36. Chapter 36
Crowe
My office is exactly as I left it. Steel desk.
Two chairs, one of them for people who come up here to ask me for things.
A window over a yard where a man rebuilds transmissions and has never once asked what I do above his head at night.
There’s a mug on the desk with an inch of something in the bottom that was coffee in another season.
Sixty years of a life, and all of it fits in this room with space left over.
The system is still here too. Take the work. Finish the work. Don’t make it personal. Write it up, close the book, wait for the next name.
It’s a good system. It has never once failed me.
I sit down in my own chair and look at it and understand that it’s finished.
She told me to think about it somewhere she wasn’t, so I came here.
They buried her cousin the morning after I left.
Short ceremony, name read once, ground closed over him.
I wish I could have been there for it, but I knew I’d only complicate an already complicated situation.
So I came down off that rock and to the life I remember.
A name comes up on my phone on the third day.
It’s a man I’ve worked for twice, and the job is one I’d have taken without thinking a year ago. Somebody’s missing. Somebody else would rather they weren’t found. Good money, three weeks, and nothing in it that would have kept me awake.
“I’m out,” I tell him.
The pause on the line goes on long enough that I can hear his office behind him.
“Out this month, or out?”
“Out.”
“Since when?”
“A while ago. I’ve only just got around to saying it.”
He asks where he should send work now. I give him two names better than mine, and he takes them, and that’s the end of a career.
I put the phone down and sit in the quiet.
This is the part worth doing alone, where nobody’s watching me run through the implications. Work I’m good at, from people who don’t ask me questions. A city where I have never once been the strangest thing in it, and where the daylight is a problem I solved decades ago.
Against that, a mountain full of people who’ll be polite to my face and mean none of it.
It isn’t a hard choice.
That’s what would have surprised me a year ago. It isn’t even close.
I take three days more than I need, because she asked for a week and a week is what she’ll get. I spend them leaving my affairs in order. On the fifth night I lock the door behind me, and I don’t stand there looking at it, because it isn’t that kind of room and I’m not that kind of man.
Then I drive north.
There’s a second thing on my mind the whole way, and there’s nothing romantic in it.
Somebody walked out of that hall while her mother was still on her feet, and nobody has seen them since. Whoever it was knew what her cousin had done and let him do it. That person is still breathing. I really don’t like that.
It’s late when I reach the gate. Aldis is on it, which I don’t believe is an accident.
“She’s in her quarters,” he says.
“How is she?”
“She’s been down to this gate twice a night since you left.” He stands aside. “I didn’t say that.”
I move through the hallways of the Eyrie without drawing obvious attention, though I know I’m being observed. I reach a door to a suite I’ve never entered and take a moment to myself before I open it.
Her arm is out of the wrap. That’s the first thing I see when I walk in. She’s sideways in an oversized chair with a lamp burning low, and she doesn’t get up.
“You’re late,” she says.
“I’m a day over. You said a week.”
“I said take a week. That isn’t the same as spend one.”
“No.” I shut the door. “I didn’t need it.”
She goes very still.
“Say that again.”
“I didn’t need a week.” I come further in. “I knew it in that yard while you were still talking. I’ve known it since a road in the dark with nothing to do but drive. There was never a version of this where I left you and stayed gone.”
She’s out of the chair before I’ve said another word. She comes into me hard enough that I go back a half step, and both her arms come around my neck. For a long time, neither of us speaks.
“Say it out loud,” she says, into my shirt. “I want to hear the words.”
“I’m staying.”
She lets out a long breath. “And everything else?”
“I closed the office. I gave my work away. There’s nothing down there with my name on it anymore.” I get a hand into her hair and tip her head back so she has to look at me while I finish. “I’m staying, Kalli. Forever.”
Whatever she’s been holding on to for seven days, she lets go of it.
She grips my collar and pulls me down, and I let her, because I’ll always let her.
I’ve had a week of not touching her, and it’s the longest week I’ve ever lived through.
