14. Chapter 14
ELLIE
The explaining took the rest of the day and left me more hollowed out than six weeks of captivity had managed.
I'd forgotten how much harder the truth is to say than to live.
Living it, you just put one foot in front of the other.
Saying it, laying out for the two men who'd crossed the wilderness for me that a third man had a fated claim on me too, that I'd been claimed and courted and had, God help me, come to like the golden king who did it, that was its own kind of march, and by the time the sun went down I was wrung dry.
Tau made it easier than he had any right to, which somehow made everything worse.
I'd braced for a confrontation, for the two great powers of my strange new life squaring off over me like dogs over a bone, and instead the king of the mound had measured Daska and Rivik with a long look I couldn't read, and then said, in careful wolf-tongue so I'd understand every word, that any man who'd crossed six weeks of open steppe to find a woman had already proved he valued her more than her captors had.
That they were guests of the pride for as long as they wished to stay.
Then he'd given us a good shelter near my fire, and food, and privacy, and walked away into the dusk with his shoulders very straight and left me standing there with my chest aching in a way I couldn't name and didn't want to examine.
He's letting me choose, I'd thought, watching him go; That's what that was.
He could have made it a fight and he chose to make it a choice instead.
And I'd hated how much that cost him, and how well I could see it costing him, because a fortnight ago I couldn't have read that golden face at all and now I could, and being able to was its own quiet disaster.
But that was tomorrow's problem, and every day's problem after; tonight I had Daska.
He'd barely let me out of arm's reach since the reunion, never crowding me, because Daska had never once crowded me, simply staying close, as a man stays after six weeks with a frayed thread where his heart should be, needing the small constant reassurance of my nearness to believe I was real.
He kept finding reasons to touch me. A hand at the small of my back as we ducked into the shelter.
His fingers checking, again, the old scar on my palm as if it might have changed since the last time he looked.
Every time he touched me, I felt the bond between us settle a little further back into place, unbreakable again, filling in the hollow the distance had worn.
We were almost at the shelter when Nathan found us.
He came out from between the fires alone, having waited, as he always did, until Rivik had gone with Dev and Tau had been drawn away by someone needing their king. His eyes went to Daska’s hand at the small of my back and stayed there a fraction too long.
“We need to talk.”
“Not tonight.”
“We’ve already lost six weeks recovering you.
We cannot turn this into an extended stay while you settle whatever this is.
” He made the smallest gesture towards Daska, reducing six weeks of terror and the bond warm between us to an inconvenience he was too disciplined to name.
“You’re alive. You’re apparently unharmed.
Tomorrow we assess the reserves and establish a departure date. ”
“I said not tonight, Nathan.”
He took a step nearer. Daska moved before I could, not threatening, not even touching him. He simply placed his great body between us, as calmly as he might have closed a door against the cold.
“She needs food and sleep,” he said. “You can speak tomorrow.”
Nathan looked past him to me.
“The world hasn’t stopped dying because you’ve had a difficult month.”
Then he walked away, leaving the words behind him to do the work he’d intended.
For one old, familiar moment, guilt opened its mouth inside me.
Daska held out his hand.
I took it, and followed him into the shelter.
When the shelter's hide flap fell closed behind us and it was finally, truly just the two of us, the air changed.
I turned to face him in the low red firelight that came through the woven walls, and for a moment neither of us moved.
He was so big he had to stoop under the shelter's frame, this gentle enormous bear of a man, and his dark eyes moved over my face with the careful attention I'd missed so badly it was an ache, and I watched him not reach for me, watched him wait, as he always waited, giving me the room to close the distance or not.
Two years ago I'd have found a reason not to.
Two years ago I was so wrapped in numbness and the certainty of my own brokenness that I'd have made some small deflecting joke and turned the moment aside, because wanting something meant it could be taken, and I'd learned not to want.
The old voice tried, even now; You can't do this.
Not with a king's claim hanging over you, not with everything unresolved, not when you're this much of a mess.
