Chapter 7
Reilly
I smelled that he was hard before he finished the second step out of the trees.
Not a guess. The bond laid it out like an inventory. Heat. Wet cloth. The fat swell at the base of him that I had taken on my floor. I stood at the marker with my hands in the open and my own underwear already wrecked and listened to him talk about the west cut like that was what we were doing.
Marshall heard the same words. Marshall also smelled the rest of it. I could tell by the way he would not look at my face.
We did the terms in the dirt anyway. Paid watch. His wolves. My ground. No hall. I heard myself say the cabin. Storage. A table. Sunset. Marshall said my name like a brake. I did not take it back.
Walking up the path was worse than standing still. Every step rubbed. I kept my coat closed. Marshall waited until the rifles were far enough back.
“You put him in that room,” he said.
“I put the paper in that room.”
“Reilly.”
“If he sleeps in the village Idony will call it a claim before the ink dries. If he sleeps on the west bench I have to explain why a rejected mate is camping in sight of the hall. The cabin is off the path. It already smells like him. I am not lighting a new fire in a clean house.”
Marshall stared at the side of my head. “It smells like him because you fucked him in it.”
“I know why it smells like him.”
“Then don’t act like you picked it for the table.”
I didn’t answer. At the yard Edward was waiting with his coat still on. He looked at my face and then at Marshall’s and he didn’t ask if I had touched Owen. He asked if Owen was coming up.
“No,” I said. “Sunset. Cabin. You’re in the hall.”
“I’m tired of the hall.”
“I don’t care.”
He went inside anyway. Idony had paper ready like she had known I would need it before I did.
She had written a draft watch contract in a hand that would hold up if Alexander Hills ever put his nose on it.
Pay. Bounds. No claim language. A line that said the company remained outside pack law except in defense of the cut.
She watched me read it. “You’re putting him under the ridge.”
“Yes.”
“I was in that yard, Reilly.”
“I know where you were.”
Idony capped the ink. “If you sign this in that cabin, don’t sign anything else. Do you understand me.”
I understood her. I took the paper and a pen and a second copy and I did not go to my rooms to change again. There was no point. I would be wet at sunset whether the cloth was clean or not.
We went down at the last of the light.
The holding cabin had been storage for three years.
Crates. A coil of wire. The bench. The table.
Someone had moved the lamp back to the center, which meant Marshall had sent a body down here after the marker and I was going to ignore that.
The floorboards were the same. I looked at them once and then I did not look at them.
Owen was already inside.
Coat off. Shirt on. Hands on the back of a chair like he had to give them a job.
Melanie Vernon stood in the open door with her shoulder to the frame and her eyes on the path, not on us.
Marshall took the other side of the door.
Rifles outside. The room was too small for four people and a bond that had never learned the rite.
I shut nothing. The door stayed open on purpose.
I set the paper on the table. The same table I had sat on with his mouth between my legs. I kept my eyes on the ink.
“Sit down,” I said.
He sat. I sat across from him. My knees cleared his under the wood by a finger.
I felt the heat of him anyway. He smelled like pine and horse and come, recent, like he had taken himself in hand after I left the marker.
The bond confirmed it. A raw edge. My cunt clenched so hard I had to put my palm flat on the paper to stay in the chair.
Marshall said, “Terms first.”
Owen did not look at Marshall. “I already said terms.”
“Now they’re written,” I said. I turned the page.
“West cut. Your eight here, more if I call and you agree. You don’t enter the village without a runner.
You don’t eat from the hall stores. Pay is coin for the first month if I can strip it out of the levy shortfall.
After that, meat and winter fodder. You don’t fly a banner.
You don’t use this pack’s name. You don’t answer Idony. You answer the contract.”
“And you,” he said.
“I sign as acting Luna. That’s the hall, not me.”
His mouth twitched. “That’s a lie you need for your elder.”
“That’s the only way this gets signed.”
He read. His throat moved. I watched it and thought about biting it and thought about the way he had bitten his own cheek instead of my neck three years ago. I was soaking the chair. I sat still and let it happen.
“Price is low,” he said.
“It’s what I have.”
“Then the price goes up in other ways or I take my eight back to a job that pays.”
Marshall shifted in the door. I kept my voice level. “What other ways.”
Owen looked at me then. Not at the paper. “I sleep here. Not the village. Not your rooms. Here. You already said it at the stone. Put it on the page so no one gets to pretend later that I snuck into a cabin you use for wire.”
I wrote it. I heard the pen. I wrote company lead to quarter in the ridge holding cabin for the term of watch like it was a sentence about crates.
Melanie spoke from the door without turning. “He stays on the bench. Door open nights until your council stops sniffing this.”
“Door closed,” Owen said. “I’m not sleeping for Hillsford.”
“Closed,” I said, and wrote that too, because an open door on this room was a joke and everyone in it knew.
We went line by line. Bounds of the cut.
What counted as a Hillsford crossing. Who got the first shout if Gareth’s men came polite instead of armed.
