Chapter Thirty-Six
THIRTY-SIX
Old Ones, the taste of him is everything.
Everything I crave, everything I need.
Everything.
Our mouths collide, and he kisses me like I’m the answer to all the questions we’ve never had the time to ask—as if there’s nothing else outside these four walls.
Wolf’s hands knot in the hair at the back of my neck and pull me closer into him. My fingers fist the fabric of his shirt to bring him closer too, his hard chest heating against me.
“Fuck,” Wolf groans against my neck, working kisses down the sensitive path of skin along my jaw to where my pulse flutters. The thrum of my beating heart drowns out everything else, everything but the sound of his breath catching rough in his throat. “How are you alive?”
One of his hands grabs hungrily at the flesh of my hip. The other comes up to cup my face, and he pulls back just enough to search my eyes. The fire in his gaze burns away the ice that’s been frozen beneath my skin since this battle began.
I nip at his lip, drawing a low sound at the back of his throat that sets my blood on fire anew. “Your surprise isn’t a compliment.”
“Wasn’t meant to be one,” he murmurs against the soft skin where my neck meets my ear. Wolf’s thumb strokes along my cheekbones, something almost tender stirring in his eyes. “Fuck, Maeve. How are you alive?” he asks again.
Because I killed people.
Because even if I’ve scrubbed it off, my hands are covered in blood.
I can’t think about any of that. I can’t think about the Assay, about the lives that I took, about the blood or the mages or the attack.
About any of it.
I rip my gaze away from his, pressing my eyes closed against the memories.
A callused thumb strokes again along my cheek, both of Wolf’s palms cupping my face with impossible tenderness, like he’s afraid I might fall apart.
“Maeve,” he says softly, and when I look back at him, his green eyes are a tempest—and the only safe port from the chaos raging inside me.
There’s chaos in his gaze too.
And if the gathering storm finds us, I want to go down knowing I’ve held nothing back.
“Kiss me,” I whisper, and it comes out dangerously close to a plea.
Wolf might’ve put me at risk by planting me in the Assay. And he might’ve made me into a lure, then a weapon.
But I am the weapon that killed a king—and survived.
I am a woman who knows the truth now—and I know exactly where I stand.
I choose to be part of the fight for a better world.
I choose him.
I want him.
Despite—or maybe because of—everything between us.
“We shouldn’t.” But Wolf says the words as if he doesn’t entirely believe them, one finger brushing back the soft hairs from my face.
I lean in close enough to curl one hand around the back of his neck and knot my fingers in the dark tangles of his rain-soaked hair. He makes a rough, low sound at my touch, eyes searching mine, like flames on the verge of flaring brighter.
And I don’t want to be numb anymore—I don’t want to think, don’t want to remember.
“Please,” I whisper.
It’s enough.
His lips seize mine, and the kiss turns wild, desperate. I’m hungry, ravenous, in a way I never dared to let myself be with him, and I can’t help but think he feels the same.
Wolf rakes his teeth gently over my bottom lip before tilting my head back with both his large hands, deepening the kiss. My tongue meets his in teasing, soft strokes. His explores every inch of my mouth, like if he just holds me close enough, everything else will fade away.
I’m counting on it.
I kiss him with everything left in me.
My fingers work at the fastenings of the leather jacket beneath his heavy cloak, and I shove it off him. The cloak unfastens with a flick of my fingers at his neck, and both hit the ground at the same time.
His arms wrap around me, pulling me so tightly against him, my feet leave the ground. I wrap them around his hips, and the warmth between us turns every inch of me flush with heat and aching.
I want him—I want this—so bad I can taste it.
The smell of sweet sage, the smoke and leather of him, fill my lungs with every breath.
I can’t get enough.
Wolf’s boots collide with something hard, and he stumbles. One arm clutches me tighter to him, the other flying out behind me to break our fall.
My back meets the softness of his bed, and then his weight is on top of me. Finally. He kicks off his boots, yanks roughly at mine. Just the time it takes to throw them across the room is longer than I can bear his lips being away from mine.
His kisses are a drug. That’s the only explanation. This is an addiction to the relief of his touch, to the rough sound of his breath in his throat that stirs my blood like nothing else.
“I want you,” I tell him, and it comes out hazy, a whisper half scraped over embers. His eyes flare. Wolf trails his lips down the path of my throat and the neckline of my shirt—his shirt that I’d snatched from his dresser like a thief in the night.
Now, that’s just fucking unfair, he said to me once. How good you look in my shirt.
