CHAPTER 11 #3
I take all of him, the thick fill of him seating deep, and we both go still with the enormity of it, this man inside me who I am supposed to hate, this man whose family unmade mine, and I do not hate him, I am choosing this, I am choosing him with every cell, and nothing I have ever done has put me in more peril than this.
"Look at me," he says, beginning to move, slow deep strokes that drag against everything inside me. "Look at me when you come, Amara. I want to watch you choose it."
My eyes lock on his. I can't not. He fucks me slow and deep and reverent in his bare cold room, the watch ticking on the nightstand, the cold sea pressing at the dark window, and he says my name like a liturgy, and he says moya once more against my mouth, and somewhere in it the careful wall of a man comes all the way down and I see him, just for a breath, the boy who carried his mother out of a fire into a slower one and has been a sentry ever since, and the want of being seen by him while he sees me is too much, it crests over me, and I come around his cock with my eyes open on his, shaking, clenching, gone.
And I cry.
It's quiet, barely more than breath, but it comes up out of me with the orgasm, hot at the corners of my eyes and spilling over, and he stills inside me, instantly, his whole body going to alarm.
"Amara. " Sharp now, the alarm cracking the control wide. "Did I—stop, tell me—"
"No. " I get a hand to his jaw, hold it, laugh and cry at once, which is a thing I swore I'd never do but here I am.
"No, these are good, Mateo. God. These are happy.
" I can barely get it out. "I came down here braced to be used.
I have been braced to be used my whole life.
And you—you held the weight of me like it was worth holding.
You said moya like it costs you something.
Nobody ever made me feel like the altar instead of the offering until—" I stop, because the rest of it is Gael, and this isn't Gael's moment, and Mateo's gray eyes are reading me and I think he understands anyway.
"These are too big to keep behind my eyes, that's all.
The whole of it just spilled. Don't stop. Please don't stop."
Something in his face I have never seen breaks fully open, and he lowers his forehead to mine, and he doesn't stop.
He finishes inside me with my name on his breath, slow even at the end, even now never hurried, and the warmth of him filling me feels like the opposite of the cold sea outside, like the one warm thing built against all that indifferent black water.
After, he gathers me against him without being asked.
He arranges my body along his with the same deliberate care he does everything, and he pulls the tight bedding up over both of us, and he tucks me against his right side so that my cheek lies on the burn-scarred arm, the smooth strange skin of it under my face, and I understand the offering of it — he is giving me the worst thing he has to lie on, the proof he flinches no one near, and he is making it my pillow.
I'm boneless. I'm wrecked. I'm warmer than I've been since the night the bratva took my father and left me standing in the cold.
I feel sleep coming up over me like the tide over the cove stones, and I do not fight it, which is its own kind of trust, falling asleep in a bratva Pakhan's bed with my whole soft self bare against him.
But just before it takes me, I feel that he hasn't relaxed.
His arm is around me, his hand spread warm over my hip, but his body is still alert, his breathing too even, his gaze — I crack one eye and see it — fixed on the door.
Watching it. The wall, even now. The sentry who cannot put down the watch because he's the only one who's ever held it.
"You don't have to watch the door," I murmur, half-asleep. "Nothing's coming through it. And if it does, I've got a thimble and I'm not afraid to use it."
A sound moves through his chest that I realize, astonished, is almost a laugh — a real one, low, rusty, like a hinge that hasn't turned in years.
"Sleep, moya," he says into my hair. "I'll watch it. It's what I'm for."
"You're for more than that," I tell him, or I think I do; I'm not sure the words make it out before sleep does.
The last thing I'm aware of is his hand moving once, slow, over the give of my hip, learning the shape of me even as I go under, and his voice, so low it's barely sound at all, almost not meant for me, almost just for the dark and the cold glass and the slow wink of the lighthouse out on the black water.
"Moya," he says, and there is a weight in the word, and for the first time since I've known him the weight rests easy in him, clean of dread.
He says it the way a man finally lays down a weapon he's carried so long his hand has shaped itself to the grip of it.
A thing set down at last. A thing he has decided to keep as a vow, and so it has stopped costing him to hold.
I should be afraid of that word. I've spent twenty-eight years learning to be afraid of that word.
I fall asleep inside it instead.