Chapter 23 #2
"Good," he says, and his mouth finds my throat while he pulls the shirt up and off, and the cold air of the abandoned house hits my skin for exactly one second before his hands replace it.
He is careful and then not careful at all, and the transition between the two is so smooth I don't notice where one ends and the other begins.
His mouth moves down my throat to my collarbone to the curve of my breast, and I dig my fingers into his hair and make a sound I would be embarrassed about if the bond weren't currently broadcasting that he finds it devastating in the best possible way.
"God," I breathe.
"Still with me?" he asks, against my skin.
"Very much with you. Don't stop."
He doesn't stop. His mouth closes over my nipple and my back arches off the bench and his arm around my waist tightens, holding me steady, and the heat of his mouth against my skin is so directly contrary to every cold and careful version of him I spent months cataloguing that it scrambles something in me in a way I'm entirely fine with.
He lays me back slowly, making sure my bandaged arm is clear, and the stone floor is cold and the fire is warm and he's above me, braced on one arm, and he takes his time with me in a way that makes it abundantly clear that Ryder Ashford does nothing by halves once he's decided to do it at all.
His hand slides down my stomach, past the waistband of my trousers, and he watches my face the entire time, and when his fingers find the right place his expression does something complicated and devoted and I stop being able to catalog anything at all.
"Are you—" he starts.
"If you ask me again right now," I say, breathless, "I will absolutely lose my mind."
"I was going to ask if you were comfortable," he says, entirely too composed for a man with his hand where his hand currently is. "The floor is stone."
"The floor is fine," I say. "I'm fine. Please keep doing that."
He does.
He takes me apart slowly and thoroughly, his thumb circling my clit with a rhythmic, heavy pressure that has me crying out against his neck.
He slides two fingers deep inside me, slick and stretching, matching the pace of his thumb until my hips are lifting off the floor to meet him.
The bond between us runs so bright and open that I don't know where his focus ends and mine begins.
When I come undone, my walls pulsing hard around his fingers, it's with his name trapped in my throat, my forehead pressed against his as the fire burns low behind us.
He gives me exactly ten seconds to breathe before I pull him back up to my mouth, my hands dropping to his belt.
I undo the buckle with shaking fingers, pushing his trousers down until his dick springs free, thick and fully erect, pressing hot against my thigh.
I reach down and wrap my fingers around him, feeling the heavy weight and the bead of pre-come at the tip.
He lets me, helps me, kicking his clothes away until there is nothing between us, his hands sliding down to cup my bare ass and pull me flush against his hard length.
He's watching my face with a focus that would be clinical if it weren't so clearly something else entirely.
"Tell me," he says.
"Still yes," I say. "Still sure. Come here."
When he finally pushes inside me, sliding into my wet heat in one slow, agonizingly perfect stroke, the sound he makes against my throat is low and wrecked.
He's so thick he stretches me completely, filling me in a way that makes me gasp and cling to his shoulders.
He is nothing like the professor right now, nothing like the man who stood in front of a Council and kept his composure under pressure.
This version of him is unguarded in a way I didn't know he was capable of, his bare chest pressed against my breasts, his nipples scraping mine.
Through the bond I feel it: relief, and want, and the specific terrifying thing underneath both of them that neither of us is going to name out loud yet but that exists anyway, solid and undeniable as the stone floor under my back.
He moves slowly at first, deliberate, checking my face, and I wrap my legs around his waist, pulling him deeper.
His hands slide under my ass, lifting me slightly to adjust the angle, and he drives into me with a hard, snapping rhythm.
The friction of his shaft against my clit with every thrust has me sobbing his name.
The bond amplifies everything—every wet slide, every point of contact, the heavy muscles of his back flexing under my hands, the slap of his hips against mine.
I press my face into his neck and hold on, letting him bury himself in me as I stop thinking about wraiths and evidence and Council votes and just feel this.
Him. The thick, relentless weight of him stretching me open.
"Angelic," he says, strained.
"Don't stop," I tell him. "Don't you dare stop."
He doesn't stop.
The second time I come apart, he's right behind me, his grip tightening, his breath ragged against my shoulder, and the bond flares so fully open between us that for a moment I feel everything he feels: the release, the relief, and underneath it the thing that terrifies him most, which is exactly how much he means this.
Afterward, he doesn't move away. He shifts his weight so he's not crushing my arm, and then he pulls me against his side on the stone floor with his jacket folded under my head, and his hand settles at my waist, and neither of us says anything for a long time.
The fire has burned down to coals. The room is dim and warm and quiet.
"Your sister," I say eventually. "She would have been insufferable about this, wouldn't she."
He's quiet for a beat.
"Absolutely insufferable," he says. "She would have found a way to say I told you so about something she never actually told me."
"She sounds like she was excellent."
"She was." His arm tightens slightly. "She really was."
The bond between us sits easy and open, not pulling, not straining.
Just present. I've been carrying the weight of it for so long as something contested, something fought over by two people who didn't want to want each other, that I don't quite know what to do with it when it feels like this. Like something that fits.
"What happens after Caspian delivers the evidence?" I ask.
"The Convocation reviews it. If they agree it's sufficient, they suspend the containment order pending investigation." He draws a slow breath. "If they don't—"
"They will."
