Chapter 30
Owen
Hillsford came for the river in the morning like the pause had only been breath.
Not twelve. Not a probe. A line on the far bank that meant Alexander had answered Gareth’s letter with bodies.
Landers Ridge split the way a hungry pack splits.
Huntington held the hall and half the wolves.
The lower houses wanted the water and also wanted someone else to stand in it.
Pell talked surrender from a safe stoop.
Melanie took my eight plus three who still followed Reilly without a pin.
We held the west approach and the stones.
Reilly was on the inner path and then she was not.
I felt her move up before I saw her. The bond opened all the way mid-clash, no door on it.
I knew where her body was without looking.
Left of the snag. Bad shoulder packed. Good arm on a blade.
Pulse high. Wet between her legs even here, a filthy fact the fight did not care about.
I could feel the swell of it, the heat, the way her cunt sat heavy in the bond while she killed a man in the shallows.
I turned into a blade that would have opened my side and met it because she was two paces off that line.
Useful. Intimate in a way that did not belong in a war.
Gareth stayed back of his first wave. He wanted the hinge, not a story about dying in mud.
Joss went down and got up. Huntington’s wolves hit from the inner bank and wrecked the polite crossing.
I killed who I had to. I did not count. I kept the map of her in my body and I used it.
When she slipped on a stone I felt the jolt in my own knee.
When I took a cut across the forearm she looked up from ten yards like I had shouted.
They broke on the third push.
Not gone from the world. Gone from the water. Gareth pulled them into the far trees with more missing than he had planned to pay. Alexander would not like the invoice. Two smaller packs would smell that invoice from a range away. That was later.
Now was blood and wet stone and Reilly still upright.
Melanie shouted the hold. I did not go to the hall. I went into the woods on our side, off the path, and Reilly was already coming because the bond had no shame. We did not make it to a bed.
A pine with enough trunk. Fern wet from the river mist. I put her back to the bark. Blood on my hands. Blood on hers, someone else’s and a smear of mine from the forearm. I did not kiss her mouth first. I said it out loud.
“Do the words still stand.”
“Yes.”
I did not bite her. A battlefield is not a room.
I said that against her throat with my lips closed.
She said please anyway, wrecked, and I kissed her then, hard, copper in both our mouths, and she opened for it.
My thigh went between hers and she ground on it, pants still on, a wet heat I could feel through cloth.
I shoved the thigh higher and she rode it once, twice, and swore.
“On your knees,” she said, and then, “Please.”
I went down.
The ground soaked my pants. I opened her belt with red fingers, yanked the pants and underwear to her boots, and left them there so she was trapped open against the tree.
Dark hair. Slick already running down the inside of one thigh.
I put my thumbs in and spread her and I looked at it because I had been in a river thinking about this and I was going to look. Then I put my mouth on her.
I licked from the wet hole up over her clit in one pass and did it again.
She grabbed my hair with the good hand. I sealed my mouth over the clit and sucked, not gentle, and pushed two fingers into her.
Hot. Tight. She clenched. I turned the fingers and rubbed the spot I knew and I kept the suck steady.
She came in a few dirty minutes, hips punching my face, a sound she stuffed into her wrist. Slick on my chin, on my knuckles, on the fern.
I did not stop.
I pulled my fingers out and replaced them with my tongue, fucked her with it, nose on her clit, and when she tried to climb the bark I held her hips and kept her on my mouth.
I went back to sucking and put three fingers in because two was not what her body was asking for.
She was loud against her own arm. I licked the stretch around my fingers and sucked her clit and she came again, harder, knees buckling.
I followed her down onto my coat because I had thrown it off before I knelt.
On my back in the leaves with her kneeling over my mouth.
Pants still at her boots. She held the tree with the good arm and sat on my face and I ate her from underneath, jaw open, tongue on her clit, hands spreading her ass so I could get at all of it.
She rode my mouth. Blood from my forearm streaked her thigh.
I did not care. I sucked until she was shaking and then I sucked through that too.
She came a third time with her weight on me and her taste down my throat and she tried to lift off and I pulled her back and licked her through the twitch until she slapped my shoulder.
“Owen. I can’t—”
I let her off. She sagged against the tree, pants at her ankles, cunt wet and open, face wrecked. I wiped my mouth with the back of a red hand. My cock was fat in my pants, wet at the head, the swell already there from the bond and her coming on my tongue.
She dragged me up by the shirt and kissed the taste of herself off my mouth. She got my belt open and pulled me out. I hissed. She wrapped her fist around the shaft and smeared the wet over the head and stroked, tight, looking at it.
