Chapter 14
LORKIN
The judge set a fine. I heard the number and let it go straight past me.
Whatever it came to, I'd have paid it twice over for the privilege of standing in that room with Chloe's fists knotted in my torn shirt and her face shoved into my chest. I had one hand spread the whole width of her back and no plan to move it again this year.
Nezara let us have the moment. Then she was done letting us.
"When the pair of you can stand on your own." She'd cleared a space at the clerk's table and laid a single sheet on it, squared to the edges. "There's a form."
It wasn't surprising. The Agency kept a paper for everything, and I'd spent the back half of my life learning to hate the smell of them.
This one I crossed the floor for.
It was short. A registration, Nezara said, of a permanent and irrevocable mate-bond between the contracted human female and the male named below.
Filed with the office, copied off-world, not open to review.
The kind of thing that, once it had two names on it, no clerk and no audit, and no transport schedule could touch.
"You sign first." She held out the pen. "Then her, if she's willing. It can't be undone. I'd not have either of you put your name to it on a courtroom's worth of feeling and regret it by supper."
"Give me the pen."
I signed. My hand looked absurd around it, the way it always did, but the name came out plain enough.
Then I gave the pen to Chloe, and I made myself watch.
The last time I'd stood over a paper with her name on it, I'd read it upside down across a clerk's shoulder in a cold office and learned the whole shape of her in three lines.
Third placement. Final eligibility. A red flag and a date and a transport that would carry her back to wherever men had taught her she was the kind you hand back.
I'd left before she turned around. I'd gone home and sworn I would not be the fourth one to ruin her.
This one I got to watch her sign.
She bent over the table and put her name down without a breath of hesitation.
No stalling, no joke to cover it, none of the bracing I'd watched her do over every good thing since I met her, that little flinch where she waited for it to be snatched back.
She just signed. Like it was hers. Like it had always been hers, and the paper was only catching up.
Something went through me at that, hot and low, and it had nothing to do with the room or the fine or the gawkers on the benches. It had to do with getting her home. Soon.
"It's done." Nezara lifted the sheet and blew across the ink like a woman who'd closed a hundred of these. "Welcome to it, both of you. Go on. You've given the town enough of a show for one week."
Chloe slid her hand into mine, every one of her five fingers not making it around three of mine, and we went.
The forge sat dark when we came up the track, the fire banked, the whole place quiet.
I got the cottage door open, and Chloe went in ahead of me, and I shut it behind us.
Then it was just the two of us, the watercolors she liked on the walls, the low gray light.
The noise of the whole long day dropped off at once.
She turned around to say something. I could see the joke coming up in her face, the one she reached for whenever a thing got too big to hold.
I got my hand to her jaw before she could find it.
I'd had a word behind my teeth since the first breath of her in that office.
Through every night I handed her off to another male in my own head, through the forge and the knife and the wall and the cell, I'd carried it.
I'd said it once today, to a room full of strangers, because I had to. I had never once said it to her.
"My mate," I said.
The breath went out of her. Whatever she'd been about to say was gone.
"Say it again."
"My mate."
The second time was easier, and the third I didn't say at all, because she was up off her feet and I had her, both arms, crushed in against me with my face down in her hair where the scent of her ran strongest, breathing her in like I'd come up out of deep water.
I was hard already. I'd been hard since she signed her name, if I'm honest about it, since her hand moved over that paper without a single flinch.
She got a fistful of my shirt. "You waited until now." She didn't finish whatever came after that. She kissed me instead, hard, up on her toes, and I bent to make it easier for her and lost the thread of it.
When she pulled back to look at me, there was something new in her face.
She'd always come at me bold, from that first night in my kitchen with the cocoa going cold.
But there had been a dare under it then, a question she would not ask out loud.
The question was gone now. She looked at me like she already had the answer. Like she was sure of me.
She put both hands flat on my chest and pushed toward the bed, watching to see if I'd let her move me.
I let her move me.