She works my coat off my shoulders and drops it. My shirt goes next. Her hands aren’t steady on the buttons, and she doesn’t care. When the last one gives, she flattens both palms against my chest and holds them there a second, like she’s making sure of me.
“I’m going to warm you,” she says.
“I’ll always be ready for that.”
Her shirt comes off over her head. There’s a new scar coming in at her shoulder, still pink, still raised, and I put my mouth on that before anything else.
She makes a sound.
“Does that hurt?”
“In the best way. Don’t stop.”
I don’t. I take my mouth from one shoulder to the other, then up the side of her throat to her jaw, and get her pants open while I’m doing it.
She shimmies out of them and kicks them away.
Then she’s bare in front of me and doesn’t cover an inch of herself.
I take my time looking, because I’ve earned it and because she likes being looked at more than she’ll ever say out loud.
“Say something,” she says.
“No.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“It isn’t.”
I sit down on the bed. She comes and stands between my knees, close enough that I don’t have to reach for anything.
From here she’s above me, and the view is something I don’t plan to forget.
Lush breasts sway inches from my eyes, and I lean forward and rest my face between them, just letting her scent surround me.
She puts both hands in my hair and holds my head where it is.
“Look at you,” she says.
“I could say the same.”
“Then say it later.”
I put my mouth to her instead. Her stomach first, low, where the muscle jumps under my lips.
Then higher. I take a nipple into my mouth, and she makes a sound above me and her hands close hard in my hair.
I do it slowly, one and then the other, swirling my tongue around in wet circles, then grazing my teeth over the tip.
She stops, standing straight, and has to hold on to my shoulders to stay upright.
“Gideon.”
“Hold on to me.”
“I am holding on to you.”
“Then hold on harder.”
I slide my palms up the insides of her thighs until they meet at her pussy, then watch as I slide my fingers through her slick lips. They come out gleaming. I suck one into my mouth and savor the sweet tang of her.
“You taste so fucking good,” I murmur. My voice has gone hoarse.
“You said that about my blood,” she husks out.
“And I’ll say it about every inch of you.” I lean forward to where her swollen clit is protruding from her folds and flick my tongue over it.
“Oh!” It’s a sharp little sound that she repeats when I do it again, then deepens into something lower when I slide a finger into her and pump it in time with my flicking tongue.
“Gideon! Oh…fuck!” she chokes out when I add a second finger and curl it. I push her thighs wider apart and bury my face between her legs, sucking her clit entirely into my mouth. Her stomach muscles jerk, and she rakes her nails down my shoulder, knees sagging.
I get one arm around the back of her thighs and hold her upright as I keep working her. Her head goes back and her hair swings behind her. She rides my hand and doesn’t apologize for a second of it, and I keep my arm locked around her legs so she can.
“Fuck! Oh… Oh…fuck!” she gasps as I push a third finger in, and I feel her channel spasming around the tight stretch as the wave hits her.
It’s the first time that anyone has ever come apart standing up in my hands.
Her pussy pulses around my fingers, hot and tight, juices dripping down my hand, her thighs shaking as she grinds down.
She’s still going when her knees fold completely.
I catch her. She lands on my lap with a knee on either side of my hips and her arms around my neck, and neither of us moves for a second while she gets her breathing back.
“That was new,” she says.
“It was.”
“Do it again sometime.”
“I intend to,” I say, licking my fingers. Her cheeks go the prettiest shade of pink when I trace her mouth with my fingertip.
She reaches down between us and takes my cock in her hand, and there’s nothing careful about her now.
She lifts up onto her knees and lines me up and comes down, slow, watching my face all the way, until she’s got every inch of me and we’re chest to chest with her arms locked around my neck.
Her pussy grips me all the way down, wet heat sliding over every ridge until I’m buried to the hilt.
Our faces are level, and there isn’t a single inch of daylight between us anywhere.
