Chapter 9
CHLOE
I'd been at the forge three days, and I was prepared to be honest with myself about exactly one thing: they'd been the best three days of my entire life, and I had no idea what to do with that.
The whole town had decided Lorkin was the scary blacksmith who didn't come to things and left it there. Once that male let himself want something, he wanted it with his whole enormous body, all the time, with no brakes and no shame.
He kissed me like he'd die without it. Close to literally. And when we fell into bed, he never once held back, never handled me like the breakable little human everyone else seemed to think I was.
He gave me all of it. All of him. Every single time.
And there was one thing I'd never have said out loud to anyone but the inside of my own skull.
I was obsessed with the fact that he was enormous. A seven-foot minotaur with horns and shoulders like a doorframe and a cock that would have sent a lesser woman running for the hills.
I was not a lesser woman. I was deranged about it.
I'd been the loud girl men found a little too much for twenty-seven years, and now I was in bed with something that could lift me off the floor with one hand, and instead of feeling small I felt like the most dangerous thing in the room.
That entire massive creature went stupid and shaking when I so much as breathed on him.
Best of all, he liked that I liked it. He'd caught me staring at his horns one morning with what must have been an unhinged look on my face, and instead of getting weird about it he'd gone dark-eyed and said, low, "Go on, then," and let me do whatever I wanted.
A man who isn't threatened by a woman's appetite is rarer than a unicorn. A minotaur who isn't is apparently a thing that exists, and I had one.
Except I didn't.
Kazan had come by on the second day to tell us Zarcal was home in his own house again. Doing better, he said. Quiet, but himself. Resting at the orchard through the day and sleeping at home, and he wanted me to know he was sorry, still, that he'd never meant any of it.
I told Kazan to tell him I was fine, and that I hoped he got well, and I meant both. I did not tell Kazan what was actually true, which was that I was never going back to that house, and it had almost nothing to do with the night Zarcal came through a wall to get at me.
It had to do with the male a few feet away, beating something glowing into shape on his anvil, who had ruined me for every other man alive in seventy-two hours flat.
Minotaur. Whatever.
Here was where I actually stood when I made myself look at it instead of at him.
Zarcal had been my last chance. The third placement, no fourth option, those were the rules, and the third one had ended with me barricaded in a pantry.
There was no version of the paperwork where that came out a success. The ship was coming for me. It was only a question of when, and of how much it was going to cost me to climb on it now that I'd been idiot enough to fall headfirst into the best thing I'd ever had, in only three days.
I was playing house in a forge I had no claim to, with a male who wasn't mine to keep, and I didn't have the first idea how I was going to make myself walk away from him when the time came.
My only option was to find time.
Somehow.
I snuck down to the Agency office on the third morning while Lorkin was out hauling timber. I couldn't stand the not-knowing for another hour. Maybe if I could just see the date, if I knew for sure the transport was coming, I could brace for it.
Or I could get on my knees at Nezara's hooves and beg for more time with Lorkin.
The office was shut. Closed for the week, according to a paper nailed to the door. Urgent business at the courthouse, come back in seven days.
I stood there in the cold and almost laughed.
Not even my own execution would happen on schedule.
There was nothing to do. No date, no verdict, no countdown I could read, just the not-knowing stretched out in front of me with no end to it, and the dread that filled up every hour I wasn't actively distracting myself from.
Which I was, mostly. Distracting myself. With him. The cruelest part was how good it was.
Something had come loose in Lorkin.
I didn't have the history to know exactly what he'd been before, but I'd seen the careful, bolted-shut version at the supper and at the smithy, the one who'd handed me off and walked into the dark.
This wasn't him anymore.
This man hummed badly while he worked. He caught me watching and grinned, crooked and out of practice, like he'd only just remembered his face could do that.
He still made knives. I thought he'd always do that.
But he made them now like a man who had somewhere to be afterward. Like a man with a future.
And I lay awake at night with his arm heavy over me and his heart going slow against my back, and I wished, with everything I had in me, that I could be the future he'd started building toward.
I knew I couldn't.
