Chapter 13 #2
The fire I built before we left still burns in the grate.
Candles glow on the windowsills where she put them.
The record player sits on the shelf by the bookcase, and I cross the room and pull the album I've been holding since I found it at the shop in town—tucked between a box of classical compilations and a Patsy Cline album with a cracked sleeve.
A guitar. Spanish. The kind of music that pours out of her mother's kitchen when she FaceTimes and the family crowds the speakers.
I set the needle.
The guitar fills the cabin. Nina stands by the door with her coat still on and her scarf hanging loose, and her face breaks open. Not sadness—recognition. Her mother's music playing in a cabin in Oregon because I put it there for her.
She crosses the room to me. I meet her halfway.
She pulls my head down and her mouth finds mine.
The kiss tastes like champagne and cold air and the salt at the corners of her eyes.
I pull her coat off her shoulders and it drops to the floor.
Her scarf follows. My hands find the hem of her sweater and she lifts her arms so I can peel it over her head.
The firelight catches the dip of her waist, the ridge of her collarbone, the curve of her breasts under the thin cotton of her bra.
She drops to her knees.
My breath locks. Her fingers work my belt, the button, the zipper, and she pulls my jeans down my hips. My cock springs free, already hard, and she wraps both hands around the base—her grip doesn't close. She looks up at me, her eyes dark and steady, and her mouth opens.
Her tongue drags flat along the underside of my cock from base to tip.
The sound that leaves me vibrates through my jaw and into the floor beneath us—not a word, not a growl, a broken noise between the two.
She takes the head of my cock into her mouth and her lips stretch around the width, the wet heat of her tongue swirling against the tip buckles my knees.
I brace one hand on the mantel. My other hand cradles the back of her skull, fingers threaded through her hair, and I force myself to hold still because if I move I'll thrust and if I thrust I'll hurt her.
She sinks lower, takes more of my cock than I thought possible, her throat working around the thickness, her hands stroking what her mouth can't reach.
The purr rolling through my chest drops low enough to rattle the glass in the windows.
She pulls back and drags her tongue along the ridge beneath the head, slow, deliberate, her fist twisting around my shaft in a rhythm that makes my vision swim.
She takes me deep again. My hand tightens in her hair.
My thighs tremble against the effort of holding still and the heat coiling at the base of my spine warns me I'm running out of time.
"Nina." Her name drags out of me in pieces. "You need to stop."
She pulls back. Her lips are swollen, slick, and she looks up at me with a question on her face.
"I won't last if you keep doing that thing with your tongue." I can barely form the words. "And I need to be inside you."
She rises. I lift her before she's fully standing, one arm under her thighs, the other at her back.
I carry her to the rug in front of the fire, lower her down, and strip her jeans off her hips, her underwear with them.
The bra she unhooks for me because my fingers shake too hard to find the clasp.
She lies bare on the rug with the fire warming her skin and the guitar playing from the shelf, and I kneel over her.
I take my time.
My mouth finds her neck first. Then the dip of her collarbone, the soft skin between her breasts where her pulse beats against my lips.
I work my way down her stomach, pressing my mouth to the plane below her navel, and she gasps and her fingers grip the fur at my shoulders.
I settle between her thighs. My palms spread her open and I press my mouth against her pussy, tongue parting her folds, tasting her.
The sound she makes arches her back off the rug and her heel digs into the space between my shoulder blades.
I grip her hips to hold her steady. My tongue finds her clit and I work her the way she taught me—slow circles, steady pressure, reading the pitch of her breath for the shifts that tell me there and more and don't stop.
I flatten my tongue against her and drag it up, then circle again, and her thighs clamp around my head.
She's wet, soaking my chin, and the taste of her makes the growl climb up my throat before I can catch it.
Her hips rock against my mouth. I slide one finger inside her pussy while my tongue keeps its rhythm, curling against the spot that makes her voice crack.
She comes against my mouth with my name on her lips and her fingers twisted in the fur behind my ears. I hold her through it, my palms spanning her hips, my mouth softening against her until the aftershocks fade and her thighs loosen and her breathing slows from ragged to deep.
I rise over her. Her hands pull me down, her fingers gripping the fur at my chest, and I push my cock inside her in one slow stroke.
