5 Kaia #4
I watched his mouth form the words and I thought, with a clarity that horrified me, about that mouth on mine.
How it would feel. He wouldn’t be careful about it—I knew that with a certainty that had no rational foundation—he would be warm and unhurried and he would mean it, and he would take my lower lip between his and the sound I would make against him would be nothing a Steward had ever made in a lifetime of service.
And then I thought about that mouth at the side of my throat, where my pulse was currently making itself known in a way I couldn’t hide, and my knees went uncertain beneath me.
And then—because my treacherous body apparently had no floor—I thought about lower.
His mouth at my collarbone, working the buttons of gray linen loose.
The wet heat of his tongue at the curve of my breast, finding the peak of me, and the noise I would make then would be worse than the first one, would be a sound that had never been in me before and had been in me my whole life, waiting.
And then lower still—
The blood that rushed to my face was matched exactly by the blood that rushed to the aching wet place between my thighs, and I stood in the middle of a common room and wanted him so badly my vision went slightly bright at the edges, and I was ashamed of it and I was glad of it and I could not untangle one from the other because they were the same feeling.
He reached out.
Two knuckles. He brushed them across the front of my tunic, over the pocket, over the small foil weight still hidden against the seam—a touch through two layers of cloth that should have been nothing, that was nothing, and a jolt of pure molten heat went straight from the place his knuckles grazed down into the aching core of me and bloomed there, sharp and wet and unmistakable, and my breath broke clean in half.
I did not step back.
That was the thing I understood, standing there with his knuckles resting against my pocket and my own pulse roaring in my ears and the wolf I was forbidden to name singing under my ribs—I had twenty-six years of training and a spine my mother had built with her nails and every reason in the world to put six feet of floor between us, and I did not move.
My body wanted to lean in, wanted to close that last inch and put itself against the heat of him, and the wanting carried the shape of things Sloane had said on the hill—other kinds of lives, other ways, he looks at you like the only fixed point in the room—and underneath all of it, threading through like smoke under a closed door, was the thing I could not say even inside my own head: that no one had ever, in twenty-six years, chosen me.
That no one had sat in a room and decided they wanted me.
His eyes came back up to mine.
“There she is,” he murmured.
The words landed in the center of my chest and cracked something there, quiet and total, like ice giving way beneath weight that has been building all winter, and I stood in the ruins of my own composure and felt—for one long, ungovernable second—seen.
I fled.
I turned on my heel and walked—too fast—out of the common room and down the corridor toward my office and the holy sanctioned path I should never have left.
Behind me I could feel his gaze on the line of my spine the whole way, warm as a hand laid flat between my shoulder blades.
The remaining candy crinkled against my hip with every step like a small bright bell I could no longer stop ringing, and the wanting followed me all the way to my desk.
I dropped into my chair, my breath still coming short, and reached blindly for the logs. I needed the clean, bloodless math of the Order to wash him out of my head.
But the file on top of the pile wasn’t a log.
It was a sealed directive. The heavy parchment bore the embossed crest of the Inner Circle, and the wax seal at the fold was the deep, unsettling blue of High Alchemist Joss’ own signet.
A chill went through me that had nothing to do with the temperature-controlled room.
Stewards did not receive direct correspondence from the High Alchemist.
I broke the seal with trembling fingers. The script inside was jagged, frantic, the ink pressed so hard into the paper it had nearly torn through in places.
To the Stewards of the mid-Western Quadrant:The current yield is insufficient.
The aurum latens drawn from the last harvest shows impurities.
You are allowing the bloom to wither before it is plucked.
We must refine the vessel. We must bleed the static from their veins until there is nothing left but the gold.
The beast is a cancer that consumes the magic.
Starve the beast, isolate the subject, purify the draw.
I require fifty units of unblemished aurum latens by the new moon. Purity is the only truth.- Joss
The parchment trembled in my hands. The words were wrapped in the language of logistics and care, but underneath them beat an obsessive hunger. Purify the draw. Starve the beast. He wasn’t talking about saving souls.
The chill spread from my fingers all the way down into the heat that Tommy had left in my belly, freezing it solid.
This was the holy work? This was the mercy I had dedicated my life to?
I stared at the Alchemist’s signature, and for the first time in twenty-six years, the catechism in my head was entirely, terrifyingly silent.