He was waiting for me in the forge when I got back from town. I didn't tell him why I'd gone, and he didn't ask.
I came in expecting nothing, still wrung out and pleasantly sore from that morning, and found him at the cool end of the workbench with his hands behind his back and a look on his face I'd never seen there. It took me a second to place it. The look sat so wrong on a male of that size.
He was nervous.
"Come here," he said. "I made you something."
He brought his hands around, and there was a knife in them.
Not one of the blades off the wall. I knew those by now; the long heavy things balanced for a fist like his.
This one was small. My size. A blade no longer than my hand, the steel folded over and over into dark, rippling patterns that caught the firelight, the handle wrapped to fit my grip exactly, the whole of it tucked into a sheath of soft, oiled leather.
It was, without contest, the most beautiful thing anyone had ever made for me.
"It's shadow-fold," he said when I didn't say anything, talking fast now to fill the quiet.
"The best steel I've got. It'll hold an edge for years and it won't ever let you down.
I scaled the grip to your hand." He showed me, his huge fingers careful around the little hilt.
"It won't turn on you, no matter how wet it gets.
" He stopped, like the next part had gotten away from him, then said it rougher.
"So no one ever pins you against a wall again with nothing in your hands.
You'll always be able to protect yourself now. Whatever happens. Wherever you are."
And I stood there in the heat and the dark with this perfect, deadly little thing in my hands, and I could not breathe.
It wasn't the sex that undid me in the end, though God knows the sex was doing its part.
It was this. Everyone I had ever met took one look at me and saw a thing to be handled. Fragile, returnable, a little too loud. Two almost-husbands had decided I needed managing. The whole Agency had me marked unkeepable.
And this terrifying, gentle male, who built a wall of knives against the end of the world, had looked at the woman everyone handed back and decided I wasn't breakable at all. He'd decided I was someone who ought to be armed.
Nobody had ever once believed I could protect myself. He'd gone and built me the means to.
"Lorkin," I said, and my voice came out wrecked.
"You don't have to say anything." He'd gone shy again, shifting his weight. "I just needed you to have it. In case."
He didn't get to finish the “in case”. I set the knife down on the bench very carefully. It was the finest thing I owned, and I wasn't going to drop it.
Then I crossed the room and climbed onto him.
He caught me on instinct, big hands spanning the backs of my thighs, taking my whole weight without the smallest strain, and I wrapped my legs around as much of him as they'd reach and kissed him with everything the knife had cracked open in me.
He made a sound that sent heat with nothing to do with the forge scorching down through me.
Then his mouth opened over mine and he kissed me back like he'd been waiting his whole life for the permission, deep and filthy, his tongue stroking against mine.
He tasted of smoke and salt and want. One hand left my thigh to spread up my spine and fist gently in my hair, tipping my head exactly where he wanted it, all that leashed strength in his grip and not one ounce of it a threat.
"Here?" he got out against my mouth, already turning, already walking me back toward the cool stone end of the bench, away from the banked heat of the fire. "You sure?"
"Don't you dare make me wait while you find a bed."
He set me down on the worn wood, and then he decided to torture me. He slowed down.
He drew my shirt off over my head and just looked, his gaze dragging over me in the low light like he couldn't believe he was allowed, and then he bent and put his mouth on me. My throat first, a slow open-mouthed drag down the side of it that rolled my eyes back. Then lower.
When he closed his lips around one nipple and sucked, slow and hard, his tongue working the stiff peak while his other hand kneaded my breast, I made a sound I'd never made in my life.
He took his time there. He took his time everywhere, learning me by mouth, unhurried, like we had all day and the whole rest of our lives.
By the time he dragged my leggings down my hips, I was shaking and arching up into nothing.
He stripped them off, got a look at me spread open on his bench, and a rough, almost pained noise scraped out of him.
I was soaked. I'd been soaked since the second he said you'll always be able to protect yourself, and he dragged two thick fingers up through the slick of me, slow, parting me open, and swore like it hurt him.
"You're dripping," he said, low and wrecked and wondering, like I'd done something miraculous.
"Your fault." I could barely get the words out. "Stop talking and—"
He put his mouth on me.