The stretch draws a sound from both of us that fills the cabin—hers a gasp that opens into a moan, mine a groan that rolls through my ribs.
She's tight, wet and hot around me and I hold still for a beat, letting her adjust to the thickness, my arms braced on either side of her head, my forehead pressed against hers.
"Mine." The word falls out of me. "Move in, permanently."
"Yes." She cups my face. Her thumbs trace my jaw. "Yes, Garrett. I would love that."
I move. Urgent and tender and unable to separate the two because they've never been separate with her.
Her legs wrap around my waist, her heels pressing into the small of my back, pulling me deeper.
My hips roll into hers and I feel her clench around my cock with every thrust, the drag of me inside her building a pressure at the base of my spine that tightens with each stroke.
Her palm presses flat against my chest. Against the scars the pit left on my skin.
I flinch.
She holds the pressure. Her eyes lock on mine and she doesn't look away.
"They didn't win." Her voice is steady and fierce and it cracks me open. "You did."
Two nights ago I wrapped my hands around the throat of the man who called me Number Seven, and then I chose to let him go. The pit made me a weapon and I put it down. But the woman beneath me, her palm pressed against the scars like they belong to her now—she's the reason I had a choice at all.
My forehead drops against her collarbone.
The growl that tears through me vibrates through the rug, through the floorboards, through the bones of the cabin.
I thrust deeper, harder, her name breaking out of me in fragments—Nina, Nina, my sha'li—and her nails rake down my back and her hips lift to meet mine.
I reach between us to press my thumb against her clit because I need her to fall first.
Her back arches and she clenches around my cock so tight my vision blurs, a cry tearing from her throat that I catch with my mouth.
I follow two strokes later, driving deep, and I come inside her with a shudder that rolls from my hips through my chest, the release crashing through me in waves until I'm shaking above her.
I bury my face in her neck and the purr takes over, deep and steady.
We breathe.
The fire pops. The guitar plays. Her fingers trace lazy circles through the fur on my chest while her heart beats against my ribs.
I reach for the mantel.
A small leather pouch she hasn't noticed.
I filed it the night she left. Sat on the hearth with a rasp and took a piece of myself away because I didn't know what else to do with the loss.
It's been behind the clock ever since, waiting for her to come back.
Inside: a piece of horn. Dark, curved, smooth—filed from my right horn, the one she touched first, the one whose base she traces when she kisses me.
She knows the handlers grabbed them to control me. She knows the child's grip on the porch at the Toy Run stopped my heart. She knows that touching them is the most intimate act she's ever shared with another person.
I hold it out to her. My hand shakes.
"Minotaur horns don't regenerate." My voice is wrecked. "This is—"
I can't finish the sentence.
She takes the piece from my palm. Presses it against her chest, over her heart, and her eyes fill.
"Yours." She finishes for me. "You're giving me something you can't get back."
I nod. One sharp, terrified nod.
She sits up on the rug and leans into me and presses her lips to the filed spot on my right horn—the raw edge, the new gap, the place where something used to be and now belongs to her.
The kiss sends a shudder through my entire body and the purr settles into something I've never felt before—I spent years suppressing it, not the rough stutter.
This is the purr I choose. Given freely, the way the horn piece is given freely, a sound my body makes because it finally belongs to me and I know exactly where I want to spend it.
"You gave me the part of you they used to hurt you." Her voice breaks. "I'm going to wear it every day until you forget it ever meant anything but this."
She falls asleep on the rug with her body curled against mine, the horn piece clutched in her fist over her heart.
I pull the quilt from the couch and drape it over both of us.
The fire burns low. The record turns through its final track, the needle lifts and the cabin goes quiet except for my breathing and hers and the hum I let roll through me because it's mine now—not the pit's, not a betrayal, not a leak. Mine.
I'll set it into a pendant myself. Wrap it in silver, hang it on a chain fine enough that the horn sits against her collarbone where everyone can see it.
Every monster who looks at her will know—she belongs to me, and I chose to belong to her, and the proof is the gap on my horn where something irreplaceable used to be.
The new year stretches ahead of me. For the first time in my life, the future doesn't look like something to survive.
It looks like something to build.