37. Callum #3
"I know." I do know. I can feel the exact place through her side of the bond, feel it light up every time the head of my cock drags across it, and I angle my hips and give it to her again, and again, exact as a metronome, because precision is what I have and I have never had a better use for it.
"I can feel you from the inside, Everly.
Every time you tighten on me. You have no idea what that—" Her body clamps down on me and my voice fails entirely, a groan tearing out of me instead, low and ruined.
The shadow has stopped being anywhere near my hand.
It's everywhere now. Pooled black across the whole gallery floor, climbing the walls, swallowing the candlelight whole—everything my bloodline ever beat into me burning off a man on the floorboards of a house that was never ours to own.
And where it touches her she only pulls me deeper.
It binds us. I don't will it and I don't stop it. It loops her wrists and winds up my own forearms and lashes the two of us together at every place we meet, dark on dark, a tether drawing tighter the harder I move in her.
Somewhere far back in my head the disciplined part of me knows this is the edge of something I was taught never to do: give my shadow a will and a person to want. I do it anyway. I bind myself to her with the one thing my family ever made me good for.
She feels it. She gets a hand loose and grabs a fistful of the dark binding us and uses it to haul herself up onto me, taking me deeper, claiming the leash for her own.
"More," she pants, nails and shadow both dragging down my back. "All of it. Don't you hold one inch of it back from me. Keep—God, Callum—just like that—"
I keep. I get a hand under the small of her back and angle her up and she cries out, and I give her the same stroke again, and again, the one that takes the words out of her, because that's the only mercy I have left.
She meets every thrust. Her breasts drag against my chest with each one, her thighs locked hard around my hips, and she's saying things I'll keep the rest of my life—my name, yes, don't stop, don't you ever stop—and her body is climbing again.
I feel it through the bond before she shows it, the warmth gathering hot and tight behind my ribs that was never mine.
My own release is climbing with it, drawn up tight at the base of my spine, heavier with every stroke, and holding it back is the last discipline I have left in the world. I spend it gladly. She goes first. In this, always, she goes first.
"Let me feel it," I tell her, mouth at her ear, my own control fraying past anything I can name. "In you and in me both. Come on. Let me feel what I do to you."
She breaks apart under me, and the second one tears through me on the same wave—her body clenching around my cock in long rolling pulls, the bond shoving her climax up into my chest until hers and mine fuse into one thing with no seam in it anywhere.
I come harder than I have ever come in my life. I bury myself to the root and spill into her, every pulse of it wrung out of me, her name in my mouth like something breaking, and the shadow snaps every candleflame out across the length of the gallery.
Pure dark. The two of us, breathing, wrecked, the whole of my inheritance guttering down off the walls and pooling quiet at last around the place where we're tangled on the floor.
The dark settles.
The shadow comes home slowly, the way it never does—reluctant, like it doesn't want to leave the warmth of her—and I let it take its time.
My hand is splayed over her breastbone. I can feel her heart going under it, fast, then slower, then steady, and under that, fainter, a second beat that is not in her body or in mine but in the thread strung between us, running full again for the first time since Wheeler stripped the four of us down to nothing.
She turns her head on the dusty floor and looks at me.
"That's not the version you give people," she says.
"No."
"Why me?"
I think about the door I sealed this afternoon. The lockwork that knew my hand. Twelve generations who kept the world afraid of the name, and me, the last who'll ever answer to it, locking my own blood out into the cold for her, glad of every second it cost.
"Because you're the only thing I ever chose," I tell her. "Everything else I ever was got assigned to me before I could talk. You, I picked. In a room built to make sure I couldn't. That's the only free thing I've ever done, and I'm not giving it back."
She's quiet. Her hand finds mine on her chest and holds it there. And then, in the dark, in a small voice with no armor left on it anywhere, she says the thing none of us has dared say yet, the thing I've felt running between us like a live wire all year and never once let myself name:
"I love you so much it scares me."
The shadow stills completely. Every thread of it gone motionless on the floor around us, the way it only goes when something reaches all the way in. It is the most honest part of me, and it has stopped dead, listening.
I turn my hand over under hers and lace our fingers and bring her knuckles to my mouth.
"Good," I tell her. "Fear me less when I'm with you."