Chapter 6 #2
It's late, past two in the morning, the clubhouse gone dark and mostly empty, and I'm in the kitchen because I couldn't sleep and a man's allowed to get a glass of water even when he's a ghost.
The door swings open behind me and I know it's her before I turn around.
I know her in the dark now.
The sound of her breathing.
The way the whole room seems to lean toward her when she walks in.
"So," she says, low and shaking with something that isn't fear. "You're really not going to speak to me?"
I grip the edge of the counter and I don't turn around.
"Tindra. You can't be in here."
"I’m part of this club as much as you are, prospect.
Maybe even more." She comes closer, her bare feet silent on the tile.
"I've watched you for a week. Watched you keep your eyes on the floor every time I walk in a room.
Watched you clear tables three feet from me like I'm a stranger.
" Her voice cracks and she shoves right through the crack.
"Days, Bodul. I love you, and you haven't looked at me once. Not once."
"You know why."
"Say it to my face, then. Turn around and say it."
I turn around.
Gods, she's wrecked.
Her eyes are red-rimmed and swollen from a week of crying she'd never admit to, her jaw set hard, her whole body vibrating with a fury that's only heartbreak wearing armor.
Looking at her is like pressing on the broken ribs, a pain so total it steals the air out of me.
"If I speak to you," I say, low, keeping my voice under the sleeping building, "I lose everything. You heard the ruling. The next kirkja doesn't end with me walking out. That's not a threat, Tindra. That's a promise. I speak to you, I touch you, I so much as look at you too long, and they end me."
"So, the club is more important than me." Her voice is a furious whisper, tears standing in her eyes and refusing to fall. "That's what you're telling me. After everything. After nine months and your blood on my father's floor. The club is more important than me."
"Tindra—"
"No. Fuck you, Bodul!" The tears break loose now, hot and furious down her cheeks, and she swipes them away like she hates them. "Fuck you for making me the fool who fell for a man who'd choose his position over her the second it got hard?—"
I move before I decide to.
Nearly a week of restraint, days of holding a line that's slowly killing me, and it all snaps at once.
I close the space between us in one stride, my boots heavy on the tile.
The only light in here is the dull red glow of the exit sign over the back door, painting her skin the color of a warning.
She's backed against the stainless steel counter, that defiant chin tilted up at me, but I catch the tremor in her lips, the way her chest rises and falls too fast.
"You shouldn't have come," I growl, my voice scraping out of my throat like gravel.
My hands find her hips, fingers digging into the denim hard enough to bruise.
The clean floral scent of her floods me, wrong for this place, wrong for a man like me, and my cock twitches behind my fly.
"I had to." Her voice comes out breathy, that streak of stubbornness I adore and hate at the same time.
She presses her palms flat against my cut, the leather creaking under her hands. "You know I had to."
I lean in until my mouth hovers a hair from hers.
Not kissing her. Not yet.
Only letting her feel the heat coming off me, the barely leashed thing coiled in every muscle.
"You get what happens if they walk in," I breathe against her lips. "They end me, Tindra. That's the ruling. I touch you, they put me in the fuckin’ ground."
"Then don't let them hear us." Her fingers curl into my shirt and tug me closer, until her soft curves are molded to every hard angle of me. "I don't care about the ruling. I care about right here. Right now."
Something snaps inside me, the last thread of six days of restraint breaking clean through.
I crash my mouth against hers, no finesse, no softness, only raw and desperate hunger.
My tongue plunges past her lips, and I taste the coffee and the salt of her tears and the want, all of it mixed together.
She moans into me and I swallow it, catch the sound before it can carry, because a sound in this building is a bullet with my name on it.
I bite her bottom lip and drag it between my teeth, and she arches into me, silent, shaking.
"You have to be quiet," I rasp against her mouth, even as my hand slides up her ribcage, thumb brushing the underside of her breast through her shirt. "You scream in here and I'm a dead man. You understand me? Not a sound."
Her answer is a shake of her head, her fingers threading into my hair and hauling me back down.
"Then keep me quiet," she whispers. "Don't you fucking dare stop."
That's all the permission I need.
I hoist her up onto the cold steel, her legs wrapping around my waist, the shock of the metal against the backs of her thighs making her gasp into my shoulder.
My mouth traces down her throat, teeth grazing her pulse where it hammers under the skin.
I want to mark her.
I want to suck a bruise into her neck that blooms purple by morning, a claim for the whole club to see, and I can't, because a mark on the princess is a death warrant, so I press the need into her skin instead and let it go.
"You're mine," I breathe into her ear, low and rough. "Fuck the ruling. Fuck what they decided. Right now, in this dark kitchen, with my life on the line for it, you're mine."
Her hips buck against me, grinding into the hard ridge of my cock through my jeans.
"Prove it," she whispers.
I get her sleep shorts down her legs, and my hand slides between them, past the lace.
Gods, she wore lace, and I find her soaked and ready for me.
She bites down hard on my shoulder to kill the cry when I press inside, one finger, then two, working her open while my thumb circles her clit in rough, demanding strokes.
"This what you came for," I growl against her hair, watching her face come apart, her head dropping back against the cabinet. "To get taken by the prospect you're forbidden from, on your own family's counter, while the whole club sleeps twenty feet away?"
"Yes," she breathes, the word breaking in half. "Gods, yes. Bodul. I need you, now, I can't wait?—"
I pull my fingers free and bring them to my mouth, tasting her, sweet and salt and something I'd get on my knees for.
I need to be inside her, and I need it now.
I free my cock and line myself up, the head pressing against her, her heat teasing the length of me.
"Look at me."
Her eyes snap to mine, those eyes that see straight past the patch and the ink and the beating and the lie I'm still carrying, and they're full of a trust I have not earned and a love I have never once known what to do with.
I push into her slowly.
Even now, even like this, even with my whole life on the line against a counter in the dark, I won't hurt her, and the slow drag of it wrenches a sound out of both of us that we have to swallow down.
Then I move.
There's nothing gentle in it after that.
Each stroke is deep and claiming, and I fold a hand over her mouth when a whimper gets loose.
She moans against my palm and grinds down to meet me, silent and frantic, the two of us listening under the fever for any footstep that would end this and end me.
"Take it," I breathe, my forehead dropped to hers. "Take all of me. Every sick, buried, twisted part I've never shown a soul. I'm not gonna apologize for what I am."
She clenches around me, her walls fluttering, and I feel how close she is.
I shift my angle and drive deeper, my hand slipping from her mouth to her clit, working her in tight circles until her whole body draws bowstring-tight.
"Come for me," I whisper. "Quiet, baby. Come apart on me and don't make a sound."
She shatters against me, her whole body convulsing, and she sinks her teeth into my shoulder to bury the scream, and the feel of her going drags me over right after.
I bury myself deep and spill everything I have into her, shaking, silent, my face pressed to her hair.
For a moment neither of us moves.
The building sleeps on around us, oblivious.
We got away with it.
This time.
I rest my forehead against hers, my thumb tracing her cheekbone, wiping away a tear, or maybe a bead of sweat, I don't know which.
"I love you," she whispers, and the words land in me like a sledgehammer.
"I love you too." It comes out rough, wrecked, torn out of somewhere I keep locked. "Gods, Tindra, I love you so much it terrifies me."
Down the hall, a door bangs, and boots hit the floor, and we break apart in a scramble of dropped clothes and slamming hearts, and she slips out the back into the night before whoever it is rounds the corner.