Chapter 22
Owen
I stayed on the contract.
Gareth walked my cabin in daylight and named it a bed and went back to her hall to wait for a date. Melanie watched him go, then looked at me.
“You’re a fool,” she said. “You’re a kept wolf with stitches and a quartering line. Pack up.”
“No.”
“Owen.”
“If I leave now he gets to say the watch ran when Hillsford looked at it. The farms are still hers. The cut is still open. I stay.”
She laughed once, no humor. “You stay because she kissed you at dawn and you think that’s a hall.”
“I stay because I signed a page.”
“You stay because you’re kept.” She started walking to the bench. “Fine. The eight already know. Joss knows. The boy with the bread knew. It’s not a secret arrangement. It’s an arrangement everyone can smell. Don’t ask me to call it a watch when I talk to Huntington.”
I agreed with her. I did not leave.
Gareth’s men held the guest line another night.
I did not go up. Reilly did not come down.
The bond sat between the hall and the cabin like a wire pulled too tight.
I worked the cut with a side that wanted to open.
I ate meat from a runner. I did not jerk off on the boards.
I sat on them and wanted the dawn back and wanted Gareth off her ground and wanted the words she had swallowed into my mouth.
Near evening Joss said, “South.”
Not a question. I smelled it when the wind turned. Smoke. Not kitchen. Not stove. Field smoke. Wet grass and grain and something put to the torch that was not lightning.
Melanie was already moving. “That’s not weather.”
We ran the south path. Landers wolves were coming off the hall at the same time. Huntington in front. Reilly in a coat, no dress, hair tied, face blank in the way that meant she was already doing math. Gareth came after her with four men like the smoke was a tour.
The south pasture was burning in strips. Not the whole thing. Enough. Fence down. A shed gone. Meat smell that was not our meat. Arranged. I knew arranged fire. I had carried people out of one.
Huntington swore. Reilly went toward the nearest flame line. I cut through the trees to get ahead of the smoke and found her there before anyone called a patrol, before Gareth’s clean boots hit the ash.
We did not talk first.
She grabbed my shirt. I had her against a pine with my mouth on her mouth, the kind kiss gone, this one teeth and smoke.
My hands under her coat, under her shirt, binding shoved up, tits in my palms. She opened my belt.
I opened hers. Pants down just enough. I lifted her and she wrapped her legs and I shoved into her standing, smoke in our throats, the fire a noise through the trees.
She was wet like she had been walking toward this.
I fucked her against the bark. Short. Hard.
Her heel in my back. My stitches pulling.
She came fast with her mouth on my shoulder to stay quiet.
I pulled out and spun her and bent her and pushed in from behind with her hands on the pine and my hand on her clit.
She shoved back on me. I felt the knot start.
I did not lock it. I pulled out and came on the small of her back under the coat, pumping, silent, my forehead on her spine.
She reached back and dragged her fingers through it and put them between her legs and finished again, shaking, still not talking.
Boots. Distant. Huntington calling her name.
I yanked her pants up. She yanked mine. I wiped my hand on the inside of my own coat. She pulled the binding down. Smoke in her hair. My come under her coat. We stepped apart as Marshall came through the trees with two wolves and Gareth behind him, nostrils already working.
“Reilly,” Marshall said. Then he saw me. Then he smelled it. His face went ugly and he put it away because Gareth was there.
Gareth looked at the pine. At her mouth. At my belt.
“Even the fire,” he said, almost pleased. “You don’t wait for a room.”
Reilly walked past him toward the burning strips. “Get water. Get the lower houses off the south fence. If you came to watch, watch.”
I went to the flame line because that was the job I had stayed for.
We beat what we could. It was already designed to look worse than it was and bad enough to matter.
Melanie found a clasp in the ash at the far edge, Hillsford metal blackened and left like a gift.
She palmed it before Gareth’s men reached that strip.
She showed it to me after, in the dark off the line.
“They want it to look like us,” she said. “Rogue fire. Your company. Ford all over again.”
“I know.”
“You just fucked her in the trees in front of that.”
“I know.”
She put the clasp in my hand. “Give it to her when the Hillsford coats are not standing on the ash. And stay on this line tonight. If you go to the cabin he will say you lit this and went to bed.”
I worked until the strips were down to wet black. Reilly worked the other end. We did not look at each other. The bond was still open from the pine. I could feel my own come under her coat while she shouted for buckets.
Gareth stood upwind with clean hands.
Edward tried to come onto the field. Reilly sent him back so hard he went. Good.
When Hillsford finally drifted toward the hall, Huntington caught me at the fence.
“You stayed,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’re a problem I cannot throw off this ground while that man is in my hall.” He looked at the black pasture. “If your company lit this I will kill you myself.”
“We didn’t.”
“I know you didn’t. That is not the same as me being able to say so.” He glanced at Reilly. “Keep your cock in your pants until he’s gone. I am tired of smelling you on her while I count Hillsford blades.”
He went.
Reilly passed me at the gate. She did not stop. Her voice was for the runner. Her hand brushed my wrist and left the smell of pine pitch and sex. I put the clasp into that hand without a word. Her fingers closed. She kept walking.
Melanie fell in beside me.
“Kept wolf,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Fool.”
“Yes.”
“We’re on the south line till dawn. If another strip goes I want you awake. Not in her. Awake.”
I stayed on the line.
Gray came up on black grass. Gareth’s men had slept. Ours had not. Reilly stood on the ridge looking at the ruin like she was adding it to the levy column. I wanted her back on the pine. I wanted Gareth’s throat. I wanted the clasp on Idony’s table before Hillsford wrote the story.
Joss spat into the ash. “They’re going to say Tillson.”
“They’re going to say it,” I said. “We have metal that says Hillsford. She has to put it in a room that isn’t my cabin.”
“Will she?”
I thought about dawn. The kiss. The words she swallowed. The pine. The page she would defend instead of me.
“Yes,” I said. “She’ll put the clasp on a table. She won’t put me next to it.”
Melanie heard that and did not argue. She handed me water. I drank. My side was hot. My cock was a stupid bruise. The south fields smoked in the way that was not weather.
I stayed on the contract.
I stayed a kept wolf in the ash with her taste in my mouth and Gareth Hills in her hall and a piece of Hillsford metal already on its way to a council that would try to call this arithmetic while the grass was still black.
The secret was not a secret.
The fire was not ours.
I watched the ridge for her and did not go up, and when the bond tugged I let it tug, and I did not follow it into the trees a second time. Once in the smoke was already a gift Gareth would wrap for his father. I was a fool. I agreed with that too. I still did not pack.