Chapter 24
Owen
The clasp should have been enough.
I was not in the hall when she put it on the table.
I was on the black south line watching Hillsford coats not leave.
Melanie brought the shape of the meeting down with the water: accusation, Gareth denying, Idony careful, Pell still hungry for protection by nightfall.
Metal in a lockbox. No confession. No wedding. No one off the ground.
Enough was not courage. Landers Ridge had the clasp and still had Gareth in the yard smiling like a man who had already written the next page.
A runner came at dusk with Alexander Hills’s seal.
Courteous. I saw the paper in Huntington’s hand at the fence.
I did not need the words. Concern. Confusion.
A father’s hope that Landers would not mistake a dropped clasp for a policy.
An offer of more eyes. A line about Edward that Huntington folded so the boy would not see it from the hall door.
Gareth stood in the yard and smiled at the fold.
I knew the next move. I could not get in front of it. You do not get in front of a hostage while you are still called the fire.
“Stay on the line,” Melanie said.
“He’s going to take the brother.”
“I know. Huntington knows. The boy was told to stay in the hall. If you walk up there now Gareth gets Tillson in the yard and the brother in the same sentence.”
I stayed on the line. The bond tugged toward the hall, raw.
Reilly in a room with a courteous note and no good move.
I walked posts in ash. My side hot. My mouth still her from the barn.
Joss wanted to put men on the hall road.
I said no. Eight of us on Landers dirt plus a staged body had already written Gareth’s letter for him.
More wolves at her door would finish it.
Night. Hillsford lamps on the guest line. I went to the cabin because the cut was quiet and Melanie had the south and if I stood in the ash any longer I was going to walk into the yard and put Gareth through the dirt.
I barred the door. I sat on the bench. I did not open my belt. I waited.
She knocked like someone who had run out of paper.
I opened. She came in raw from the hall. Eyes shot. Coat on. The note still in her smell, wax and Gareth and fear she would not name. I barred the door. She did not speak. I did not make her ask.
I took her coat off. I took her down on the bench on her back and held her wrists above her head with one hand and opened her pants with the other.
She lifted her hips. I dragged the cloth down and put my mouth on her without warming up.
She was already wet. I held her open and licked her clit in steady strokes until her thighs shook.
I pushed two fingers in and kept my mouth on her and I did not stop when she came the first time.
I held her wrists and worked her through it and into the next climb.
She swore at me and opened her knees wider.
I sucked. I turned my fingers. She came again, louder than she wanted, and I still did not get up.
I stripped her pants the rest of the way.
I stripped mine. I did not put my cock in her yet.
I put her legs over my shoulders and I licked until she was crying in the quiet way, the hall still in her throat, and then I moved up and pushed into her slow and held her wrists again and fucked her in a rhythm that did not care about Gareth’s smile.
“Look at me,” I said.
She looked. She came on my cock with her wrists in my hand and her mouth open.
I pulled out before the knot, turned her onto her stomach, and held her down by the back of her neck—not the throat, the neck muscle—and pushed back in.
Deep. Her fists in the bench. I reached under her and rubbed her clit and she came again with her face in the wood.
I kept going until she went quiet. Not silent.
Quiet. The fight gone out of the sounds.
I pulled out and came on the small of her back, shaking, and then I put my mouth there and dragged my tongue through it and down and ate her from behind until she jerked and I held her hips and made her take one more. Small. Spent. Her voice gone.
I let go.
I found the blanket. I put it over her. I poured water from the jug and held the cup while she drank, still on her stomach, still shaking. I did not say I told you so. I did not say Edward. I did not say the courteous note. I sat on the floor beside the bench and put my hand on her hair and waited.
After a while she said, “Alexander wrote about my brother without writing about my brother.”
“I know.”
“Gareth smiled.”
“I know.”
“The clasp didn’t matter.”
“It mattered. It didn’t finish it.”
She turned onto her side under the blanket. I got on the bench behind her, stitches in, and pulled her back against my chest. My cock was wet on the back of her thigh and not interested in more. She took my hand and put it on her stomach, not lower.
“If I keep him in the hall he is a prisoner in his own house,” she said. “If I let him walk he is a sack of grain.”
“Then he stays in the hall and hates you.”
“He already hates me.”
I kissed her hair. Kind. The dawn kind. She didn’t pull away.
We stayed like that. I felt her heartbeat slow. I felt Gareth’s men on the guest line. I felt the south field black and the clasp in a box and a courteous father who had just pointed at a boy.
She slept for an hour. I did not. When she woke she reached back and found me half-hard from the heat of her and she stroked me under the blanket, slow, no fight in it, until I came in her fist against her spine. She wiped her hand on the blanket. She did not ask for my mouth again.
“I have to go up,” she said.
“Take Huntington to the door. Take the side path. Don’t walk the yard alone.”
“I know how to walk my own yard.”
“Reilly.”
She sat up. I watched her dress. I watched her put the hall back on over what I had done to her. She paused at the bar.
“If they take him,” she said, “I will not ask you to walk into Hillsford alone.”
“I didn’t offer yet.”
“You were going to.”
I had been. She knew it. I nodded once.
She left. I sat in the blanket smell and the water cup and the wet bench and I did not say scraps and I did not say I told you so. I put my pants on. I went to the door and did not open it. Melanie was on the path anyway.
“She came down,” she said through the wood.
“Yes.”
“Gareth’s runner is back. More than a note this time. Lights on the east road.” Melanie paused. “If you’re going to be a fool about the boy, be a fool with me in the room. Don’t disappear into Hillsford like a story they already wrote about you.”
“I hear you.”
“Hear me on the line at gray. Not in her hall.”
She went.
I lay down on the bench. I could still taste Reilly. I could still feel her wrists in my hand. I could still see Gareth’s smile in the yard. The next move was the brother. Everyone with a brain knew it. Knowing it and stopping it were not the same kind of work.
I slept against my will. I woke with my side stuck and my mouth dry and the bond pointed at the hall, at a woman who had gone quiet on my bench and then put her coat on and walked back into a courtesy that was a blade.
I got up and went to the cut because the contract was still the only clean sentence I had, and because if I went to the hall I was going to start the fight Reilly would have to finish with grain she did not have.
The clasp was in a box.
Alexander’s seal was on a fold.
The boy was in the hall.
I was a kept wolf on a black field, and I still could not get in front of what was coming. I put my teeth in the old scar in my cheek and walked the ash until first light, and I did not go up.