“Don’t move,” she says. “Not yet.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“I know.” Her forehead is against mine. “That’s the whole thing, isn’t it? You’re not going anywhere.”
Then she starts to move, and she does it slowly, because we have time.
There’s no rhythm to chase and no hurry to get anywhere.
She rolls her hips and takes the length of me and then lifts off it, her pussy dragging along my cock with each rise and fall.
I get one hand splayed up her spine and the other under her to help, and her mouth stays a half inch from mine the entire time so I can feel every breath.
Her heat starts coming up out of her chest. It’s the same heat she carries before a shift, and it goes down through all of her and out into me until I can feel it in my own hands.
“You’re burning.”
“I know.”
“Don’t stop.”
“Not a chance.”
Then she slows and puts her mouth beside my ear.
“Gideon.”
“Yeah, princess.”
“I’m going to bite you.” Plain. No question dressed up as a statement. “I need you to say yes to it.”
“Yes.”
She doesn’t hesitate after that.
Her teeth go into my throat, and there’s a second where I brace, because I know what a bite is and I expect the worst of it.
This isn’t that.
It starts where her mouth is and goes outward.
Not down through me the way heat travels, but up into my scalp and out along both arms to the ends of my fingers and down through the soles of my feet, every part of me finding out at once that it can still feel something new.
She’s still moving on me while she drinks, her pussy squeezing and releasing around my cock with every pull of her mouth.
I choke out a sound. Nobody has put their teeth in me since the night I was made, and that was a man taking something. This is a woman giving it back.
And then I see it.
The flash. The same one I’ve been carrying since the first time I saw her. Her teeth. My throat. The heat of her against me.
Here’s what I’ve been getting wrong.
From the start, I thought it was a warning, a message, something to be alert to.
I treated it as evidence. I turned it over and looked at it from every angle and asked myself what was coming for her, because that is the way a man like me thinks.
It was never coming for her.
It was her. Not Kalli—her dragon, the one who came to me in the dark that first night because she’d already made up her mind and wasn’t going to wait around while the rest of us caught up.
She’s been telling me the same thing since before I knew her name, in the only way she had, and I’ve spent months reading it as a threat, because a threat is the only thing I know how to read.
She wasn’t warning me about anything.
She was telling me she’d chosen.
She comes apart on me while I’m still understanding it, everything in her locking down at once, her pussy clamping tight around my cock in rhythmic pulses, and it takes me with her.
I get both arms around her back and hold her against my chest through all of it with her mouth still at my throat, and for a while afterward neither of us can do anything at all.
She lifts her head eventually. There’s blood on her mouth, mine, and she doesn’t wipe it off.
“Let me see,” she says.
I let her see.
She goes quiet. She’s frowning.
“I marked you.”
“You did.”
“And it’s going.”
“Yes.”
She sits back with my blood still on her mouth and works at it.
“Then I’ll do it again,” she says.
“All right.”
“I mean tomorrow.” She isn’t asking. “And the day after that. As often as it takes. If your body’s going to take it off you, it can spend the rest of your life doing that, because I’m going to keep putting it back.”
“You realize I’m immortal? That’s a lot of biting.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Hell, no.”
“Good. Because whether anyone can see it or not, you’re my mate; we chose you,” she says, but it comes out ragged, and I get her down against my chest and tighten my arms around her. It’s probably the first time I’ve ever hated my ability to heal quickly.
We stay like that a while. The lamp is out, and the fire’s down to nothing, and her hand keeps going back to my throat, checking.
“Say it to me,” she says. “I want to hear it out loud.”
“I’m your mate, Kallista Ondrathe. You and the dragon both.”
“Yes,” she sighs, and finally the tension goes out of her.
Later, when she’s nearly under, her thumb finds the place on my neck again and stops there.
“It’s almost completely gone,” she says.
“I know.”
“I’m doing it again in the morning.”
“I’m counting on it,” I say, and she’s asleep before she can tell me what she thinks of that.