12. Leoric
LEORIC
The cabin smells of rot and old ash when we push the door open, which tells me it has been uninhabited long enough to stop being dangerous and start being merely unpleasant.
Either way, we have no choice with the storm.
Wind hammers the shutters. Theren takes the escorts two hundred meters to a structure with a better roof, and he gives me the look he reserves for decisions he has already calculated and found wanting before I've finished making them.
I let him have it. There is nothing in that look I haven't already said to myself.
Corrine gets a fire going faster than I expect.
She uses the dry bark stacked near the wall with efficiency like she knows how to build warmth from almost nothing.
By the time I've checked the door, windows, and floor for structural failures, the fire is alive.
She sits close to it with her coat still on and her hands extended toward the heat, and her silence is heavy.
I've spent enough time studying her quiet to know which ones are for thinking. This one is.
I sit across the fire and don't open conversation. The wind whistles through every gap in the planking.
"Isolde told me things," she starts finally. "About Marrowfen. About Draven Hollow."
"Did she?"
"You changed the routes."
"Those change."
"Leoric." Her voice drops, she has stopped performing and means it instead. "I'm not asking for a tactical answer."
I focus on the orange flames rather than at her. "The orders were wrong. I had the authority to alter them. So I did. That's the whole of it."
"You make it sound simple."
"At the time it was."
She pulls her knees up, wraps her arms around them, and rests her chin there, watching me through the firelight.
She has never once hidden her burn scar.
I've thought about that more than I should.
"I spent years waiting for someone to find me," she admits.
Flat. Like something carried a long time and set down carefully.
"Every checkpoint. Every border guard. Every time someone looked at me too long.
Part of me thought I deserved it. Not as something I wanted. As something that was just."
I stand, because seated feels like a decision about to make itself without my permission. I move to the window, check it out of habit. Her reflection shows faint in the warped glass. She hasn't moved.
"I searched for years," I confess. "It wasn't clean or rational. You were there every time the scars pulled, every time someone said Blackwater, every time sleep left before morning."
She's listening intently, waiting for more.
"I told myself it was accountability. That I needed to face the person who made the choice that cost me everything and make her understand it. I believed that for a lengthy time."
"What changed?"
"I found your trail in the Veth lowlands.
Four years in. I had a location, a name you were using.
I could have moved on it within the week.
" I turn. "I didn't. Because I realized I didn't know what I would do when I found you.
I had made you into a design of everything I'd lost. And I didn't know whether I would want justice or something else entirely. "
She rises. Not toward me. Just rises, like the sitting has become something she can't manage anymore. "You're the only person who looks at me and actually sees what I did. And you don't look away from it."
"No."
"Everyone else condemns it or excuses it.
You just hold it. Like I'm allowed to be someone who did that terrible thing and still be here.
" She crosses the distance between us without hurry and without announcement.
She stops close and the firelight hits us both from the same glow.
Her hand comes up. Stops before it touches. Hesitation or a question.
I should step back. The case for it is coherent and I have been rehearsing it since the cave. The road ahead requires two functional minds, two people who are not making the catastrophic error of confusing shared grief for something survivable. She waits.
I reach up and press her hand against my cheek.
Against the scar. The skin there has no sensation at the center.
At the edges it has too much. Her breath changes, but her eyes don't leave mine, and something that I have held locked since I dragged myself out of the fire and made myself who I am today, gives way.
"Stop thinking," she suggests.
"I'm not—"
"You are. You've been thinking since the pass." Her thumb moves against the ruined skin. "Stop."
I take her wrist. Not gently. Her pulse kicks hard against my grip and her chin comes up in answer — defiant, immediate, entirely her — and whatever remained of my restraint goes with it.
I kiss her the way I've refused to since the cave.
Without apology. Without the controlled retreat I managed then.
She makes a sound against my mouth that isn't surprise, and then her hands are in my collar and she is pulling rather than yielding, which is exactly right, it's the only variation I would believe.
I walk her back until the wall catches her. She doesn't protest. She bites my lower lip in retaliation for the grip I have on her jaw — sharp and deliberate — and I feel it go straight through me.
"There he is," she says, quiet, almost satisfied.
I pull back just enough to look at her. Thick dark curls loose. Eyes hazel. Her pulse pumping at her throat. "You're not afraid of me," I say.
"I didn't say that."
"You're not acting afraid."
Her mouth curves at one corner. "Maybe I've decided it doesn't matter."
