28. Clara
CLARA
The farmers market in town has the best raspberries I’ve ever tasted, and I’m buying an irresponsible amount of them when I hear it.
“Non mi interessa cosa ha detto. Trovala.”
Italian. Sharp, clipped, impatient Italian, and my body reacts before my brain finishes translating, every muscle locking up like someone yanked my emergency brake.
I don’t care what he said. Find her.
I abandon the raspberries mid-transaction—sorry, raspberry lady—and drift sideways behind the bronze statue of some nineteenth-century mayor with a magnificent mustache.
My heart is doing a drum solo against my ribs.
It could be tourists. It could be anyone.
Sixty million Italians exist, and statistically, some of them vacation in the Black Forest, and I’m being paranoid, and—
I peek around the mayor’s bronze elbow.
Marco.
He’s standing by the fountain in a charcoal coat that costs more than the fountain, frowning down at his phone like it personally offended his mother.
Two of his men flank him, the big one with the neck tattoo and the quiet one who always scared me more.
Marco scrolls, scowls, says something I can’t hear, and the quiet one nods.
Every drop of blood in my body evacuates to my feet.
He’s still here. It’s been weeks. Weeks of me building a new life, bribing notaries, buying light bulbs, falling in love with a corpse—and Marco is still in Germany, standing in my market town, telling people to find her.
Find me. Because who else? What else could keep a man like that in a country whose bread he complained about for the entire trip?
I press my spine against cold bronze and try to become architecturally invisible.
Why is he still after me? I’m nobody. I’m a waitress who looked good on his arm.
I have no money he knows about, no secrets, no leverage.
Men like Marco replace girlfriends like they replace cars.
There’s no rational reason to spend a month combing the Schwarzwald for one runaway fiancée.
Unless it’s not about wanting me back. Unless it’s about the fact that I left. That I made him look like a man whose porcelain doll walked off the shelf, in front of people whose opinion is the only currency he actually respects.
That thought is so much worse.
Marco lifts his head and scans the square, and I stop breathing. His gaze slides over the raspberry stand, the fountain, the mustache mayor.
I pull back behind the statue and count the mayor’s bronze coat buttons and pray to a god that Aldric insists doesn’t hang around us.
When I risk another peek, Marco is walking away, toward the parking lot on the far side, his men falling in behind him like expensive shadows.
I go the other direction. I don’t run, because that would be super suspish, but I do the speedwalk of a woman whose parking meter expired an hour ago, cutting between the cheese stall and the flower stand, down the side street where I parked.
My hands shake so hard it takes me three tries to hit the unlock button.
The Porsche chirps. I drop into the seat, lock the doors, and just sit there for a second, gripping the wheel, breathing like I ran here from Bern.
“Okay,” I tell the dashboard. “Okay. He didn’t see you. Nobody followed you. You’re a mysterious silver-haired heiress and he’s looking for a broke waitress. Different tax brackets. Practically different species.”
The dashboard doesn’t answer, which I appreciate, because if it did, I’d have bigger problems than the mafia.
I take the long way home, with two extra turns and one deliberate loop through a village with a church and four houses, my eyes flicking to the mirror the whole time. Nobody follows.
At Blackthorn Keep, I park in the courtyard, kill the engine, and sit for one more minute, deciding what to tell Aldric.
He will not react proportionately. There’s no version where he nods thoughtfully.
There’s a version where he sharpens the greatsword, and a version where he stands at the gate for a week like a gargoyle with abandonment issues, and a version where he marches into town glowing blue and makes the evening news.
I need a plan first. I need to think. I need…
I walk through the atrium, out the garden door, and every thought in my head files for unemployment.
Aldric is gardening. Topless.
He’s in the tomato rows, tying vines to stakes, and he’s stripped to the waist in the afternoon sun, and I stop dead on the gravel path like I hit the invisible wall the curse used to keep around this place.
I bite my lower lip. The light does obscene things to him.
It pools in the valleys of muscle across his back, makes old scars gleam silver, turns the wolf tattoos into moving shadows when his shoulders roll.
The blue glow of his heart is faint in daylight, just a cool shimmer between the parted ribs, like sun through stained glass.
His black hair is tied back with a strip of leather, a few strands escaping to stick to his neck, and when he reaches up to loop twine over a tall stake, his entire torso flexes, and my knees send me a formal notice of resignation.
Marco. I should tell him about Marco.
I will absolutely tell him about Marco.
Later. After.
“You’re staring,” he says without turning around. Of course he knows. He always knows. He probably heard my heartbeat change from three rows away.
“I’m supervising.” I make my feet move down the path. “You know I hold a management position on this property.”
“Mm. And how does the management find the work?” He ties off the twine and glances over his shoulder, one dark eye and one blue shard, both entirely too knowing. A smear of dirt crosses his forearm. There’s a leaf in his hair. He’s the most ridiculous, gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen.
“Unsatisfactory,” I say. “There’s a leaf in your hair. Very unprofessional. I’m docking your pay.”
He raises one black eyebrow. “You do not pay me.”
“Then I’m docking your privileges.”