"You don't know that."
"Caspian Thorne walked into a room where he had every reason to stay neutral," I say, "and put his family's stolen methodology on Ryder Ashford's desk.
He's going to take that evidence to the Convocation and he's going to make it land, because that's what Caspian does with things he's decided to do.
" A pause. "I don't particularly want to give him credit for it, but I'm not going to pretend I didn't see it. "
Ryder is quiet for a moment. "You trust him."
"I don't know if trust is the word." I stare at the ceiling. "But I think he's on the right side of this one. For his own reasons, but still."
"His own reasons being you," Ryder says, and the flatness in it is not quite jealousy but runs adjacent to it.
"His own reasons being whatever Caspian Thorne's reasons are," I say. "Which I'm not going to pretend to fully understand."
Silence. The coals settle.
"He's not wrong to be drawn to you," Ryder says, after a while. It costs him something, that sentence. I can tell by the specific evenness he uses to deliver it. "I can find that inconvenient and still acknowledge it."
"Very generous of you."
"Don't push it."
"I'm not pushing anything." I press my face briefly against his shoulder. "I'm noting the growth."
"There's no growth. I'm the same person I was two hours ago."
"You're really not," I say. "But I'll let you have that one."
Outside, Thane's footsteps have started again, slow and measured. A man walking because standing still is worse. I know that particular restlessness. I've felt it myself.
"He's not coming in," I say.
"No." Ryder's voice is careful. "He won't."
"Is that better or worse for him?"
"I don't know." A pause. "I think that's between him and himself."
I think about Thane crouching beside me on the training field with his hand flat on the ground and the gold fading from his eyes and nothing to say.
The specific presence of someone who shows up and doesn't make it about themselves.
I think about the shame I know he carries, the mother he doesn't speak of, and the way he looks at me sometimes with that complicated thing moving behind his eyes that he smooths over fast.
The bond with Ryder runs warm and open beside all of that, and I let it exist alongside the rest without trying to resolve it. Some things don't resolve neatly. Most things, actually.
"Ryder," I say.
"Mm."
"If the Convocation takes twenty-four hours—"
"Sleep," he says. "Whatever comes next, you'll handle it better having slept."
"That's practical advice dressed up as concern."
"It's both," he says. "Go to sleep, Angel."
The name settles over me like something new. Not a title. Not a term the Obsidian Circle would use to mock me. His version is different and he knows it, and the fact that he knows it is doing something to my chest that I choose not to examine too closely right now.
"You're staying?" I ask.
"Where would I go?"
"That's not an answer."
"Yes," he says. "I'm staying. Sleep."
I close my eyes. The bond between us is a warm thread running steady, and his arm at my waist is solid and real, and outside Thane walks his slow circles in the dark and Caspian is somewhere moving through the night with evidence that could pull this whole structure down, and the quarry anchor still exists and the Headmaster is still in his office and none of it is resolved.
But Ryder's breathing is even beside me, and the fire is down to coals, and I am, for this specific hour, not alone.
I sleep.
Outside, Thane stops walking. He leans against the outer wall of the abandoned house with his head tipped back and his eyes on the sky, and the cold does nothing to him the way cold never does, but the stillness is its own kind of exposure.
He can feel the bond pull from here, the warmth of it through the stone wall, and it is not his to feel and he knows that and he feels it anyway.
Caspian is sitting on a low section of broken wall twenty feet away, and he's not looking at the house. He's looking at his split knuckles, dried dark now, and his face is doing nothing at all, which is the version of Caspian Thorne that is most dangerous to read anything into.
"Don't," Thane says.
"I'm not doing anything," Caspian says.
"You're sitting there calculating."
"I'm always calculating. That's not new."
Thane looks at him. Caspian looks at his hands. The night is quiet enough that they can both hear the low sound of voices from inside, though not the words, and then nothing, and then nothing for long enough that the quality of the silence changes.
"Don't," Thane says again, quieter.
"I told you," Caspian says, "I'm not doing anything."
But his jaw is tight and his hands are still and the blood on his knuckles has gone completely dry, and Thane knows, from long experience with Caspian Thorne, that the version of him that goes very still and very quiet is the version that is feeling something he hasn't decided what to do with yet.
Thane pushes off the wall. He walks to the broken section of stone and sits beside Caspian, not close, and they both look at the dark tree line, and neither of them says anything for a while.
"She closed the breach," Thane says finally.
"She did."
"By herself. With an anchor stone."
"I was there."
"I know you were there." Thane sets his forearms on his knees. "I'm saying it out loud because it deserves saying out loud. She held a quarry-level charge and then took a wraith hit and then closed the breach. She's twenty-one years old and they were calling her a null six weeks ago."
Caspian is quiet for a beat. "She was always more than a null."
"Yes," Thane says. "She was."
He doesn't say what else he's thinking. Some calculations deserve to be left unfinished for one night. Inside the house, there is warmth and a bond running open, and outside there are two men sitting in the cold, and the night stretches on around all of it without judgment.
The coals inside glow low and steady.
Ryder's arm doesn't shift from my waist.
The bond stays open, quiet, and fully lit between us like something that has finally stopped fighting to exist and has simply decided to.