Chapter 17
VAELIS
She comes to my study at dusk and she is holding the analysis.
Not to give it to me—she gave it to me this afternoon, twelve pages of eastern resistance networks assembled from my own archive: grid references, relay points, the movement patterns of three handlers through a single corridor.
She has her own copy, annotated in the ciphered shorthand she thinks I can't read.
She comes here now with her copy under her arm and her notebook in her hand and sits down across the desk and looks at me.
She has come to collect.
Both my cocks are hard against my breeches.
They have been since she set the twelve pages in front of me at a quarter past two and stood there with her jaw set and her eyes on my face waiting to see what I found.
Grid reference 7-14 on page eight. I read it and I held my face completely still and I filed it and I kept reading and she watched me do all of it.
She is watching me now.
"The HV-7 file," she says.
"Still restricted."
"You've been saying that for three weeks."
"It's still true."
She looks at me with the spy's look—the one that finds the seam in everything, the one I have been on the receiving end of since the Gathering and have never been able to fully deflect. "Lena Riley," she says. "Is she in that file."
I go very still.
"Yes or no," she says.
"Yes," I say.
She breathes in once. "Is she all right."
I run the magic up—the warmth arriving under what I'm about to say, settling it, making the landing clean and certain.
"She's alive." True. "Deep cover. She went further in rather than out.
My people have eyes on her but we're not moving against her.
" True, currently. True for another forty-eight hours.
The relief through the bond is immediate and enormous. I feel it in my chest—her relief, specific and real and hers—and the magic holds it warm and I watch her face soften.
She looks at me for a long moment.
I look back. She has given me six weeks of her work, her cover, her body, the specific version of herself that says yours into my throat in the dark. She is owed something real in return. Not the file. Not the truth. Something I can actually give.
"Rosalind," I say.
She goes still.
"I can arrange a pass to Thorn Court. Three days, no handlers in the sitting room, no escort beyond the gate. You would have time with her." I keep my voice even. "If you want it."
The look on her face is not managed. It arrives before she can manage it—the specific shape of someone who has been waiting for something without letting themselves know they were waiting for it. Not gratitude. Something older and closer to relief.
"Yes," she says. "I want it."
"Day after tomorrow. There's a morning train."
She holds my gaze a moment longer than necessary. Then she reaches across the desk and puts her hand on my jaw.
I go completely still.
She has touched me many ways in the last weeks. Not like this. This is deliberate. Her hand against my face, her thumb resting at the hinge of my jaw, looking at me while she does it.
The warmth is running. I am aware the warmth is running. I do not lower it.
"Thank you," she says. The two words landing with full weight. She means the Rosalind. She might mean the Lena news. She does not mean anything I have earned, but she does not know that.
I cover her hand with mine.
Her hand is warm. I run cold everywhere, as I always run cold, and she has been sleeping against my back for weeks and she knows exactly how cold I run, and she reached across my desk in the lamplight and put her hand on my face.
I hold it there.
She takes her hand back. Stands. "Before breakfast tomorrow," she says. "The March logs."
"Before breakfast," I say.
She goes back to the workroom.
I sit in my study and both my cocks ache and the bond hums with her—with the residue of her relief, the warmth of what she just gave me, the deliberate reaching across the desk—and I feel the cost of it through the bond the way I always feel the cost of what people give me.
I have six centuries of knowing what people give me and what it costs them.
I pull out the intelligence summary. Eastern cell. The transfer window opens in forty-eight hours—three handlers in sequence through a single corridor, all of them exposed. The picture from her analysis is complete and exact.
I put the summary in the dispatch box.
Then I get up and I go to the workroom.
She looks up when I come in. Still at her desk, the lamp burning, another file open in front of her. She reads me immediately—she always reads me, the truth-sight runs both directions, she has been learning me the same way I have been learning her—and she sets her pen down.
I cross the room. I reach for her.
She doesn't step back from my hands. She comes into them. That is what has changed since the claiming—not the wanting, the wanting was there before, but the crossing of the small distance. She moves toward me now. She doesn't wait.
