Epilogue #2
The ache is already burning at the base of me. Every hair on my body lifts as I pour every ounce of patience into myself. It takes everything… everything not to sweep her off the damp earth and have her against the nearest trunk.
The pine here is wide enough to hide most of her. Her chest undulates beneath her coat, each breath scraping visibly through her parted lips.
My trousers tighten at the sight of her flushed and wanting, and the memory of last night – of her moaning against me – returns with painful clarity.
Leah yanks the scarf from her neck and stuffs it into her pocket.
Her eyes move between the slope, the stream and the thicker growth farther east, calculating which path might carry her beyond me.
She mutters something savage beneath her breath, catches the scarf before it slips free and stuffs it deeper into her pocket. One strand of her chestnut-brown hair refuses to follow order. It falls across the side of her neck and clings to the damp skin above her collar.
Her pulse beats beneath it, dissolving the forest and the moment until she is sitting across from me in the Stonebrook visitors’ room again.
The first day.
She had walked through locked doors and harsh corridors to place herself before a murderer, then remained stoically seated.
The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it, Epicurus had said. The difficulty being confined to a narrow space behind those bars after she gave me something worth wanting beyond them.
Fear smelled on her so beautifully. Her hair defied the order she tried to keep it in, and she had to tuck it behind her ear repeatedly. Every few minutes, a strand slipped across her cheek and drew my attention towards the pale line of her throat. The pulse that trembled there.
I barely heard half of what she said.
I watched that little throat. Wondered how that heartbeat would feel against my thumb. Whether she would finally break that stubborn composure if my breath touched the place where her hair kept directing my eyes.
But I am broken. The fantasy plummeted into the darker waters of my soul.
I close my eyes. Tight. Tighter. The past won’t poison my present. I won’t let it.
Because that was fear.
This isn’t.
I know the difference now. She taught it to me.
She pushes away from the trunk and begins climbing a slope. Confidence enters her steps and makes her careless enough to leave the scarf half exposed from her pocket like a little flag.
I follow close enough to hear her breathing.
Then I stop abruptly. The movement makes a rock scrape between my boot and the ground.
Her head whips around. Breath catches.
In one moment, she stands still.
Her eyes meet mine. I watch the recognition enter them as the slow-simmering need low in my body splinters and floods every inch of me.
Then her lips part around one shallow breath. They twitch but don’t draw into a smile.
She darts into the woods.
The demon breaks loose.
Three seconds. I give her that much time, and not because she needs them.
Because I do.
The sight of her fleeing after looking directly at me tears through the last civilised layer of me.
A branch thrashes ahead.
Breath in.
Her boots strike the earth in a rapid, uneven rhythm.
Breath out.
The forest narrows into flashes of yellow leaves, black trunks and the scarf flickering behind her.
I close half the distance before she reaches the birches. I know she can hear it. She veers right and ducks beneath a low branch. I shoulder through it and it splinters. Wet leaves strike my face, but it barely registers.
Five metres.
Four.
Her breath.
Mine.
Her heartbeat.
Mine.
Her mouth opens on a breathless laugh and I surge forward.
My fingers close around the fabric hanging from her pocket.
She jerks back, but the scarf pulls free before it can drag her off balance. She stumbles two steps, recovers and lunges forward again.
Not fast enough.
I wind the scarf around my fist and reach her before she clears the next tree.
One of my arms closes around her waist, her body strikes mine hard enough to force a grunt from my chest. She fights me exactly the way she knows I like, twisting in my hold without reaching for the yarn.
I turn with the momentum and drive her carefully towards the fallen pine beside us, taking her down with me. The trunk lies half raised from the ground, one thick branch reaching upwards at an angle where the tree tore free.
She twists again.
‘Elias—’
My name breaks into breath when I catch both her wrists.
I gather her arms in one hand, bring them over her head and press them against the bark. The scarf secures her against the branch.
Once, I’d been taught to do this without asking myself what it would mean for her.
Now her eyes tell me the truth. And the want in my core hardens into something merciless.
Words desert me as I wrench her layers aside and drag my own zip down.
Breath drains from me sharply as I find her hot and ready for me.
The last shred of sense catches me and I pull myself free, hands shaking twice with the effort of separating this moment from every touch ever forced upon me.
I stop.
Leah looks up at me, her fists unclenching and one of them grazing my knuckle.
‘It’s okay.’
I nod.
‘I want this. Don’t stop,’ she whispers.
I seize up first, let the warmth of her chocolate eyes devour me. Then I push inside her in one hard, desperate movement.
Shame floods instantly. Vicious. But before the panic has time to bloom, Leah cries out, ‘Yes!’ with such certainty that the word tears through the haze, and the cadence of her voice imprisons me beautifully.
I open my eyes to see hers closing, her head tipping back, throat exposed in utter trust beneath the loose sweep of her hair.
The shame is still there, hard to survive, ever-present. But her body presses back into mine, asking rather than forcing, waiting rather than enduring, and the darkness inside me changes shape.
It is no longer the memory.
No longer the violation.
And when she looks at me, I move fast, wrenching a gasp out of her. Her hands curl into fists and she settles her lips against mine, tasting the pleasure straight from my tongue.
I drive into her again, harder, and every broken part of me answers with more… more… More of this woman.
Her mouth follows mine, her fingers digging into the scarf we’re both gripping. She holds me inside the moment while her body meets every thrust with a confidence that turns the strength I fear into a rhythm we’re making together.
Heat coils around my spine until fear and pleasure are no longer separate.
I chase the sound of my name as she keeps biting at it over and over again.
I hunt the feeling of being wanted by this woman who refuses to fight my demons, instead looks them in the face and makes me prove that I am the one holding their leash.
Every movement is mine to choose. Every answer from her reminds me what I am choosing it for.
Until the forest, the wrongness and every hand that came before her dissolve beneath the raw, shuddering need to give her everything she is asking me to take.
The pressure tears through me. It binds us to this soil, to the cold air and the mountains looming upon us.
My face finds solace against her throat as every muscle locks around the intensity of it.
‘Harder,’ she rasps.
That’s my good girl.
I breathe against her like a man dying. The next word is the final echo of my name that holds me there while the last of the darkness fractures inside her and pulls me under.
I spill into her. Her knees clamp around my waist as I pull once more at the scarf. The dead branch gives with a crack, letting the knot fall loose between her hands.
They come around my neck as she bites through her climax and relishes my brand of hot, wet decadence.
When the demons stop drowning in our cries, the chill of the autumn soothes the fever until air returns to our lungs.
I remain against her neck and inside her body, listening to our breathing settle beneath the whisper of leaves and the distant movement of the stream.
‘I thought the Hunt was supposed to end with you carrying me back to the ceremony,’ she croaks beneath me.
‘It will,’ I murmur. ‘Eventually.’
Her lips press together. ‘Fuck the schedule.’
I chuckle into her neck. She follows.
When I begin to withdraw, her thighs tighten and pull me right back inside her.
‘Stay… a little longer,’ she whispers.
And I keep holding her while nature settles around us.
One woman…
One stubborn woman walked into my prison and kept asking me to choose. She never tore the chains off me, yet she taught me I could reach the lock myself.
I move slowly inside her, letting the friction pull us into a new high as I hold onto her. Hold tight. Tighter.
Because the world beyond her still feels uncertain, cruel and temporary. But as long as her pulse beats beneath my mouth, as long as her hands remain tangled in my hair, these unshed tears of mine will never again calcify into another prison.
She won’t let them.
And anything or anyone that tries to build a prison around hers will have to survive me first.