He straightens to his full absurd height and turns, wiping his hands on his pants. His gaze travels down my body in that slow way that should require a license. “Which privileges would those be, little intruder?”
Heat coils in my belly and travels through my veins, chasing out the last of the cold that seeing Marco left behind. This is medicinal, I decide. This is me processing trauma through healthy physical connection. Somewhere, a therapist feels a disturbance and doesn’t know why.
I close the distance between us, hook a finger through his belt, and look up at his face.
“Clara.” His voice drops an octave. “You have that look.”
“What look?”
“The look you had before the orchard lost its dignity.”
“The orchard volunteered.” I flatten my other palm against his stomach, cool skin over hard muscle, and walk my fingers up his abdomen, over scars and ink, until they rest just below his exposed ribs. Under my hand, the glow brightens. “Aldric. I’m going to need you to stop gardening now.”
“I am nearly finished with the tomatoes—”
“The tomatoes,” I say, rising onto my toes to drag my mouth along his jaw, “can watch.”
The sound he makes isn’t human, and I can’t pretend that I don’t love it.
His hands grip my waist and lift me like I weigh nothing, and my legs wrap around him on pure muscle memory. His mouth crashes into mine, his lip piercings cool against my tongue, and I bury my hands in his hair and pull the leather tie loose.
“You come home,” he growls against my mouth, walking us out of the tomato rows, “and put your hands on me in my own garden. Insolent.”
“Your garden?” I bite his lower lip, tugging a piercing. “Check the deed, tenant.”
He laughs, and then my back meets the soft grass of the strip between the lavender and the raised beds, his huge frame caging me, bees droning somewhere overhead.
His mouth is at my throat, lips and teeth and metal, and his hands are already at the hem of my shirt, shoving it up, palming my breast through my bra.
“Off,” I gasp, clawing at buttons while he wrestles with my jeans. “Everything off, we’re not doing the half-dressed farmer thing today, I want—”
“Tell me.” He peels the denim down my legs, flings it toward the cabbages, and my underwear follows it into horticultural exile. “Tell me what you want. Use that filthy mouth.”
“I want you inside me before the bees unionize.”
Aldric pauses for half a second, nonplussed. “Not what I meant, and you know it.”
I chuckle as he settles between my thighs, still in his pants, and drags a finger through my folds. My hips arch off the grass.
His voice is rough. “Soaked.” Another slow drag, a circle around my clit that makes me whimper. “Say what you want, Clara, or I will kneel here and tend to you like the tomatoes. Slowly. For hours.”
“You’re the worst.” I fist my hand in his hair. “Fine. I want your cock. I want you to fuck me in your stupid beautiful garden until I can’t remember anything else. Explicit enough? Should I notarize it?”
“It will suffice.” His pants hit the lavender.
His cockhead presses against my entrance, broad and heavy, the first barbell cool where I’m burning, and when he pushes in, slow and relentless, the stretch punches the air out of my lungs.
Like it does every single time he fucks me.
He watches my face the whole way down, jaw tight, the shard blazing.
“There,” he breathes when he’s seated as deep as I can take, the rest of him pressed against me.
“There’s my Clara. Full of me.” He rolls his hips, and the ladder of piercings drags across my inner walls.
“Look at you. The lady of the keep, spread out in the herbs, gripping my cock like the world is ending.”
“Less… narrating.” I hook my heel behind his thigh and pull. “More—”
He gives me more, and I lose my breath.
Aldric sets a pace that’s slow and deep and merciless, each stroke grinding against my clit at the end, each withdrawal raking the piercings over the exact spot that makes me boneless.
The garden fills with sounds no vegetable should hear.
His voice pours into my ear, an endless filthy litany—how tight I am, how wet, how he thought about this all day, my mouth, my thighs, the way I scream.
I can feel myself climbing that peak, and I’m eager to jump off the edge.
“Harder,” I demand, and he obeys, and I go off like a flare, arching up into his chest, shouting his name at the sky as the orgasm sets every nerve ending in my body on fire.
He fucks me through it, shifts my knee up over his elbow and finds a deeper angle, and the second orgasm builds before I finish shaking from the first.
“Whatever upset you in town,” he growls against my throat, thrusting deep, “I am fucking it out of you. Do you feel it leaving?”
He knows. He knows something’s wrong, and he’s decided this is his job right now, and the tenderness combined with the filth is what tips me over the second time. I clench around him hard enough that he curses in extinct German.
“Clara.” His rhythm falters. “Clara, I—”
“Yes.” I drag his face down to mine. “Come on. Give it to me. All of it.”
He slams as deep as he can and roars into my mouth, flooding me in hot pulses. His cock kicks inside my pussy, triggering small aftershocks each time.
We end up in a heap in the crushed grass, my cheek on his glowing chest, his hand tracing lazy lines up my spine.
“Now,” Aldric says quietly, his lips against my hair. “Tell me what happened in town.”
I close my eyes. The sun is warm, his skin is cool, and Marco is out there somewhere, frowning at his phone.
“Tomorrow,” I whisper. “Today, just hold me.”
His arms tighten. He doesn’t push. But I know my revenant. He’s already preparing for battle.