Her hands at my chest. The press of her palms, warm through my shirt.
I walk her back toward the daybed—the narrow one against the workroom wall, surrounded by her files and her cipher notes and the map with the farmhouse icon she pinned last week—and I take my time getting there.
My hands at her waist first, learning the shape of her through the fabric.
Her neck against my mouth while we're still standing.
She tilts her head without being asked, offering the throat mark, and I put my mouth there briefly and feel the shiver move through her before I've even pressed in.
The first button. The next.
"You can look at me," I say.
"I am looking at you," she says.
I look up. She is. Not at my hands—at my face. I hold her gaze and undo the rest.
I undress her slowly. Each layer, her skin warmer underneath than the fabric was on top, my hands cold on first contact and warming slightly from hers.
She is more deliberate now than the first nights—she knows where to put her hands, knows the cold of my chest and presses her palms flat against it anyway, watching.
"Still surprising," she says.
"My temperature."
"Yes."
She runs her thumbs along my collarbone. I feel it across my whole chest.
I take her down to the daybed.
My mouth on the claiming marks, both of them.
I begin at the throat—the older mark, the first night's work, still vivid—and when my mouth finds it she makes a sound that is not quite language and her hands go into my hair and stay.
I hold there. I feel through the bond exactly what this does to her and I stay with my hands flat on her shoulders, her whole body concentrated to a single point.
Then the collarbone mark. Lower, broader, the sensation different there—bone-resonant, deeper—and I take it in my mouth while the throat mark's heat is still running, both at once, and she says my name quietly into the ceiling.
I move down.
I use my mouth on her between her thighs.
I have done this since the first night after the heat broke, the night she went still because she hadn't expected it and I ran my tongue through her and she stopped being still immediately.
I find this equally satisfying every time: the shock of it, the sounds it pulls from her, the particular dishevelment of a woman who planned to keep her head and cannot.
I keep my hands flat on her thighs and hold them open and take my time.
She is already wet—has been since I walked into the workroom; I could smell it.
I work through it slowly. The flat of my tongue first, learning the shape of her response as if I didn't know it, because she responds differently each time and I intend to know all of them.
The angle she tilts toward. The specific pressure that makes her stop controlling the sounds.
I find it and I stay there, steady, her thighs shaking against my hands, until she stops trying to manage any of it.
She comes with my hair in her fists and my name on her lips. Clearly. Just my name.
I move up the daybed and line the upper cock against her cunt. She is already wet—soaking, her slick running freely—and I press in and feel her take me inch by inch, her walls gripping tight around each one.
"Here," I say. Not gentle. "Keep your eyes on me."
She does.
I start to move. Long strokes, the curve of my cock finding the angle that makes her grip the daybed—every withdrawal dragging against the front of her walls—and I turn the vibration on low and watch her mouth fall open.
I feel the lower cock sliding against her arse on each thrust, pressed between her cheeks, slick from her already.
Not inside her yet. Just there. Letting her feel it.
She is making sounds already. Small and continuous. Her thighs tight against my hips.
"I can feel you," I say. "Every time you clench."
Her face goes hot. I drive in harder.
Her slick runs down my shaft and onto my balls with every stroke. I watch her face—jaw slack, eyes losing focus—and turn the vibration up a notch, and feel her walls begin to flutter around me instantly.
"That's it," I say. "Give me all of it."
She comes on my cock. Her cunt seizes tight around me in a long clenching wave, slick flooding out around my shaft, and she cries out and her hips roll up to meet mine through the whole of it.
I drive through every wave. Don't stop. Don't slow.
The orgasm stretches and she sobs against my throat and I keep going.
I stay inside her.
She is breathing hard. Both hands fisted in my shirt. The lower cock is still pressed between her arse cheeks, slick from her now, vibrating against her.
She whimpers at that. Just from the proximity of it.
"And this," I say, and press it to her arse.
She makes a sound—low, involuntary.
"Yes?"
"Yes." Barely a word. "Yes—"