18 Tommy
Fifteen degrees.
That was the gap, the dead slice of air where the camera couldn’t see—I’d clocked it on day one, ambling past with my tourist eyes wide and my wolf counting, and the number had lived in the back of my skull ever since like a coin I’d been saving for exactly this.
The camera over the service door swept its slow mechanical arc, left to right, lazy, and at the far edge of its travel there was a wedge of hallway it gave up on, and that wedge had a door in it, and behind that door—
Kaia’s hand was a brand around mine. She was burning through her wet uniform.
I could feel the heat coming off her in waves the cold pond water hadn’t even dented, and her breath had gone short and ragged beside me, and when I cut my eyes sideways the gold had flooded all the way to the centers of her eyes and stayed there.
We had maybe two minutes before Joss sent a Warden down to find out why his investment was taking the scenic route to the veranda.
So I gave them a show.
“O-okay, see, this is exactly what I was afraid of—” I let my teeth chatter, let my whole frame shake like the hypothermia had its hooks in deep, and I stumbled, dragging her with me, my voice climbing into the bright panicked register that had carried me through every checkpoint in this building.
“I can’t, I can’t go up the stairs like this, I’m soaked, I have a documented thing about being wet and cold, it triggers the—the episodes, the brush-fire thing, I need a towel, I need a towel right now or I’m gonna—”
The camera reached the right edge of its sweep. Started back.
I hit the wedge of dead air and yanked the service door open and pulled her in backward, into the dark and the dust and the smell of bleached cotton stacked floor to ceiling, and got the door shut behind us with my heel before the lens swept past where we’d been standing.
Then it was just the two of us in a closet the size of a coffin, and the only light was the thin bar coming through the louvered slats. Kaia made a sound against my chest that I’d been hearing in my sleep for three days.
“Hey.” I had her face in both hands before the door finished settling. “Hey. I’ve got you. Look at me.”
She looked. The gold was bad. Worse than the lawn, worse than the transport, the whole iris drowned in it, and a fine tremor ran through her jaw, and when I pressed my palm flat to her sternum her heart was going like a fist on a door.
“It’s—Tommy, it’s all the way up, I can’t—the potion—” Her hands fisted in my soaked shirt. “He’s down there. Your brother. And it broke something, seeing him broke something, I felt it go—”
“I know.”
Finn.
The blood matted black in his hairline, the dragging leg, the wall he’d made of his own face.
My wolf came up the inside of my ribs snarling, demanding I put my shoulder through this door and the next one and every wall between me and the creatures who’d put their hands on my brother—and I took that whole roaring animal and I shoved it down into the dark and sat on the lid, because right now, in this minute, there was only one thing on this earth that needed me, and she was shaking apart in my hands.
Compartments. My whole life was compartments now. The rage in one. The fear for Finn in another. And this—this I gave her everything.
“Two minutes,” I breathed against her temple. “We’ve got two minutes and then we walk up those stairs looking like nothing happened. I need you to come back from the edge, sweetheart. I need to put it out. Right now. Fast. You with me?”
A jerky nod. A tear cut down through the pond water still beaded on her cheek.
I dropped to my knees in the dark.
The closet was so tight my shoulders hit shelving on both sides, and a stack of folded towels slid and thumped onto my back and I didn’t care.
I gathered the sodden gray Steward’s skirt in both fists and shoved it up her thighs, and the heat of her skin scalded my palms, fever-hot, the kind of heat that cooked a person from the inside if it didn’t find a door.
No prep. No slow worship like the iron box.
No time for any of the things I’d promised her in the dark.
Just my mouth and my hands and the clock screaming in my ears.
I hooked the wet cotton aside and put my mouth on her.
She bucked, and I pinned her hips back against the door with my forearm, and the taste of her flooded over my tongue—rain and dark honey and the salt-warm reality of her—and somewhere underneath the desperation a part of me went still and reverent the way it always did, because this was mine, this was the thing I’d been starving for, and I’d have given a year of my life for the right to take an hour over it.
I had ninety seconds.
I worked her ruthless and exact. Flat of my tongue where she ached most, two fingers sliding into the scalding grip of her, finding the place inside that made her whole spine bow, and I drove them in time with the strokes of my mouth and felt the fever start to gather, start to pour down out of her chest toward the one channel out.