“Not in,” she said. “Not here. If you go in I’m going to tell you to knot me and I will not forgive the tree.”
“Then don’t put me in.”
She didn’t. She got on her knees in the fern, bad shoulder tucked in, and took my cock in her mouth.
Blood on her fingers around the base. She locked that hand on the swell so I could not push the knot past her teeth and she sucked the rest, deep, messy, spit and river and the salt of me.
I held her hair and did not fuck her throat.
I let her work. The sight of it—Reilly Landers, no pin, my cock stretching her mouth, Hillsford blood on both of us—almost ended me in three pulls.
“I’m coming.”
She stayed on it. I spent on her tongue, thick, a groan I could not keep in the trees, hips fighting her fist at the base. She swallowed and licked the head clean and kept her mouth there until I twitched and pushed her off.
She was still dripping. I could smell it.
I put her on her back on the coat and shoved her knees up as far as the trapped pants allowed and I put my mouth back on her because she had said until she could not stand and she could still sit.
I licked her swollen clit, soft now, then firmer when she pulled me in.
I slid two fingers in the mess and rubbed.
She came a fourth time small and mean, thighs slamming on my ears, and that was the one that took her standing away.
She could not get up. She lay on my coat with her pants at her boots and my come in her belly and her own slick on my face and she laughed once, no air, at the sky.
I lay beside her. Cock wet on my hip. Forearm soaking the coat. The words standing. The bite unused.
“Not here,” I said again.
“Not here.” Her good hand found my chest. “They stand. When there is a door. When he is all the way home and that bank is empty enough.”
Melanie found the edge of the trees and did not come in. “Huntington wants the bank counted. Gareth’s still in the far line but he’s not coming back this hour. If you two are done swallowing each other, I need bodies that can walk.”
Reilly pulled her pants up over the mess. I tucked my cock away sore. We walked out like the woods had been a dressing station. My mouth was full of her. Her mouth was full of me. Anyone with a nose would know.
The bank was ours. For now. Huntington looked at Reilly’s mouth and my knees and closed his eyes for a second. Edward stood in the hall doorway, too far to have seen the tree, close enough to see us come out of the woods together. He did not joke. He went back inside.
I stood in the water’s edge and washed my hands. The blood thinned. Her taste did not. I washed my mouth and it did not take her off my tongue.
Gareth’s line stayed in the far trees until afternoon, then thinned. Not a full retreat home. A retreat to write. Melanie watched it with her arms folded.
“He overpaid,” she said. “Two packs east of Hillsford will smell that. You might get a winter that isn’t a siege.”
“Might.”
Reilly stood on the inner path with no pin and a packed shoulder and my come swallowed.
I went to her when the count was done. I did not put my hand between her legs in front of the line.
I wanted to. I could still feel how swollen she was.
She could still feel me half-hard in my pants.
The bond had not closed with the orgasm. It had only gone from scream to hum.
“All the way home is closer,” she said.
“Not empty. Closer.”
“The words stand.”
“I heard you in the trees.”
I still did not take the bite. I wanted a door. A bench. A night that was not fern and someone else’s blood and my come in her stomach from a blowjob next to a war. She nodded like she wanted the same door.
Huntington sent us off the stones in shifts. I took the cabin because my side was open again. She walked Edward through the yard where people could see him alive. Then she came down.
I had the bar off. She came in and sat on the bench.
I sat on the floor between her knees and I put my mouth on the inside of her thigh, over the smear I had left with my hands, and I waited.
She said not yet. I stopped. I kissed the inside of the other thigh and I left her pants closed.
The woods had taken the edge off and not the want.
If I opened her again I was going to put my cock in her and knot her on this bench with Hillsford still in the far trees and I would not be able to call the tree a reason.
“Sleep an hour,” I said.
“Then the bank.”
“Then the bank.”
She slept sitting up, legs on either side of my shoulders, my head against her closed fly, her smell in my face. I watched the door. I did not believe Gareth was finished. I believed he had learned the price of this river. That was enough to close my eyes for a count of sixty.
When I opened them she was still there, no pin, words standing, throat unmarked.
I could have had it. I could have opened her pants and licked her awake and shoved in and locked and bitten.
I waited. I am not sure that made me decent.
It made me a man who wanted the claim in a room that did not smell like a battlefield.
I lay my hand on the floorboards I knew and I did not pull her down onto them.
The river was held.
The bite was not.
I could live with that for one more night. I did not call it scraps. I called it a door I was going to open when the bank was actually empty, and I let her sleep with my mouth an inch from the heat of her, and I did not close the inch.