"Sit," she said.
I sat.
Then she went down onto her knees on the floorboards in front of me, and my mouth went dry.
She freed me from my trousers and got a hand around as much of me as her fingers would close on, which was never all of it. She looked up the length of my body, her mouth already gone soft and wanting, and I had to plant both hands on the bed and hold.
I didn't tell her she didn't have to. Some careful, miserable part of me wanted to, the part that had spent a lifetime making sure I never asked a soul for a thing they might resent giving. But she knew.
She knew exactly what she was doing on her knees in front of me, and she wanted to do it. One word against it would have been me deciding for her again, the way I'd decided everything for her behind her back the whole way through. I was done with that. I shut my mouth and let her have me.
She took the head of me into her mouth, and I made a sound I hadn't known was in me.
She couldn't take much. There's too much of me; we both knew it, and it didn't slow her for a second.
She took what she could and worked the rest with her hand, her tongue dragging slow over the broad of me, her eyes coming up to mine every little while like she wanted to watch what she was doing to me.
And what she was doing was dismantling me on the edge of my own bed.
The wet heat of her mouth, the small, greedy sounds she made.
The way she pressed her thighs together where she knelt, worked up by my being worked up, the both of us caught in the same loop pulling tighter.
I let one hand into her hair, but I didn't push. I held my fingers spread against her skull while she took me apart.
"Chloe." It came out wrecked. "Mate, please. I'm close."
She hummed around me like she'd be glad of it, and that nearly ended me. I gathered her hair into my fist and drew her off, gently, the loss of her heat almost more than I could stand.
"Up here." My voice had gone to gravel. "Come up here. I want my mouth on you."
She arched a brow, still on her knees, lips swollen. "Bossy."
"You had your turn." I lay back and reached for her, hands at her hips, already lifting. "Get up here and put yourself on my mouth. Hold onto something."
She climbed the length of me, flushed and grinning and game, and swung a knee over my head. Then she was settling down over my mouth, both hands reaching back to catch the base of my horns for balance, and I had her exactly where I wanted her.
I'm too big for half of what I want to do to her. Most things I have to do slow, mindful of every place I could hurt something small and precious without meaning to.
Not this.
Here she could brace on me and grind down and take what she needed, and there wasn't a careful bone left in my body, only her, the salt-sweet soak of her right over my tongue, the weight of her coming down, her thighs gone tight on either side of my head.
I licked up into her, and she swore, her grip on my horns going hard. That grip lit me up at the base of them like a struck nerve, the pleasure forking straight down to where I was already aching, so that I groaned against her and felt her jolt at the buzz.
"Oh. Do that again."
I did it again. I did everything again, both hands splayed up over the backs of her thighs to hold her down on me right where she wanted, and I feasted on her, slow and then not slow, reading every sound she made and chasing the ones that climbed.
She rode my mouth without an ounce of shame, working herself on my tongue, her fists wrenching at my horns every time I found the spot, each pull of them singing the heat back through me until I couldn't have told whose pleasure was whose.
She came with my name in her mouth and her thighs shaking around my face and both hands locked at the base of my horns, holding on.
I lifted her off before her legs could give, and she came down onto my chest, boneless, her heart going wild against my ribs.
I held her there and let her find her way back, my hands moving slowly over her damp skin, and the want in me banked to something patient. I'd waited this long, I could wait while she caught her breath.
She didn't take long.
"Okay." She pushed up on her hands, hair stuck to her flushed face, eyes gone dark and certain. "Okay. I want you. All of you. Now."
She reached back and got a hand around me and rose up, and I went still under her.
This was the part I'd never once believed I'd get, back when I was a thing they pointed at other things to break them.
Her astride me, in charge of it, taking me at her own pace, and me holding still and letting her.
I dug my hands into the bedding on either side of us and made the whole shaking length of me wait, because this was hers to do.
"Hold still," she breathed, notching me against her.
"I've got it." My jaw was tight. "Take your time."