Chapter 17
Reilly
The storm left the cut in pieces and one of Hillsford’s lost scouts in the alder with a knife still in his hand.
We found him at midmorning. Not dead. Waiting in the wreck of the wash like the rain had been a roof.
Owen saw the blade first and still took the line of it across the ribs when he put the man down.
Not deep enough to dump him on the ground.
Deep enough to open him. Enough blood to make Melanie swear and Huntington tell me to get him off the cut before Hillsford came looking for the rest of a pair.
The scout was dead when we left him. I did not look at the cut on Owen’s side until we were moving. Shirt black-red. He walked anyway.
“Cabin,” I said.
“Bench is closer.”
“Cabin has needle and thread and a door that bars. Move.”
Marshall wanted the hall infirmary. I said no. The hall had Pell and Edward and a Hillsford letter Idony was holding for my eyes. I was not stitching Owen Tillson in front of that. Marshall hated it. He sent two wolves to finish the wash and he did not follow us under the ridge.
The holding cabin still smelled like the shack we had wrecked and the night we had started in. I sat him on the table. The same table. I told him to take the shirt off. He did. The gash ran along the lower ribs on his left side, ugly, bleeding when he breathed in. Not a lung. Not nothing.
I washed my hands. I threaded the needle. He watched my mouth.
“Look at the wall,” I said.
“No.”
I put the needle through. He hissed and his hand landed on my hip like I was the thing that needed holding.
I stitched. Blood on my fingers. Blood on the table.
His skin jumped under the next pass. I was wet anyway.
The smell of him open, the cabin, the bond—it went straight between my legs while I was trying to close a hole in him. I hated that. I kept stitching.
Halfway down the gash his other hand went between my thighs over my pants and just pressed.
“Owen.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I’m holding a needle.”
“You’re wet. I can smell it. Finish the stitches.”
I finished the stitches with his palm cupped against my cunt through the cloth, not rubbing, just there, blood smearing from my fingers onto his stomach because I would not put the needle down and push him off. I tied off. I cut the thread with my teeth. I set the needle on the crate.
Then I opened my belt.
He pulled my pants down to my boots. I was soaked through the underwear.
He dragged it aside and pushed two fingers into me, standing between my knees while he sat on the table, the fresh stitches pulling when he breathed.
Blood on his side. My slick on his hand.
The first night in this room sat on top of us like a third body.
“You should lie down,” I said.
“After.”
He fucked me with his fingers and put his mouth on my breast over the shirt, then shoved the shirt up and found the bite from the shack and sucked it until I hissed.
I stroked him through his pants, then got him out.
Hard. Wet at the head. The swell already starting because the cabin did that to him.
I was careful of his side. He was not careful of me.
He pulled me in and I sank down on his cock standing, my boots still trapped in my pants, his hands on my ass, the table edge in the backs of his thighs.
I rode him like that. Short. The stitches were a fact I could feel when his breath caught. I did not stop. He was in me to the root and his blood was getting on my shirt and I kissed his shoulder instead of his mouth and bit him there instead of his throat.
“Tillson Ford,” I said, because Joss’s silence and the widow’s door and Gareth’s paper were all in the room with the needle. “Now. While I can still hear you.”
He didn’t pull out. He kept me on him and his hand found my clit and rubbed, messy, and he talked into my neck.
“Hillsford set the back wall. I was on the front with the civilians. I got who I could out. The ones I didn’t get—that isn’t a rumor I can fix.
The report used my name because I was alive and the hall was not.
They needed a villain with no pack left to argue.
Alexander signed it. Gareth repeats it. That’s the story your widow shut the door on. ”
I believed him.
I believed him with his cock in me and his blood on my ribs and his fingers on my clit.
The truth went through the bond and my body used it.
I came on him hard, clenching, a sound against his neck, hating both of us for how that worked—how the fire and the dead and the report could sit in his mouth and still make me squeeze around him like gratitude.
He held me through it and did not come. The knot was swelling. I felt it.
“Don’t.”
He lifted me off. I went to my knees because his side could not take more standing and I took him in my mouth, hand around the base, blood-smear on his hip under my wrist. He came on my tongue with a groan he tried to keep off the stitches.
I swallowed. I pressed my forehead to his thigh and breathed.
He pulled me up. His fingers went back between my legs like the sentence was not finished. Two in, thumb on my clit, slower. I was too sensitive. I let him.
“Say you believe me,” he said.
“I believe you.”
“Say the rite is still the rite.”
I looked at him. Sweat. Blood. Lamp. The table where he had first put his mouth on me.
“The rite stands,” I said.
His fingers didn’t stop. He worked me through the anger of that until I came again, smaller, mean, on the truth and the refusal together. I grabbed his wrist and held it there while I shook.
“I am not taking it back because you finally said Ford out loud,” I said. “I am not taking it back because I came on it. Hillsford still wants a date. This pack still eats seed. You still have their name on a fire.”
“I know.”
“Then don’t look at me like the stitches bought the claim.”
He took his hand out. I saw my slick on his fingers next to his own blood. He wiped them on his ruined shirt. I pulled my pants up. My shirt was marked. I would have to burn it or hide it. I packed the needle. I tied a strip around his ribs tight enough to hold.
“You stay off the cut until that stops opening,” I said.
“Hillsford will come for the scout.”
“Then they can come to a man who isn’t dripping on their tracks. Melanie can hold the line. You can sit on this bench and not tear my thread out.”
He caught my wrist when I turned to the door. Not hard. His thumb on the old bite I had given myself in the bath weeks ago.
“You asked for the story in this room on purpose,” he said.
“Yes.”
“So you could come on it and still say no.”
“Yes.”
He let go. I barred nothing. I left him on the table with clean stitches and an open belt and the Ford fire sitting in the cabin where we had started.
Marshall was on the path. He saw the blood on my shirt and went pale, then saw it was not mine.
“The scout,” I said. “Dead. Owen opened. I closed him. Hall infirmary would have been a show.”
Marshall looked at my mouth. At my belt. “You smell like you closed more than a cut.”
“File the scout. Tell Idony Hillsford lost a man on our dirt after the storm. I need the letter.”
“You need a clean shirt.”
I went to the hall the back way. I changed. I hid the bloody one. I stood in the basin and washed him out of my mouth and from between my legs and the truth did not wash off. Hillsford set the back wall. He got who he could out. I believed him. I had come on his cock while he said it.
Idony had the letter on the table when I came in. Gareth’s seal. She watched me break it.
Concern about missing scouts. A hope that Landers Ridge was not harboring rogue elements who might explain a body. A reminder about the moon and a date. A line about confusion on the west cut that was Gareth saying he could smell Owen from a range away if he wanted to.
“Well,” Idony said.
“He believes me,” I said, and Idony frowned, because that was the wrong pronoun for the letter. I did not correct it.
Edward was in the doorway. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’m not.”
He looked at my clean shirt like he did not trust it. I sent him to Marshall.
I sat down and wrote nothing about Ford. I wrote nothing about a needle and a table and a man I believed. I wrote that the cut had been defended under contract and that Landers Ridge did not harbor anyone Gareth could not already name.
Then I sat with my hands flat on the desk and felt Owen in the cabin under the ridge, stitches pulling when he breathed, my taste still on his fingers, the rite still standing because I had said so with his come in my mouth.
I believed him.
I did not take the words back.