Above me her hand clamped over her own mouth to keep the sound in.
That was when the boots stopped outside the door.
Heavy. Squeaking on the wet floor where we’d dripped our way in. They halted dead in the corridor not three feet from the louvered slats, and a radio crackled, and a bored voice said, “—yeah, west service hall, no, nothing down here, must’ve gone up already—”
Kaia froze under my mouth, every muscle locking, a high thin whine building in her throat with nowhere to go—and I felt the gold surge, felt the wolf in her rear up at the threat, felt her body teeter on the knife’s edge between climax and catastrophe—
I came up off my knees fast and silent and got my mouth over hers, swallowing the whine whole, my cheek pressed hard to her cheek, my body crushing her into the door so she couldn’t move, couldn’t make the wood creak, couldn’t do anything but take it.
And I didn’t stop my hand. I kept it moving, deep and merciless, curling against that spot inside her while the Warden’s boots squeaked and his radio spat static and my brother bled three floors down and my own cock throbbed against my soaked pants, iron-hard and screaming and utterly, deliberately ignored.
Come on, sweetheart. I poured it down the thread between us. Come on. Right now. Give it to me. Quiet. Just for me.
She shattered.
It tore through her in total silence, her whole body seizing against mine, her teeth catching my lower lip hard enough to bring up the copper tang of my own blood.
I drank the scream she couldn’t make straight out of her open mouth.
Her inner muscles clamped around my fingers in deep radiating spasms, milking, pulsing, and I held her through every one of them with my mouth sealed over hers and my forearm pinning her hips and the Warden’s boots a yard away through a quarter-inch of wood.
The fever poured down out of her and grounded into me, into the floor, into the dark.
The boots squeaked. Moved off. The radio voice faded down the corridor. “—copy, probably sent him to Dorm B to dry out, the Alchemist’s pissed, says she’s stressing the asset—”
I held perfectly still until I couldn’t hear him anymore. Then I let her mouth go.
She sagged against the door, lungs heaving, and when she lifted her face into the bar of louvered light the gold had banked down—not gone, never all the way gone now, but dulled, the fever a survivable ember instead of a wildfire.
“There you are,” I breathed.
I dragged my own hand back and got my arm around her before her knees could finish folding, and for one second I just held her in the toppled towels with my forehead pressed to hers, both of us shaking, the want still grinding low and unfinished in my gut. My whole body ached with the not-having.
I’d take that ache to my grave and call it a privilege.
“The vial,” she whispered.
Right.
I dug into the seam of my clothes where Nadia’s bitter little reset button rode, and Kaia was already pulling hers from somewhere inside the sodden gray uniform.
We cracked the wax seals in the dark and tipped the last drops under our tongues at the same time.
Mine burned down rosemary-and-tar and the wolf sank under its gray blanket one more time, hackles still up, snarling all the way down.
Two empty vials. I felt the weight of that land in my chest harder than the burns, harder than the cold.
“That’s it,” I whispered. The words came out flat.
“That’s the last of it. Nadia gave us seven days of mask and we just burned the last drop on day—” I did the math and hated it.
“We’re nowhere close. The next time this fever climbs, sweetheart, there’s nothing left to hide it.
No more potion. No more pretending you’re one of theirs. ”
Her hand found my jaw in the dark, her thumb dragging across the blood on my lip where her teeth had caught me. “Then we finish it today,” she said.
And the Steward came back over her like a coat pulled on, the spine drawing up even as she leaned on me, the gold banking the last degree behind a flat clean nothing.
“Help me up. We walk out separate. You’re a babbling idiot and I’m escorting an unstable payload.”
“I’m extremely qualified for that role,” I said, smiling a kiss against her mouth and got us both standing. I stuffed the empty vial back in my clothes, and put my hand on the door.
I shoved open the door on a wave of fake teeth-chattering and stumbled out into the corridor wrapping a stolen towel around my shoulders.
A Warden was rounding the corner just as I cleared the doorway, and I gave him the whole show—shivering, hunched, my voice pitched high and watery.
“Oh, thank God, an authority figure, listen, I fell in the koi pond, there were fish, I don’t think they bit me but I can’t rule it out, I need dry clothes and possibly a tetanus shot and a strongly worded conversation with management—”