My mouth curves against his, and he pulls back, studying me. “You okay?” Concern knots his brow, and I know if I so much as say one word, he’ll stop.
I’m the one in control here—and it only makes me want him more.
I nod, trailing a hand down the strong lines of his back above me. There’s his ghost of a smile, and Old Ones, the way it makes his green eyes burn even brighter. “Don’t stop.”
I pull him back down to me, and my thighs part as he settles between them. I reach a hand around to grip his ass and gasp when his teeth take the edge of my ear in response.
“I thought I’d never see you again.” The warm brush of his breath on my neck makes me melt. “Thought the gardai would get you, that I’d never get to…”
Whatever he meant to say goes unsaid as his lips find mine again.
There are no promises here. Nothing we can say that changes what this is. We’re thorns wrapping around the same stem, always one wrong move away from drawing blood. From fucking up whatever this starving, undeniable thing between us really is—if we live long enough to find out.
Wolf’s hands work at the hem of my shirt, his fingers trailing heat along the plane of my stomach.
He doesn’t push. He doesn’t ask, or reach for anything I’m not already willing to give, anything I’m not aching for him to claim.
But I hear the question in his touch all the same and take the tunic off myself, guiding his fingers, his touch, back to my skin.
His hand climbs up my ribs, careful of the scar left by the assassin’s blade, and cups the curve of my breast. His thumb traces the hard peak he finds there, and I let my head fall back, gasping.
“Yeah?” Wolf growls against my mouth, and kisses me; I answer by nipping at his bottom lip. I reach my hand down between us, teasing at the waistband of his leathers. I stroke the length of him beneath, already hard for me.
The groan I draw from him pours fuel on the flames licking up my core.
I pull at the shirt covering the muscled expanse of his chest, and Wolf’s breath catches. He tears his mouth away, forehead resting against mine, and a rare flicker of…
Is that fear that darkens his eyes?
I pull back, searching him the way he looked at me, but let my thumb trail along the inches of bare skin above his waistband. But I don’t draw the shirt any higher.
He tenses, almost imperceptibly, and draws one hand up to cup my face as his darkened green eyes flicker back to mine.
Old Ones… it’s like he’s waiting for me to pull away. To walk away.
From him.
“You might not like what’s underneath,” Wolf warns softly.
My heart splinters.
Without a word, never taking my eyes off his, I draw the hem of the shirt up another inch, then another. I move slowly, waiting for him to tell me to stop, to give me some sign he doesn’t want this.
He never does, even as he braces with every inch of skin he lets me bare until there’s nothing left but for him to drag the shirt over his shoulders and throw it somewhere neither of us cares about. A brief flare of anguish burns in his gaze, there and gone in a blink—and I take him in.
Old Ones—there are so many more scars than I had seen in that secret room where he bandaged my side. Some jagged, others more like the raised welts of long-healed brands. Still others mirror the branching purple scar marking his jawline.
My chest, my heart, crack open, a rock wedging in my throat. “How?”
I trail a hand along the deep welts and indentations over the muscled width of his chest, his collarbone, his ribs.
He shudders, just as the storm crashes outside.
“Does it matter?” Wolf watches me trace the scars with a feather-soft touch.
I don’t want to hurt him—can’t imagine anyone hurting him like this.
There’s a weight behind his simple question—a shield just waiting to be drawn back up between us.
I don’t answer him with words. Instead, I close the inch between us and press my lips gently to the deep, raised scar carved across the dip where his shoulder meets his collarbone and feel the muscles there tremble beneath my kiss.
“Maeve,” he whispers, low and ragged. And when I turn my face up to his, the raw longing in his eyes bruises my heart.
His mouth finds mine, and this time the kiss is a dangerous combination of raw hunger and need and the aching loneliness that’s burned in us both for too long.
Wolf lowers his mouth to the peak of my breast.
Fuck.
The heat of his mouth only adds to the fire inside me. His tongue teases my nipple, drawing tight coils of pleasure, and I stifle a moan with my hand.
His fingers reach up, knotting in mine. He pulls the hand from my mouth, kissing along each of my bruised knuckles.
“I want to hear you. I need to hear you, Maeve.”
My name in his mouth sounds raked over coals. I want to hear him say it again and again and again, even if there’s no guarantee either of us will live to see tomorrow.
Time stops. Everything stops, except for us.
His hand slips beneath the waist of my leathers, and there’s no hiding the moan his fingers coax from me.
I don’t want to, even if I could.