goes out of his skin. He gets warmer against me a little at a time, until he’s almost as warm as I am, and I have never felt him this alive under my hands.
He pulls off my throat before he’s ready to. I feel him make himself do it.
“That’s it,” he says, ragged.
“You could have more.”
“No.”
He lifts his head, and he’s whole again. The gray’s gone out from under his eyes. His mouth is red with me. He looks like the man who came to get me in that van a lifetime ago.
“Gideon Crowe,” I breathe out. I feel the burn on my throat. Two punctures, open and slow. They’ll be there for days. And I don’t mind, because I like that they stay.
He covers them with his palm. Then he lifts his eyes to mine, and there’s nothing careful left in his face.
He kisses me, and there is nothing hurried in him at all. That’s what feeding does to him, apparently. He has the whole night in front of him now, and he has decided to use it.
He takes my bottom lip between his teeth and holds it until I make a sound. Then he lets go and comes back and opens my mouth with his, slow, like there is nowhere either of us has to be. I can taste my blood on his tongue. It should bother me. It doesn’t bother me at all.
When he finally lifts his head, he stays close. Nose against my nose. My breath goes out against his lips, and he doesn’t move away from it. Eventually, when it’s almost too intense, he pulls back.
“Sit up,” he says.
I sit up on the side of the bed. He kneels in front of me and gets hold of my left boot.
“You don’t have to—”
“Be quiet, princess.”
He works the laces open all the way down instead of dragging the boot off over them.
Then he takes my heel in one hand, eases it off, and sets it on the floor.
Then the other one, beside it. Then my socks, one and then the other.
His thumb runs across the arch of my foot on the way past, and I feel that everywhere.
Nobody has knelt down and taken my shoes off since I was a small girl. It gets to me more than anything else he’s done tonight.
“Stand,” he says.
I rise. He stays on his knees and unfastens my pants and takes them down my legs.
I put a hand on his shoulder and step out of them.
My underwear goes next, and I feel his cheek against my bare hip when he draws them down.
Then he sits back on his heels and looks at me standing naked in front of him, and he takes his time about that too.
His eyes go up me slowly. He isn’t hiding what looking at me does to him.