Chapter 14 #3
He doesn't finish. He slows, holds still inside me, and I feel what's coming before it starts. The swell at the base of his cock, the thickening that stretches me in increments I can register through the bond.
The knot.
He chose this. The first time he knotted me, I didn't understand what was happening until the lock completed and neither of us could move.
I understand now. I understand that every time he's been inside me and the knot didn’t form, it was because he decided against it.
The anatomy is his to command, the same way the wolf is his to command, the same way the pack is his to command.
Every knot is a choice. Every absence of a knot was also a choice.
The swell expands. I breathe through it, letting my body adjust.
His hands find my face, his thumbs against my cheekbones, his palms cupping my jaw. He holds me there while the knot locks into place, and when the connection completes, a groan tears from him that carries the weight of something being demolished.
We can't move. The lock holds us sealed together, every pulse of blood through the knot sending tremors through both of us that the bond amplifies until I can't tell which sensations are mine and which are his.
My orgasm didn't end. It changed. The knot presses against the place inside me that no other angle reaches, and the sustained pressure sends waves of heat through my body that crest and recede without resolution.
I'm shaking. He's shaking. We're both shaking, locked together in a bed in the Tower with the torches burning on the walls outside and the whole fortress holding its breath.
His release hits him in a series of pulses I feel through the knot, each one accompanied by a sound he presses into my neck, his face buried against my throat, his breath destroyed.
The warmth of him filling me is total, contained by the knot, and the intimacy of it is so complete that for a span of seconds the bond between us doesn't feel like a connection between two people.
It feels like the absence of separation.
As if the boundary between his body and mine has been temporarily revoked.
We lie in the dark. The fire has burned low. The torches on the wall outside cast moving shadows through the window, the flames stirring in a wind that carries the river's breath.
The knot holds. His body is heavy on mine, his face still in my neck, the ragged pull of each exhale slowly evening against my skin.
His lips move against my throat. The words are so quiet I almost miss them. "I should have told you from the start."
The words settle into the space between us. The fire burns. The knot pulses.
I go still. "Told me what?"
His arms tighten around me. He presses harder against my neck, and the knot stirs, and neither of us is going anywhere.
He doesn't answer.
The fire pops. The shadows move. Somewhere in the Tower, a wolf howls, and the sound is taken up by others, a chorus that rises and falls and rises again. Wolves howl when the territory is threatened. Wolves howl when the pack senses fracture.
The wolves of the Tower of London are singing for a reason I don't know. The man locked against me is holding a truth that he almost gave me. The tenderness of the last hour rearranges itself in my memory into what I should have recognized from the start.
Not tenderness.
Farewell.
I lie beneath the weight of a man who is still buried in me, who can’t physically separate for as long as the knot holds, who just gave me the most careful and devastating intimacy of my life.
I understand with the clarity of a woman who has been traded once before that I am about to be traded again. For whatever arrived on that raven's leg at Dover, whatever pulled the light from his eyes and the commands from his voice and replaced them with this terrifying, unfamiliar gentleness.
The knot softens. He eases out of me. He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling, and the distance between us on this bed is the widest it has ever been.
I lie beside him and I don't ask again.
Whatever he should have told me, whatever lock he's turning on whatever door he's about to close, I will find it myself.
I have always found it myself. My father taught me to gather intelligence from incomplete reports, and Ryland has just handed me the most incomplete report of his life.
‘I should have told you from the start.’ Eight words. I turn them over in the dark while the wolves sing outside and Ryland breathes beside me and the bond hums between us with a clarity that won’t let me sleep.
He should have told me what? The answer is somewhere in this Tower.
In the way he looked at me the first time in the treaty hall.
In how his body responds to mine with a precision that has never felt learned.
In the bond itself existing at all, this impossible thread connecting a human woman to a wolf-shifter alpha in a world that offers no explanation for why two people who should be enemies feel like two halves of a structure that was designed to hold each other's weight.
I will find it. And when I do, I don't know whether it will save us or finish what the raven started.