Chapter 26
Owen
I offered to walk into Hillsford alone.
Not a speech. Efficiency. They wanted my head on a price list next to a wedding. I could give them the head without the wedding and pull the boy out on the way if the guest house was what Melanie thought it was on the east road. One body through a door instead of a raid Landers could not afford.
I said it in the cabin after the hall split, after she had come on her own hand in front of me and thrown me out, after I went back anyway because the map was not a map without the offer on the table.
“No,” Reilly said.
“It’s clean.”
“It’s a story they already wrote about you. Ford. Fire. Tillson walks in and doesn’t walk out.”
“It’s a guest house, not a hall war.”
“It’s you dying usefully so I don’t have to choose.” Her voice went up. The company was on the path. They would hear. I did not lower mine either.
“You told me not to offer it in the hall. This is not the hall.”
“Don’t offer it in my mouth either.” She shoved me. The stitches flared. “You don’t get to take the math with you and leave me the chair.”
“Then what do you want the chair to do, Reilly. Write him a date. Send him my head in a bag. Sit on Marshall’s map until Gareth mails you a finger.”
She hit my chest. Not a slap like the shack. A real shove. I caught her wrists. She kneed my thigh and missed what she wanted. We hit the wall beside the door. The bar rattled. Someone outside went quiet on purpose.
“If you die usefully,” she said, close, furious, “I will never un-reject you. Do you hear me. Never. I will let the rite rot in the yard for the rest of my life.”
I laughed into her neck. I did not promise.
She bit me. I tore her belt open. She tore mine.
Pants down. I lifted her and her back hit the wall and I shoved into her in one thrust because that was the language we had.
Wet. Angry. She locked her legs and I fucked her standing, her shoulders on the wood, my side screaming, her mouth on my ear telling me I was not allowed to be a grave.
“Say you won’t go.”
“No.”
“Owen.”
I drove into her harder. She came on a curse, clenching, and I held her through it and kept going.
The knot swelled. She said don’t and I said then say I can go and she said never and I pulled out and slammed back in short of the lock and she hit my shoulder with her fist and pulled my hair and came again.
I dropped her to her feet, spun her, and put her hands on the wall.
I pushed in from behind and got a hand on her clit and rubbed her like the argument.
She shoved back onto me. I put my mouth on her shoulder, not her throat.
I came close and pulled out and spent on the wall beside her hip, stripes on the old wood, a groan I did not keep from the path.
She turned and went to her knees and took me in her mouth, still hard enough, and sucked the rest out of me like she could keep me in the cabin by holding me in her throat.
I came a second pulse on her tongue. She swallowed.
She stood and I put my hand between her legs and three fingers in and my thumb on her clit and I worked her until she came on my hand with her forehead on my mouth.
We stayed against the wall. Pants at our boots. The company outside pretending they had heard a different fight.
“I didn’t promise,” I said.
“I heard the laugh.” She fastened her belt with shaking hands. “You go tonight and I will not follow you with a claim. I will follow you with a shovel.”
Melanie knocked. Did not wait long. “If you two are done deciding the war with his dick, the map is ready. Huntington wants bodies in the room. Not fluids.”
Reilly opened the door on us still too close. Melanie took it in and looked past us like she was tired of looking.
We went to the hall.
Marshall had the east road on the table. Guest house. Two doors. A barn. Gareth’s eight still on Landers guest line, which meant the boy was held by a different set. Idony stood with her arms folded. Edward’s empty chair was a hole in the room.
I put my finger on the side door of the guest house. “One man in. Two on the barn. No banners. No Landers colors. You raid with a company they already called a fire and they kill him in the first minute.”
“That’s you in,” Marshall said.
“Yes.”
Reilly said, “No.”
The table looked at her.
“Two in,” she said. “Not him alone. Melanie and Joss on the barn. Marshall on the road out. I go with the second in.”
“You are the Luna,” Idony said.
“I am the sister. I am also done sending people through doors I will not walk.”
I said, “That’s worse math than mine.”
“It’s my math.” She did not look at me when she said it. She looked at the map. “Dawn. Not tonight. Tonight they expect a raid or a wedding. Dawn they expect a date. We give them neither until we are on the boards.”
Marshall hated it. He nodded anyway. Melanie nodded like she had already packed. I hated it and I wanted her next to me in a door I had meant to take alone, and both things were true.
We broke to prep.
I caught her in the corridor. The wall fight was still on my cock. She was still wet; I could smell it. I did not put my hand on her.
“If they offer the trade at the door,” I said, “my head for him, you do not take it.”
“If they offer the trade at the door you do not step forward.”
Neither of us promised.
She went to write nothing to Gareth. I went to the cabin and packed a blade and a cloth and the clean shirt that would not matter.
I sat on the bench and I could still see her on the wall.
I could still hear never. I got hard from it and I ignored it and then I didn’t.
I opened my pants and stroked once, twice, the smell of her on me, and I stopped before I came because I was not going to spend the last of it on my fist the night before a guest house.
Melanie filled the door.
“You’re both fools,” she said. “Alone was stupid. Together is stupid with a title on it.”
“I know.”
“If she dies in that house I will put you in the ground next to Ford.”
“I know that too.”
She tossed me a strap for the stitches. “Bind it. You tear it in a door and you become the useful grave she told you not to be.”
I bound it.
Night went long. I did not sleep. The bond pointed at her rooms. She was not touching herself. She was lying still, forcing it, the same discipline as the hall. I lay still too. Dawn would come. The east road would be there. The boy would be a guest until he wasn’t.
Near gray I stood on the path and she came down in dark clothes with her hair tied and her face like the yard.
She stopped in front of me.
“If you peel off and go in first I will never un-reject you,” she said. “I meant it.”
I laughed into the cold, quieter than the wall. I still did not promise.
We walked toward Marshall’s map as it turned into a road, the fight still in our bodies, the heat still stupid, the price still a wedding and a head, and the only third option we had was a door at dawn we were both going to put our hands on.