CHAPTER 29 #2
"Look at you," he says, very low. It comes out raw and unrehearsed. He owns too few words to ever waste them on lines. "Every time. I think I've made my peace with it, with how much, and then you take off your clothes and I have to learn it over again."
"Mateo."
"Call this something other than kindness," he says. "I have been accused of softness for you, and they have the name of it wrong. I want you the way I want air after going under. What you read as gentleness is only need wearing gentleness as a glove, because I refuse to grab."
And there — there — is the thing about this man that broke me open weeks ago and hasn't let me re-set since.
He won't grab. He has the size and the power and the legal right by a contract I signed in my own maiden name to take, and he refuses it, every time, down to the bone, and hands me the next move like it's the only treasure in the house.
So I take it. I put his hand on the weight of my breast and watch his breath go ragged, and I lead him to the single good bed, and I lie back in the lamplight, and I open my arms to the wall of a man who learned tonight to set the wall down.
He follows me down slow.
He worships me the way a man prays who's forgotten the words and remembers only that he meant them.
His mouth at my throat first, where the steel lies cold against my hot skin; he doesn't move the chain, he kisses around it, careful of the small worn thing like he understands it's load-bearing.
Down to the weight of my breasts, both hands full of me, his thumbs over my nipples until they draw tight and I arch up off the bed with a sound, and he stays there, unhurried, patient past sense, while I twist under him and dig my fingers into his silvering hair and beg without words.
"Patience," he says against my skin, the same word he's used on me every time, and I want to hate it and instead I feel it go through me like warmth through cold cloth.
He kisses the round of my belly, where the old wound lives deepest, where every cruelty I ever swallowed pooled and set — his mouth on the soft of me, lingering, deliberate, until the thing I brace against has nowhere left to live, and I feel my own eyes sting in the lamplight and don't fight it.
"This," he says, palm spread wide over the give of my hip, the give of my thigh, gripping me like a man grips the gunwale of a boat in weather. "All of this. Moya. " Mine. Grave, the way he gives it, given once and meant — low and rough and certain, a vow and a verdict braided into one syllable.
But tonight, after he says it, he goes still again. And then he lifts his head and looks at me up the length of my body, something working in his face, some calculation harder than any Emil ever ran on his monitors, and he says the rest of it.
"And yours."
I go still myself. "What?"
"Moya," he says again, and his burn-scarred arm comes up — the right one, the inside of the forearm smooth and pale where twelve years ago he carried his dying mother out of a burning house and got her death for his trouble — and he braces it beside my head, the scar right there in my eye-line, the whole silent story of every person he ever failed to save.
"Mine has never been a leash, Amara. I want to finish it.
Mine is a vow, and a vow runs both ways or it isn't one.
I am also yours. " His voice goes very low, almost gone.
"That's the part no one warned me about, the part that slipped past every model I ran and every model Emil ran and everything Lev still thinks he knows.
You belong to me, yes, and the truth runs the other way besides: I belong to you.
The wall belongs to you now. I've kept it alone since I was twenty-three. I am so tired of keeping it alone."
I get my hand up to that scar. I put my palm flat against the smooth pale length of it, the place where the fire took its toll on him, and I feel him flinch and then hold still and let me.
"Tell me what happened," I say. "Tell me the part you never say."
He's told me the shape of it, weeks ago — the fire, his mother, the carrying. He's never told me the inside. He looks at my hand on the scar for a long moment, the cold glass ticking faintly as it sheds the night's heat, and then he tells me. Quiet. Flat, the way he says the worst things.
How he got her out and how she lived four days, and how she asked him at the end to be careful with the others, with Emil and Gael, to be the wall — and how he heard be the wall as be only the wall, and spent twelve years being a door that won't open because the last person who walked through one died of it.
"And then you," he says. "And then you, and your terms, and your maiden name signed under the seal like a refusal, and your soft hands building a dress two days before a war.
You walked through the door I welded shut.
You put a handle on it. Nothing has unmade me so thoroughly in twelve years.
" His mouth moves, almost a smile, the rarest thing he owns. "I find I want to thank you instead."
I pull him down and kiss him with my hand still on the scar, and that's when the slow thing finally turns.
He takes me slow.
There's no other word honest enough. He's between my thighs, spreading me with those careful patient hands, and he watches my face the way he watches everything, like there'll be a price for looking away.
"Look at me," he says when he finally pushes into me, filling me by degrees, devastating in his unhurry, "look at me, Amara," and I do, I hold his storm-gray gaze while he seats himself all the way home and we both go still around the enormity of it.
Then he moves. Slow and deep and certain, all the steady pull of a tide come in, every stroke a sentence in a language we've been building since I struck his obedience clause with my own pen in a cold chapel two months ago.
His burn-scarred arm braces under my shoulders, the one that carried the dead, holding me now like it was always meant for this and only ever got the other job by accident.
The watch ticks on the nightstand, open, bare. Out past the black glass the Sound lies flat and silent, holding its breath with the rest of the house.
"Yours," he says against my mouth, moving in me, and the word comes out as an offering, he's giving it back to me like a ring. "Say it to me. I have said it to you for weeks. Say it back."
"Mine," I breathe, and feel his whole body lock around the syllable, feel what it does to a man who has belonged to a debt and a name and a dead family's expectations his entire life to belong, instead, for once, gladly, to a living woman who chose him.
"Mine, Mateo. The wall is mine. You're mine. I've got you."
He shudders. The Pakhan of the Sokolov bratva shudders in my arms like a man set down after carrying something too long, and he drops his forehead to mine and moves in me slow and deep and patient, always patient, until the patience is its own cruelty and its own gift, until I'm wound so tight around him I can't tell where the wanting ends and I begin.
"Now," he says, when I'm shaking, right at the edge with his name coming apart in my mouth. "Look at me when you come, Amara. I want to watch you choose it."