21. Aldric
ALDRIC
Clara sleeps through the morning. I check on her twice, and both times she has migrated further across the mattress, conquering territory in her dreams. Schmetterling guards the pillow beside her head like a gargoyle with opinions.
By the time she descends the stairs, the sun sits high, and I have lunch waiting in the great hall.
Roasted chicken with rosemary. New potatoes.
Bread still warm enough to melt the butter.
She appears in the archway wearing her own clothes, hair damp at the temples from the washbasin, and she walks like a soldier three days into a forced march.
“Don’t.” She holds up one finger before I open my mouth. “Whatever smug medieval thing you’re about to say, swallow it.”
“I was going to say sit down.” I pull out the chair beside mine. “You slept six more hours.”
“I was dead for six hours. There’s a difference.” She lowers herself into the chair with a wince she doesn’t manage to hide, and I feel a twinge of what could only be guilt.
“You are in pain.”
“I’m in aftermath.” She reaches for the bread. “It’s different. Aftermath comes with a highlight reel.”
I don’t ask what any of that means. Instead, I sit and watch her tear into the chicken like a woman rescued from a shipwreck. I let her get three bites in before I say what I rehearsed while cooking.
“Clara. This morning. I did not intend…” I pause and purse my lips. This woman is turning me into a stammering page boy. “I was rough with you. If I hurt you, if I took more than you wished to give, I—”
“Aldric.”
“—am prepared to hear grievances, and to amend my conduct in whatever—”
“Aldric.” She sets down her fork. Her cheeks match the strawberries in the garden, and she stares at the wolf banner instead of me. “I loved it.”
I stop. Blink. “You loved it.”
“Every ridiculous, unhinged, medically inadvisable minute of it.” She pushes a potato around her plate, and her voice turns almost shy, which is something I didn’t know she was capable of.
“I passed out from orgasms, you enormous idiot. That’s not a complaint.
That’s a Yelp review with five stars and a photo. ”
I breathe out through my nose. “I do not know what a Yelp is.”
“It means…” She finally looks at me, chin up, defiant even in her embarrassment. “Do it again sometime. Okay? Grievance withdrawn. Case dismissed. Eat your chicken.”
I eat my chicken. I taste none of it. The blue thing in my chest pulses so hard I fear it’s visible through the waistcoat, and Schmetterling, curled on the third chair, watches me with an expression that says he has never in three hundred years seen anything so pathetic.
“Walk with me,” I tell her when the plates are cleared. “You need air. You are even paler than usual.”
Clara wrinkles her nose. “Whose fault is that?”
“Mine. I take full credit.” I hold the garden door open. “Come. The orchard apples are turning. You may insult my pruning.”
The afternoon is warm and golden, the bees are drunk in the lavender, and Clara walks beside me down the gravel path with her hands in her pockets and her shoulder bumping my arm every few steps. I don’t think it is by accident.
“So this is your life,” she muses, tipping her face to the sun. “Chickens, bees, one immortal cat, aggressively good cooking.”
I raise an eyebrow. “And now one intruder who eats my strawberries and steals my shirts.”
“Borrows. And that shirt is softer than anything made this century, so really, that’s on you.
” She stops at the strawberry bed, crouches, picks one, and eats it right there, juice on her lower lip, eyes closed against the sun, and I understand with total clarity that we are not going to finish this walk.
We make it as far as the orchard.
She stops beneath the oldest apple tree—the one I have pruned since before her country existed—and reaches up to touch a low-hanging apple. Her shirt rides up, baring a strip of soft warm skin above her jeans, and whatever remained of my civility leaves me entirely.
“You’re doing the thing,” she says without turning around.
“What thing?”
“The looming. The breathing. The—” She turns, and her pupils are already blown wide, her voice gone husky. “The looking at me like I’m a city you’re about to sack.”
“Clara.” My voice comes out like gravel. “Your terms require that you ask. Explicitly. With words.”
She holds my gaze for one heartbeat. Two.
“Fuck me against this tree, Aldric.”
I have breached castle walls with less speed.
Her back meets the trunk, and my mouth crashes into hers, and she’s already climbing me, fingers in my hair, one leg hooking around my thigh. She tastes of strawberries and sunlight, and she moans into my mouth like she cannot hold it back.
“Off.” She yanks at the button of her jeans while I hold her weight against the bark. “These are the enemy. These were invented specifically to ruin this moment.”
Between the two of us, we peel the cursed things down one leg, boot and all, leaving them dangling absurdly from her other ankle, and neither of us cares, because my fingers find her bare and soaked, and her head thumps back against the trunk.
“Already,” I growl against her throat. “You have been wet since the strawberry.”
“I’ve been wet since the chicken, don’t let it go to your—ah—”
Two fingers inside her, and her insult dies on her tongue. I drink in the sound of it. She’s still swollen from last night, tender and fluttering, and I gentle my hand, slow strokes, until she’s grinding down onto my palm and cursing me in fragments.
“Aldric, I swear to god, if you tease me right now—”
“Remember, little intruder? There is no god here.” I bite her earlobe. “Only me.”
“Then only-me had better get his pants open in the next five seconds or I’m finishing this myself.”
I free myself one-handed and hoist her up. She wraps both legs around my waist, jeans still flapping from one ankle like a defeated banner, and I brace her against the tree and notch myself at her entrance, and the heat of her against my cool flesh tears a groan out of my chest.
“Slow,” she breathes. “I’m—last night, I’m still—”
“I know.” I press my forehead to hers. “I have you. Breathe.”
