Chapter 11
Reilly
The first joint patrol was supposed to be a line walk.
Marshall took the south bend with two of ours. Melanie took three of Owen’s along the ridge. Owen and I took the cut itself because I had signed the paper and I was not going to send other people to stand next to him while I sat in a hall and lied.
We didn’t talk for the first mile. He had a borrowed shirt that wasn’t the one he had been wearing in the cabin.
I could still smell the cabin on him. I could smell last night on both of us, the stupid back-and-forth through the bond, fists and fingers and no one in the same room.
Walking beside him made that look like a joke.
Every step put his heat against my side.
I was wet before the second marker post.
“Tracks,” he said.
Hillsford. Two pair. Fresh. Not the far-ridge looking we had been getting. These came down off their dirt onto ours, then tried to step light along the cut like we wouldn’t notice.
“Scouts,” I said.
“Or bait.”
We followed anyway. The bond was a hum in my teeth. I watched his mouth instead of the prints and then forced my eyes back down. He was already hard. I didn’t have to look at his belt. I could smell it. I hated that it steadied my hands.
The pair was in the alder wash.
One of them had a Hillsford clasp half-hidden under a coat that was trying to look like ours.
The other had a bow. They saw us the same time we saw them.
The bow came up. Owen was already moving.
I went left. No speeches. The bowstring snapped past my shoulder and punched bark.
I hit the archer low and we went into the wet leaves.
He was strong. I got my knife into his forearm so the next shot wouldn’t happen and he punched me in the ribs and I saw white.
Owen’s man made a sound that was not words.
Then Owen was over me, dragging my archer off and putting him down with a knee and a cut I did not watch to the end.
My man stopped moving.
The wash went quiet except for water and my own breathing.
Two bodies. Hillsford. On our side of the cut. The clasp sat in the leaves like it wanted to be found.
Adrenaline should have made me clean. It dumped straight into the bond instead. My pulse was in my clit. My mouth was full of metal and him. Owen stood over the second body with blood on his knuckles and his chest going hard and he looked at me like the fight had only been the front door.
The others were not in the wash yet. Melanie would hear it. Marshall was too far. We had a minute that was not a minute.
I crossed the leaves and put him against an alder.
His back hit the trunk. My fists were in his shirt. He made a noise and his hand clapped over my mouth, not gentle, and his other hand went down the front of my pants like he had been waiting three years and one signed page for the exact route.
No kiss.
His fingers shoved my underwear aside and found me soaked.
He dragged two fingers up through it and over my clit and I jerked against his palm.
He didn’t tease. He rubbed hard, tight circles, then pushed those two fingers into me and the heel of his hand stayed on my clit and he fucked me with his hand against the tree while his other hand kept my mouth shut.
I breathed through my nose. I could taste his skin.
Blood on his knuckles next to my cheek. I bit his palm and he didn’t take it away.
He curled his fingers and found the spot he had found on the cabin table and stayed on it.
My knees tried to go. He pinned me there with his hips, his cock a thick line against my hip through both layers of cloth, and worked his hand like the patrol was still happening.
I came in under a minute.
Ugly. Fast. My cunt clenched on his fingers and my hips kicked and I made a sound into his hand that would have carried if he hadn’t been covering it.
Slick ran down his wrist. He kept rubbing through it until I tried to twist away because it was too much, and he eased off my clit and left his fingers in me, still, while I pulsed around him.
He took his hand off my mouth.
We did not kiss.
He pulled his fingers out. They shone. He looked at them like he might put them in his mouth and then he wiped them on the inside of my coat instead, a mean little mark no one would see unless they were looking.
I could still feel the shape of him against my hip.
I did not open his belt. If I opened his belt I was going to take him out and get on him in the leaves next to two dead scouts and that was a line I could still see.
“Patrol isn’t finished,” I said. My voice was wrecked.
“I know.”
I stepped back. My pants were open. I fastened them with hands that were not council hands. He adjusted himself once, rough, and it didn’t hide anything. He was hard enough to look hurt. I wanted him in my mouth. I wanted him in me. I turned toward the bodies instead.
Melanie dropped into the wash from the ridge side with a blade out and then she saw the scouts on the ground and us standing and her nostrils flared.
She looked at my mouth. She looked at his hand.
“Hillsford,” Owen said, like that was the only smell in the alder.
“I can see Hillsford,” Melanie said. “I can also smell the rest of it. Get off the bodies before Huntington gets here and decide which part of this goes in a report.”