I take the hem of her shirt and she raises her arms without being asked — deliberate, chosen, not surrendered.
I understand the difference. I honor it by not making her wait.
What follows isn't soft, not even gentle; we've both already accounted for that.
Her nails find my neck and hold on while my palms learn her — the old blade-marks along her ribs, the geography of damage and survival mapped in scar tissue.
I trace them without comment. She watches my face while I do, and that is more intimate to me than anything else.
When she reaches for the buttons of my shirt I let her.
She gets two undone and stops and stares at what's beneath — the full burned ruin of me — and her jaw sets with an expression that is not pity and not horror.
She presses against it and holds one palm there, and that single simple warmth is the most dangerous thing that has happened to me in a decade.
"Your turn," she says, and there is a wink in her voice even now, even here.
I pull her back in and she laughs — low and real, bitten off at the end — and then there is no more room for it.
I get her out of the rest with more efficiency than patience and she drags her nails slowly down my chest, watching my reaction the entire time, satisfied with what she finds there.
When I get my hand between her thighs it shifts to something else.
Her composure doesn't slip so much as fracture — a single clean break, quickly plastered over.
"Don't," she starts.
"I'm not saying anything."
Her hips roll against my hand and whatever she was going to say dissolves.
I work her until her breathing goes uneven and her grip on my arm tightens, and then she pulls me up by the collar before she gets there, stubborn to the bone, refusing to let me have it that cleanly.
I respect it, but I pull her closer for it.
She gets my belt undone and wraps her hand around my cock and the sound I make is not dignified. She notices immediately.
"There he is," she says, quietly triumphant.
"There she is," I say back, and she bites the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling and fails.
I take her wrists and lay her down. When I push inside her the smile goes, replaced by something unguarded and undefended, her body going still for one suspended moment, her whole body stilling for one suspended moment before she exhales against my throat.
I tilt her chin back with two fingers. She holds my gaze through it — furious at being so completely seen, and present anyway, which has always been the most defining thing about her.
I move and she meets me. Not yielding, but matching, her hips rising to answer mine with the same stubbornness she has brought to every argument and every crossing and every dark passage between us.
There's no softness in it. There is something better than that: the gravity of two people who have chosen this without flinching, the grief underneath it with anger threaded through it, and the need that neither of us had the grace to outrun.
"Stop looking at me like that," she says, breathless.
"No."
She pulls me down harder in answer. I find the pressure and the angle that makes her control slip until strategy is useless — I just stay there, and watch her try to hold herself together, and feel the incremental loss of the battle in every point of contact between us.
Her jaw unclenches. Her eyes lose focus and she drags them back to mine.
The armor comes off one piece at a time and she lets it go without surrendering it, which is the most remarkable thing I have ever witnessed.
"Don't stop," she says finally, quiet, the sarcasm entirely gone. Just her voice, stripped of everything except the ask. I don't.
When she comes it moves through her whole body — her nails finding my shoulder, a broken sound torn from somewhere below composure, her gaze staying locked on mine all the way through it.
That is what undoes me. Not the heat of her or the sound or the way she shudders against me, but the fact that she looks at me and stays.
I follow her with my face against her hair and nothing left of the restraint I have spent four weeks maintaining, and for a moment there is nothing in this rotting cabin but the fire and the storm and us two, and it is enough. It's more than enough.
We stay still for a moment. Her breathing slows. Mine takes longer.
"Well," her voice vibrates against my collarbone.
"Yes."
"That was—"
"Yes."
She laughs once, and it reaches my chest like something I have no name for and I'm not ready to look at directly.
Before the dark shifts toward gray she is asleep with her hand loose against my ribs.
I lie still and look at the ceiling of this rotting cabin with the documents folded inside my coat and an enemy still shaping every road ahead, and understand that I am no longer capable of the decision I would have made about her four weeks ago.
I feel myself drift into sleep for a short time. Then, she stirs as the light changes. I open my eyes as the memory reaches her. For one second, she looks almost exposed. Then she smooths it away.
"Theren will come looking," she states.
"Yes."
A beat. Neither of us moves.
"Right," she sits up, and begins the efficient work of putting herself back together.
I watch her do it and think how inconvenient this is, I would never have let this happen to me before.
I jump up. Check the door. The storm has spent itself in the night, leaving the world outside indifferent to whatever happened inside these four walls.
Good. Indifference I know how to work with.
Whatever this is, I haven't learned how to work with it yet.
I don't know if I can. But I already know I won't be able to leave it alone.