I sink into her by inches, and she takes me with little hitching gasps, her nails carving into my shoulders through the shirt, her body gripping me so tight and hot and alive that my knees nearly buckle.
Bark bites into my forearms where I cage her.
I do not feel it. I feel nothing in this world but her.
“Oh my god.” Her eyes flutter. “How is this—it’s worse standing up—it’s so much deeper, it’s—”
“Worse?”
“Better. It’s better, shut up, move—”
I move.
Slow at first, long rolling thrusts, the ladder of my piercings dragging across her inner walls while she whimpers into my collar. Then she starts meeting me, riding down onto each stroke, greedy, and slow stops being an option for either of us.
“Look at you.” I grip her thigh, hitch her higher, drive up into her hard enough that leaves shiver overhead. “Fucked in an orchard like a peasant girl at harvest. Where are your centuries of progress now, little intruder? Where is your dignity?”
“Left it—in the bathtub—yesterday.” She looks at my chest, and her fingers go to my buttons. “I want to see it.”
“Clara…”
“I want to see it.” And she doesn’t wait. She grabs the placket in both hands and rips, buttons flying into the grass, fabric spreading, and blue light meets the glow of the afternoon sun.
My heart. Bared. The parted ribs, the crystal pulsing in its cage of bone, glowing brighter with every thrust because of her.
I brace for her flinch.
She doesn’t flinch.
She flattens her palm against my sternum, just below the ruin, and stares into the glow while I move inside her. Her mouth falls open, and she clenches around me so hard I choke.
“It beats faster.” There’s wonder in her voice, ragged and breathless. “When you’re inside me. It’s beating faster.”
I slam into her, and she cries out. “It has beat for you since the night you screamed at me from that bathtub.”
Clara blinks. “That’s the most romantic—horrifying thing—anyone’s ever—”
“Watch it, then.” I take her jaw in one hand, keep her eyes on my ruined chest, on the light pulsing blue between the bones. “Watch what you do to a dead man. Watch me come alive.”
She shatters.
Her body seizes, her channel clenching around me, her scream scattering birds from the trees.
The crystal blazes so bright it turns her skin cerulean, her face washed in the light of my own damnation while she comes on my cock with her hand pressed over my exposed heart, and it is the single most obscene, most holy thing I have witnessed in seven hundred years.
I fuck her through it. When she goes limp and gasping against the trunk, I still haven’t finished, and she cracks one eye open and laughs, wrecked and disbelieving.
“You’re still—”
“I am nowhere near done with you.” I ease out of her, and she whines at the loss. Then I set her feet on the grass and turn her around before her knees decide anything unfortunate. “Hold the tree.”
“Hold the—” She grabs the trunk. “This is how I die. Death by orchard. Tell Shmoo he can have my boots.”
“Tell him yourself. He is watching from the fence and judging us both.”
“What—” She twists to look, and I choose that moment to bend her forward, kick her feet wider, and slide back into her from behind. Whatever she meant to say about the cat becomes a long, broken moan into the bark.
It’s deeper this way. She feels it. I feel it, every clutching inch of her, and I grip her hips and set a pace that has nothing gentle left in it, because gentleness departed the moment she tore my shirt open.
“Aldric—fuck—” Her fingers scrabble at the bark. “The tree—the whole tree is shaking—”
“Then hold it harder,” I say through clenched teeth.
Apples drop around us. One bounces off my shoulder. Neither of us stops. The sounds we make together are obscene—wet flesh and creaking wood and her voice climbing higher, chanting my name like a woman at prayer in a religion of exactly two members.
“You feel me.” I lean over her back, my teeth at the nape of her neck, one hand leaving her hip to slide down over her belly, fingers finding her clit slick and swollen. “Every metal adornment, every scar, every piece of this wreckage buried inside you, and you love it. Say it.”
“I—ah—”
“Say it, Clara.”
“I love it, I love it, you smug undead bastard, I love—” She breaks off, and I feel it building, that deep tightening flutter, so I work her clit in ruthless circles and drive into her hard and fast until her spine bows and she screams her release into the ancient bark, and this time she drags me with her.
There is no stopping it. Her body milks me, and the heat rushes up my spine, and I bury myself deep and roar into her shoulder as I spill and spill, the crystal in my chest coloring everything blue, apples raining down, and she’s laughing and coming and gasping my name, all at once, alive, alive, alive.
We slide down the trunk together in a graceless heap, her back against my ruined chest, both of us wrecked and breathing hard. My spend runs down her thigh. An apple sits in the grass an inch from her hand, and she picks it up, examines it, and takes a bite.
“Unripe,” she reports, chewing anyway. “Worth it.”
“You are eating my apples,” I complain.
“I earned this apple. This apple witnessed things.” She tips her head back against my collarbone and looks up at me, flushed and glowing and smug, then down at the torn edges of my shirt, the blue light pulsing slow and sated between my ribs.
Her fingertips trace one parted rib, feather-light, and I hold very still.
“It really does beat faster,” she murmurs. “For me.”
“For you.” There’s no armor left. She tore it down.
She’s quiet for a moment. Then: “Your shirt’s destroyed.”
“You destroyed it.”
“You have a wardrobe spanning centuries. You’ll survive.”
Clara snuggles back against me, cool undead chest and all. I press my mouth to her hair, elderberry and basil and sunlight, and for the first time for as long as I can remember, I do not think about the gate, or the curse, or the day she will find her crack in the wall.
I think only that the harvest has come early to Blackthorn Keep, and I am a rich man.