Marshall was not far. I heard him. I crouched and picked up the clasp with fingers that still smelled like my own cunt. I wrapped it in cloth. I did not look at Owen.
Marshall took in the wash in one pass: bodies, clasp, my ribs, Owen’s knuckles, the tree. He was not stupid. He didn’t put it on the air with Melanie and two extra wolves coming down behind him.
“Pair,” I said. “On our side. Clasp on one. Bow on the other. We need them off the cut before Hillsford sends a second look.”
Marshall nodded at the wolves. “Move them. No banners. No display. Reilly, you’re bleeding through your shirt.”
I was. The punch. I had not felt it until he said it. I felt it now, and I felt Owen’s fingers, and I felt the wet in my pants, and I walked out of the wash like those were all the same kind of wound.
We finished the line.
Owen stayed three paces off me. It did not help.
The bond was wide open from the fight and the tree.
I could feel how hard he still was. I could feel him replaying his hand in my pants.
I replayed it myself because my body would not drop it.
His fingers in me. The heel of his hand.
The tree bark through my coat. His palm tasting like salt against my teeth.
I had come on him in a wash with dead Hillsford at our feet and I was already swollen again walking the next post.
At the turn he spoke without looking at me. “That didn’t happen.”
“I know.”
“It happened,” he said, after a second. “It doesn’t go on the page.”
“I know that too.”
Melanie passed us with her eyes forward. “If the next pair finds you against a tree I am leaving you both on the cut. Watch the line.”
We watched the line.
Nothing else came down off Hillsford dirt.
The far ridge had gone still, which was not comfort.
They would miss two scouts. They would send a question that looked like a letter or a question that looked like ten men.
I walked with the clasp in my pocket and my ribs starting to really hurt and my underwear glued to me.
At the split Marshall sent Owen’s wolves back to the bench and mine toward the hall. He stopped me with a look that said we were going to talk and not here.
Owen stood on his side of the split. Blood dry on his knuckles.
Mouth unmarked. We had not kissed. I could still feel his hand over my lips.
I wanted it there again. I wanted his fingers back in my pants.
I wanted to drop to my knees in front of the split and take his cock out and suck him until he came down my throat so I would not be the only one who had gotten there in the wash.
I did not.
“Meat at dawn,” I said, because I needed a contract sentence.
He nodded once. His eyes dropped to my belt and came back up. “Have someone look at your ribs.”
“Have someone wash your hands.”
His mouth twitched. Not a smile. “They’re washed.”
They were not washed of me. I knew it. He knew it. I turned up the path before I put him against another tree.
Marshall waited until the company was out of earshot. “Reilly.”
“Hillsford on our cut. Two dead. Clasp. That’s the report.”
“I smelled the tree.”
I kept walking. “Then you can leave the tree out of the report too.”
He did not touch my arm. He was too angry to. “You put a watch in writing. You just used it to get his hand in your pants next to corpses. Gareth Hills does not need a spy. He needs one scout who got away and a nose.”
“No one got away.”
“This time.”
We reached the yard. Edward came out, saw the blood on my shirt, and went pale. I told him it was a punch and a pair of scouts and he was not to go to the cut. He looked past me for Owen and did not find him. That was better.
I went to my rooms. I locked the door. I took the clasp out of my pocket and set it on the desk like it was the reason my hands were shaking.
Then I opened my pants and shoved them down and looked at the mess.
Slick on my inner thighs. The cloth dark.
I put my own fingers where his had been, two in, thumb on my clit, and I was so swollen from the tree that I came again almost immediately, standing, biting my wrist, angry at how easy it was now that I had the shape of his hand to copy.
I kept my fingers in and smelled them. Me. Him. The wash.
I washed for real after. Cold water. Ribs already coloring. I bound them. I put on a clean shirt. I took the clasp to Idony because a clasp was arithmetic and the tree was not.
Idony turned the metal in her fingers. “Hillsford.”
“Yes.”
“And Tillson.”
“He was on the cut I hired him for.”
She smelled the air around me the way she had been doing since the contract. She did not mention a tree. She looked at my throat and then at the clasp.
“They will send more,” she said.
“I know.”
“Then keep the next ones off your skin.”
I left her office and stood in the hall and felt Owen on the bench west, still hard, still wiping his hand on things that would not help. The patrol was finished. The line was walked. We were going to pretend the alder wash had only been a fight.
I could still taste his palm.
I went to write the report with a sentence about two scouts and a clasp and no sentence about his fingers inside me against a tree, and the bond sat in my belly and called the report what it was.