27. Gideon
GIDEON
There is a chair in the corridor. Rhys brought it out on the first night and set it beside the suite door without comment. It has remained empty while I pace the same section of floor.
I refuse to sit because it would make staying feel decided. I have stood here for a day and a night.
The door is two inches of old-growth timber, but her scent and sounds pass through it.
Her heat comes through the wood, intense rowan and sweet cream sharpened to burnt sugar, and underneath the scent, worse than the scent, the sounds, especially the unfinished cries between orgasms, which I stand through with my hands opening and closing on nothing, reminding myself that they are caring for her, which is true, which does very little to ease the pain.
I mean the cries between. The trough sounds, small, unfinished, cries that signal an unmet need, and I’ve started counting them.
I lost the count somewhere in the second dark, and it wasn’t mercy that lost it.
I kept perfect count. Every one of them is mine, and I stopped pretending otherwise a long time ago.
Soren leaves food and coffee beside the chair without speaking. He replaces them when I ignore them. Eventually I eat the bread and cold roast while standing.
Rhys came out to me once, in the first night. He stood in the corridor in the light from the suite, knuckles white at his sides, and he didn’t bother asking, because the asking had already been done by then, through the wall, clearly enough.
“She’s calling for you,” he said. “Not once by name. She won’t use your name, even under. You want to know what she calls you?”
“No.”
“The third one.” His eyes were wet, and his voice didn’t perform anything.
“You want to stand out here for months, that’s between you and the floor.
But I went behind your back once already this year, and I’d do it again, so here’s the truth at no charge.
You think you’re the only man in this pack who remembers a corridor like this one.
You’re not protecting her from you, Gideon.
You’re punishing you, and she is the one being hurt. ”
I sent him back in, since the alternative was answering, and he went, having already done the damage he came to do. Rhys confronts people directly. His words continue to hurt long after he has gone.
I have reconsidered it ever since, coming out the same every time. Biological need can outlast rules. I told her that in her office. I now understand that her rule remained firm; mine was the one failing.
The change comes in the worst hour of the second night, and I know it before the door opens, because the scent changes first.
Heat cycles should rise and subside, giving the body a period of relief after each episode.
Hers has stopped breaking. Her episodes become stronger and closer together without any relief, and her rowan scent has weakened and developed a scorched note, a note in it now that I know from a hospital corridor, the smell of a body spending reserves it doesn’t have.
Then the door opens. Soren stands in it, sleeves rolled, completely steady. Betas remain lucid during heat, but Soren is sweating from the work, and his face is the one from the lobby with the drunk, minus every trace of the murder. What’s left is a man assessing a dangerous change.
“She’s not breaking fever.” Flat, quiet, kitchen-voiced, the voice he’d use to tell me the flour was short with guests due.
“The waves are stacking, and they’re not paying out at the top.
Six hours of that now. It’s not enough, what we are, not for a matched cascade.
A four-way got called in that room, and three of us answered it.
I can hold her steady for hours more, not days.
After that it’s the clinic, and the clinic sits on the far side of a closed pass. You know what they’d fly in this.”
He doesn’t move out of the doorway yet. When he speaks again the kitchen’s gone out of his voice entirely and what’s left is older, the flatness of a man signing his name in the place he was told to sign it.
“She left one door open in her own terms, and she gave me authority to invoke it. Her conditions, lucid, at that table, in front of all three of us, and she made us say them back.” His eyes level on mine and carry no judgment at all, which is the worst thing they could carry.
“I’m invoking it. This is medically necessary.
” He says the two words without a flicker, in a flat clinical tone.
“She authorized you to enter and provide the matched response her body asks for, including penetration and a knot. She also authorized one mark, hers to your throat. Nothing in her nape, nothing answering it and no completed bond. That’s the whole of what she authorized, and it’s all that will happen. ”
Then he steps aside and holds the door.
“Which leaves your half of it, and she didn’t get to decide that one for you. Nobody does.”
I reconsider every reason one last time in the doorway.
On one side, every reason I’ve stood in this corridor, and the corridor before it, the numbers, the vow that biology doesn’t get a second body out of this lodge.
On the other side, through two inches of old growth, one trough-sound, small, unfinished, searching.
“Yes.” It comes out of me hoarse, to a man holding a door. “To all of it, on her terms, exactly as she set them. Say it once more so I’ve heard it standing up.”
“Medically necessary,” Soren says.
Fuck every ledger I have ever kept. I stop arguing with myself, and I go in.
My knees nearly give way.
I bled this radiator myself. Taped a work order inside the closet door so nobody would ask why I was warming a room for a woman I was trying to get off my mountain.
None of it got me ready for standing in the middle of the result.
The lamp burning low at nest height. Wool in layers with all of us worked through it.
And in the center, turning toward the door before it’s finished opening, her.
She’s wrecked. Hair stuck to her temple, mouth swollen, fever riding high in her face. She finds me across the room and holds on.
She gives a broken purr, and I step closer.
Three steps in, I have to stop.
“Say it,” she says. Her voice is almost gone, and it’s completely hers. “Say what you came in here to say, so I can tell you to shut up.”
“Nobody bites you.” I answer in a voice I barely recognize. “The clause holds. Nothing you forbade happens in this room. I came in to respect your decision from inside the room, if you’ll have me doing it.”
