21. Chapter 21 #2
I knew what an unanswered bond felt like.
That knowledge was carved into my own bones, because I'd lived it, the hollow ache in the chest where a bond had been torn loose, the constant low grief of it, the pull toward a person who wasn't there that never let up day or night.
For one single night at the Savoy, when Nathan broke our bond in front of five hundred people, I'd felt exactly that, and it had nearly ended me.
It had put me on my knees on a ballroom floor.
It had hollowed me out so completely that two years later I was still numb from it, still flinching from any warmth, still certain I was too broken to be loved.
A single night was what had done that to me.
And Rivik had carried an unanswered bond, aching and unspoken beneath everything, reaching for a woman who couldn't even feel it reaching, for six months; day after day after day.
He'd walked six weeks across an ice-age wilderness to save me with that bond screaming in his chest the whole way, and he'd said nothing, and he'd done it on purpose, chosen it, swallowed that specific agony every waking hour, because he'd decided my freedom was worth more than his own relief.
The scar in my own chest, the old torn place where Nathan's bond had been, ached in answer, and I pressed my hand to it without meaning to.
"You've been in that much pain," I whispered. "For half a year, on purpose, and all of it for me."
"It was a fair trade." He said it simply, like it was obvious, like it wasn't the most devastating thing anyone had ever said to me. "My comfort for your freedom. I'd make it again."
And that was what did it. It wasn't an argument that broke me open, and it wasn't the bond, which I still couldn't feel.
What broke through six months of his silence and two years of my numbness and every careful wall I'd built was the simple, unbearable recognition of what this man had chosen to suffer rather than add one ounce to my burden.
Every other man in my life had taken what he wanted of me, arranged the rest to suit himself, and called it love. And here was Rivik, who'd been handed the one thing that could have bound me to him, and had chosen instead to bleed quietly for half a year so that I could be free of even him.
The distance between us was four feet of firelit dark, and I crossed it.
I didn't decide to; there was no deciding left in me. I crossed the space between us and dropped to my knees in front of him and took his ruined face in both my hands, and I felt him go rigid with shock under my touch, felt the breath stop in his chest.
"You should have told me," I said, my thumbs against his cheekbones, my forehead coming down to rest against his.
"You stubborn, honourable idiot of a man.
You should have told me six months ago and let me decide what I could carry.
But I understand why you didn't, and I can't be angry at a man for loving me too carefully, not anymore, not when I know what it cost you. "
"Ellie." My name came out of him wrecked, his hands coming up to close around my wrists, not pulling me away, just holding on like I might be a thing he was dreaming. "You don't have to—"
"Stop telling me what I don't have to do.
" I pulled back just far enough to look at him, at those amber eyes gone desperate in the firelight.
"You've spent six months deciding what I can and can't handle.
Stop doing that to me. Let me decide something for once.
" I felt the truth of it rise up in me, the thing I'd been running from on the steppe, the thing Daska had already given me leave to reach for and I'd been too frightened to take.
"I want this, and I want you. God help me, I've wanted you for longer than I've let myself know, and I've been calling it other things because wanting more than one man felt like proof I was the greedy, broken thing they always said I was.
Well, I'm done with that. Daska gave me his blessing.
Tau's known from the start. And you've just told me you'd bleed for half a year to keep me free, so the only person left standing in my way is me, and I'm done letting her win. "
The last of my careful control went, and I kissed him.
There was nothing patient in it, nothing like Daska's slow reverence, that measured checking, that gentle unhurried care.
Six months of Rivik's silence and one afternoon of his heartbeat under my hand and two years of my own frozen wanting all broke loose at once.
He made a sound against my mouth like a man dying and coming back to life in the same breath.
Then his hands were in my hair, mine were fisting in the front of his hide, and the kiss turned starving.
"Safe?" he managed, dragging his mouth from mine, because even now, even wild with it, he'd ask, and the word was so unmistakably borrowed from Daska, from the bear who'd taught all of us what asking looked like, that I laughed against his lips even as I pulled him closer.
"Safe, God, yes," I said against his lips. "Don't you dare stop now."
He made good on that. He pulled me into his lap, deliberate of his wounded ribs and not cautious of anything else.
The urgency in him was a different country entirely from the tenderness I'd known, Rivik kissed like he hunted, focused and relentless and wholly present, his hands mapping me like a man who'd been starving for the shape of me for half a year and meant to learn all of it at once.
He got the ties of my outer hide loose and pushed it from my shoulders and put his mouth to my throat, my collarbone, the swell of my breast. I arched into him with my hands buried in his hair and made sounds I didn't recognise as my own.
"Tell me," he said against my skin, his voice shaking. "Tell me you feel even a fraction of what I've, tell me I'm not alone in this, Ellie, tell me that."
"You're not alone." I pulled his face back up to mine so he'd see it, so he'd know I meant it past any doubt. "You haven't been alone since the day you decided to suffer for me. I just didn't know it yet."
Whatever he'd been holding himself together with gave way.
He laid me back on the furs by the fire, stripped the rest of the hide from me with hands that shook, and looked down at me bared in the firelight like a man who couldn't believe the goddess had let him have this after all.
He closed his mouth over my nipple and sucked hard.
When I cried out and bucked under him he growled low against my skin and did it again, his hand already sliding down between my thighs.