It had a hundred reasons and every one of them was really just the one reason, the old one, the fear.
I crossed the space between us and kissed him anyway.
He made a low sound against my mouth, part relief and part something rougher, and his big careful hands came up to frame my face like I was something he'd been terrified he'd broken, and he kissed me back with a tenderness that undid me.
There was no rush in it; there was never any rush in Daska.
He kissed me like the kiss itself was the whole point rather than a toll on the way to somewhere, and I felt two years of frost and six weeks of terror start to melt out of me under the patient warmth of it, and I pressed closer, greedy for more of that melting.
And then, right on cue, the guilt arrived, because it always did.
Some traitor part of me flinched at how good it felt, whispering that I hadn't earned this, that a woman who'd been discarded by her own fated mate had no business feeling wanted, that pleasure this pure was a thing that got noticed and then taken away to teach you not to reach for it.
For two years that voice had won every time.
It had turned every kind touch into a threat and every good moment into a debt I'd have to pay, until I'd stopped reaching altogether and called the numbness peace.
But Daska's mouth was gentle on mine, and his hands were shaking with how carefully he held me, and the bond between us hummed with a wanting that had nothing of ownership in it, only a bone-deep gladness that I was here, that I was whole, that I'd let him close.
And I made a choice I hadn't been able to make in two years.
I chose to believe the good thing was real, and mine, and allowed. I chose to let it in.
"Ellie." He drew back just far enough to speak, his forehead resting against mine, his breath uneven. "Tell me you're sure about this. You've had a day that would flatten anyone. If you need only to sleep in my arms tonight, that would be enough, more than enough."
And there it was. The thing that had ruined me for every other man the first time he'd said it, months ago, in a different shelter in a different cold.
He was offering me a way out. Standing there wanting me so plainly I could feel it in the bond, in the heat coming off him, in the tremor in his hands, and still, first, before anything, making certain that what I wanted mattered more than what he did.
"I'm sure," I said, and my voice cracked on it.
"Daska, love, I have never been more sure of anything in my life.
For six weeks I've been walking toward this without letting myself think about it, and now you're here, and what I want is to feel something good again.
I want you, please. I want to come home to you tonight. "
Something broke loose in his face at the please.
He kissed me again, deeper now, and I felt the change in him, the careful patience opening into something with heat under it, and his hands left my face to skim down my throat, my shoulders, coming to rest at my waist and drawing me in flush against the solid warmth of him.
"Then let me take care of you," he murmured against my jaw, and the words went through me like a struck bell. "Let me do that for you. You've spent six weeks taking care of everyone in this whole settlement. Tonight you don't lift a finger. Tonight's only yours."
I'd cooked for a captor's whole camp. I'd fed a king's pride, built them a council, mended their hurts, held Megan through her fear, poured myself out into task after task because being of use was the only way I knew to feel worth keeping.
And this man, who knew me better than anyone alive, had looked at all of that and understood that the deepest thing he could give me wasn't passion at all.
It was permission to be, for one night, the one who got taken care of.
And so I let go; for the first time in longer than I could remember, I simply let myself be held and cared for.
He undressed me slowly in the firelight, and there was nothing hurried or grasping in it, each layer of hide eased away and set aside, his hands smoothing over each new stretch of bared skin as it appeared, his dark eyes following, reverent, like he was uncovering something he'd never quite believed he'd be allowed to see again.
The cold air raised gooseflesh and then his warmth chased it, his palms sure against my skin, a healer's hands that knew exactly where the tension lived in a body and how to coax it loose.
When he eased me down onto the furs and knelt over me, blocking out the firelight, controlled even in all that size, I felt no fear at all.
Only the deep animal safety of being with the one person who had never once, in all the time I'd known him, wanted anything from me but my wellbeing.
"Safe?" he asked, low, his mouth against the pulse in my throat.
The single word, our word, the whole of him folded into one deliberate syllable.