Owen’s voice stayed flat. Mine did too. Under the table my knee bumped his and I pulled it back like I had been burned.
He went still. The smell of him got thicker.
I could pick out the exact heat of his cock from here, the wet at the head, the swollen base.
My nipples were so tight the binding felt like a file.
“You don’t touch me in this room,” I said, not for the first time.
“You said that.”
“I’m putting it on the page.”
I wrote no claim, no bite, no rite reversal implied by quartering. My handwriting went worse on implied. He watched the letters form.
“You can write it,” he said, low. “Doesn’t make it true.”
“It makes it enforceable.”
“By who. Huntington? He’s going to stand in that door every night and measure how wet you are when you walk down here with a report?”
Marshall said, “Watch your mouth.”
Owen didn’t. He leaned in over the paper, not touching me, close enough that I got his breath.
“You picked this table on purpose. You sat on this table with my tongue in you. You took my knot on that floor. Now you want a sentence that says quartering is just quartering. Write it. I’ll sign it.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend my dick doesn’t remember the grain of this wood. ”
Melanie said, “Owen.”
I should have ended it. I should have taken the paper to the hall and signed it under Idony’s lamp. I stayed in the chair with my knees locked and my pulse in my clit and I said, “Sign below the pay line.”
He signed. Owen Tillson. The hand was rougher than Gareth’s. I watched the name and thought about that same hand holding me open. I signed under him. Reilly Landers, acting Luna. The title looked like a joke next to the smell in the room.
Marshall came to the table and witnessed. Melanie did not. She stayed in the door and watched the path like the path was the only clean thing left.
The copies were done. I should have stood up. I didn’t. Owen didn’t. The lamp made a small sound. My body leaned forward without my permission and I stopped it an inch off a stupid idea.
“You need to leave,” he said.
“This is my cabin.”
“Then I need you to leave. You told me not to touch you. If you sit there dripping on that chair I am going to put my hand under this table and check, and then your beta is going to have to decide whether the contract covers me fingering his Luna on the same wood she used for a watch term.”
Marshall’s voice was ice. “Reilly. Up.”
I stood. The air hit the wet cloth and I almost made a sound. Owen’s eyes dropped to my belt, to the line of my pants, and stayed there long enough that Melanie turned her head and swore at the dark.
I gathered the copies. My hands left a smudge on the margin. Not ink.
“You get meat in the morning,” I said. “You don’t come to the hall for it. A runner brings it. If Hillsford shows on the cut, you send Joss, not yourself, until I say otherwise.”
“If Hillsford shows on the cut I will be on the cut,” he said. “That’s the job you paid for.”
“Owen.”
“Reilly.” He was still sitting. He had to be. Standing was going to make the problem in his pants a problem for the door. “Go up the hill. Read your polite letter to Gareth again. Tell yourself this was arithmetic. I’ll be here when you run out of paper.”
I walked out.
The cold did nothing. Marshall didn’t speak until the cabin was behind us and the rifles were moving.
“You signed a watch,” he said. “You also quartered your rejected mate in the room you let him knot you in. Idony is going to smell that page and know which part you cared about.”
“Idony can smell whatever she wants. The cut gets watched.”
“And you.”
I stopped on the path. “If you ask me how long again I am going to put you on levy duty until spring.”
He almost smiled. It died. “Don’t go back down there tonight.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
That was a lie I wanted to be true. The bond dragged at the base of my spine toward the closed door and the man behind it.
I could feel him still in the chair. I could feel him stand up after we were gone.
I could feel the shape of his fist like a bad echo.
I put my thumb on the wrapped wrist and pressed the bite until it hurt enough to walk on.
Edward met us in the yard. “Is it signed.”
“It’s signed.”
“Is he staying.”
“In the cabin. Not here.”
Edward searched my face. He was twenty and not stupid. “You look like you did the morning after.”
“Go to bed.”
He went. Idony took the copy from my hand in the hall and read the quartering line twice. She did not comment on it. She looked at me over the paper and I looked back until she filed it.
I went to my rooms and locked the door and sat on the bed with my boots on and my fists on my knees and last about a minute.
Pants open. Underwear shoved aside. I was so wet it made a sound when I spread my knees.
I pushed four fingers against my clit and then two inside and I thought of him at that table telling me he remembered the grain of the wood.
I thought of sitting on the table again with my pants at my ankles and his face between my thighs while Marshall stood in the door and hated both of us.
I thought of the floor. The knot. The way he had asked how long it would last with his come pumping into me.
I came on my hand with my bootheels kicking the bedframe and his name in my teeth. Short. Mean. Not enough. I kept my fingers in and tried for another and only got that raw, unfinished clench the bond had been selling me for three years.
I washed. I did not go down the path.
I lay in the dark and felt him in the cabin under the ridge, behind a closed door I had written into a contract, hard and furious and paid, and I did not sleep until the heat burned itself down to a dull throb I could mistake for duty if I didn’t put my hand on it.