“Stay.” No hesitation anywhere in it. “And don’t make me say it twice.” Then, because she’s herself all the way down, fever or no fever, “Took you long enough, you absolute idiot.”
Soren puts the water bottle in my hand on his way past and touches her hair once with his knuckles. The door clicks shut behind him. Rhys is asleep in the outer wool with one arm flung toward the alcove. Snow continues to strike the shutters, and then the trough ends.
She comes off the wool into me, and the first press of her skin against my throat tears out of me the sound I’ve been strangling since the library.
It comes up deep and rolls through the room. I can’t stop it. I don’t try. Her spine arches. Her glands become hot and swollen against me. Her scent goes rich and close, and I know exactly what I’m smelling.
“There it is.” She breathes it into my jaw. “God. Do that again.”
I do it again. I’d do anything she named right now, which is the entire thing I’ve been afraid of since the first morning, and I find I don’t care.
She goes at my shirt with both hands and gets impatient with it. A button goes. She doesn’t apologize.
“Off. All of it. I’ve been smelling you through a wall for two days, and I’m done being reasonable.”
“Briar.” I get her name out, and my hands are shaking, which is new, which she’ll have noticed. “Tell me you’re in there.”
She takes my face in both hands and holds it still. The fever’s rolled back just far enough. Her eyes are clear.
“I’m in here.” Her voice is steady. “The no about your teeth stands. Everything else you’re getting is on purpose.” Her thumb moves once at my cheekbone. “Now take your fucking shirt off, Gideon.”
I get us both out of what’s left of it, and then I put my hands on her properly, the first time in my life I’ve done it.
She’s soaked. Two days of it, slick down the inside of her thighs, and when I work my fingers through it she makes a noise that is completely unrestrained and drags my wrist down harder.
“There. Right there. Don’t you dare be careful.”
I’m not careful. I get two fingers into her cunt and my thumb on her clit and I work her until she’s swearing at the ceiling. Her heels dig into the wool. Her hips chase my hand. When she breaks it’s fast and loud, and she says my name in the middle of it.
Not the third one. My name.
That ends my restraint.
“Now.” She hauls at my shoulders. “Now, now, I want your cock, stop making me ask for things.”
“You never have to ask me for anything again.”
“Then move.”
I get a hand under her and press in, one stroke, all of it, and her cunt takes me. She’s hot enough to burn. She’s so wet the sound of it fills the alcove. Her nails go into my back, her legs lock at the small of it, and she pulls.
“Yes. Finally. Yes.”
“Fuck.” It gets out of me before I can stop it, and I’ve kept that word away from her since the day she arrived.
Whatever rhythm I meant to keep is gone in four strokes. She moves with me and meets every thrust.
“Harder,” she says into my ear. “Right there. Fuck me harder.”
I grip her hip and drive into her. “This?”
“Yes. Don’t stop. You’re mine, Gideon.”
“Yours.” I thrust deeper, and her nails score my back. “Every part you want.”
“Then come inside me when you knot me.”
My knot swells and catches at her opening. “Now?” I ask, holding still long enough to see her face.
“Now. Knot me.”
I thrust once more. My knot pushes inside and locks us together while her orgasm tightens her pussy around me. I come deep inside her, her name breaking out of me in a shout. Her fever drops at once, and she sobs against my throat with relief.
Then she purrs, and this time I can answer her.
My low sound matches her purr. The sound a matched pack makes, which I’d forgotten a man could still be part of, and she feels it happen against her cheek and purrs harder.
The worst hour comes after, which no training warned either of us about.
Her fever rises one final time. She’s unable to speak, wrecked and locked to me, and she starts to beg.
Not for what I braced for. Her mouth finds my throat. My gland. And what she’s begging for, over and over, is to mark.
To claim. Not to be claimed.
Her teeth graze the gland, and my vision goes white at the edges. This is the one door she left open. She named it herself at that table with the snow coming down behind her, sober, witnessed, made all three of us say it back to her. One mark. Hers, to my throat.
“Let me.” Into my skin, fever-certain. “Please, Gideon. Let me.”
She doesn’t have to ask me. She settled this before the fever ever got its hands on her, and I settled my half of it in a corridor with my boots still on. I’ve told this woman no every day for months. This is the one she made sure I’d never have to.
So I tip my head back and give her my throat.
“Take it.” I can only whisper. “It’s been yours since the library.”
Her teeth go in.
It isn’t gentle, but I didn’t want gentle.
The bond that went through me the first morning she walked into my house activates fully.
A partial bond, no answering mark in her nape to close it, and even incomplete, it gives her access to emotions and sensations I usually suppress.
The sound I make then isn’t a growl. I don’t know what it is. I’ve never made it before.
She lets go before it can set whole, licks the mark once, thorough about it. Then she drops into sleep between one breath and the next, still knotted to me, purring, her mouth against my throat.
The fever breaks for good before dawn.
She surfaces once in the gray, one eye’s worth, and finds me still there. Her fingers come up and rest on the mark, not pressing. Checking it’s still where she left it.
“That’ll need a form,” she mumbles, most of the way under already.
“I’ll draft it.”
She huffs, which is Soren’s laugh, which she’s caught off him. Then she’s gone, with her hand still on my throat.
I should leave before she wakes. That was the plan, or what survived of one, and the plan has a flaw in it. Her hand’s closed round my wrist and she isn’t letting go.
The mark on my throat pulses under her fingers.
So I stay.