Chapter 7
He's standing in the wreck of the common room when he steps off the last step. His eyes stay on the floor.
Racks lay on their sides. The slate slab in the middle of the room is shoved off its footing. Zeva is still down against the far wall where Kage left her, and the whole cold store is torn up around the two of us. Aamon walks through the middle of it, so still he’s like a held breath.
When he does finally look at me, it's not the warden's look. There's no assessment in it. There's something worse.
"You should not be anywhere near that thing," he says.
Low. Even. But there's a hairline crack running under it. Like his emotions are threatening to expose every thought in his head.
"That thing has a name."
"That thing is a leashed animal the academy keeps for the work no one else will do.
" He doesn't raise his voice and somehow that's worse.
"You think you found something dangerous and romantic down here in the dark.
You found a weapon somebody else already owns.
He's been theirs longer than you've been alive, and every time they slip the collar he leaves a body behind.
He is not a rescue, Calypso. He's a liability with your name attached to it now. "
"Funny." I fold my arms. "You want to talk to me about who's leashed?"
His jaw shifts a centimeter. "It was him. At the library. The one who put Thierry Vasreaux down, wasn’t it?"
I go still. I never told anyone that. I never told a soul who actually killed Thierry, and I watch him arrive at it on his own—the protective streak, the break-in, the way Kage moves—watch him fit the pieces together in real time and go colder with every one.
"So you knew," he says. "Months ago. And you said nothing, and you let him near you again anyway."
"Careful." My voice drops. "You're doing a lot of listening for a man who was pretending to give us privacy."
"I heard him ask to drink from you." It comes out before he can stop it, and I watch him hate that it did. "And I heard the part where you didn't say no."
The heat lifts behind my sternum, my magic rolling over, and I breathe it back down, in for four, because I am not giving this room another crater tonight. When I speak again it comes out low and mean, because who the fuck does Aamon think he is right now?
"You don't get an opinion on that." I close some of the distance between us.
"You made sure of it. Warden and asset. You say it to everybody like a prayer that will save you. You said it to everyone’s face at the Revel with your thumb on the fail-safe button.
So no—you don't get to stand in my cell jealous. You don't get both."
"He had his mouth on you." It's not a question. It comes out of him low and it has heat in it now, real heat, the flat gone out of it. "His teeth on your lip. His blood in your mouth. He had you against a wall in a room I'm chained to, and you were going to let him."
"Jealousy doesn't suit you."
"Don't." A muscle jumps in his jaw. "Don't make it small."
"Then don't make it yours." I round on him.
"That's the part I can't get over, Aamon.
You. Only minutes ago you stood in this room and told him there's no visitation, I'm under sentence, I'm a prisoner and you're the guard and that's all this is.
You put me in a box in front of him, same as you put me on that floor in front of two hundred people.
And now what—now he touches me and suddenly you've got something to say about it? "
"Yes."
"You can't have it both ways!" My voice climbs and I let it.
"You don't get to look at me like an assignment when the council's watching and then look at me like this the second we're alone.
You don't get to decide I'm nothing to you every time it's convenient and then be furious when someone treats me like I'm more.
Pick one. Warden or—" I stop, because I don't have the second word, because he's never let me have it. "Pick one and stand in it."
"You have no idea what I'm standing in." Rough now, ragged. "None. You think this is easy for me? You think I chose one wall between us for a punishment? I would take a hundred inquests before I'd—" He cuts it off, teeth clicking, and drags in a breath he doesn't need.
"Before you'd what?"
"Calypso."
"What?" I'm close now. Close enough to see it—the wreck under the still, the effort it's costing him to hold his face together. "Say it. For once in your entire existence, just—"
"You think I don't want to?"
It comes out of him rough and low and it stops me cold, because it's not the warden. There's nothing measured in it.
"Want to what?" I ask, feigning ignorance to force him to speak.
He doesn't answer.
"No. You started it." My hand closes in his shirt. I did the same thing to Kage less than an hour ago, and Kage took it and gave it back doubled—but Aamon has never let me touch him outside the mirroring, not once, and he lets me now. "Finish it."
"You are the most blind person I have ever met." Barely a voice. His eyes come off the wall and land on me, and there's a whole life in them, none of it careful. "After everything. You still haven't—"
He stops.
An inch between us. His chest is moving. Vampires don't need to breathe, which means he's forgotten to hold it, and the thing he almost said is right there, so close I can nearly read the shape of it, and I want it so badly my hands hurt.
"Haven't what," I whisper.
He doesn't say it.
His eyes drop to my mouth instead, and his hands come up and take my face, and whatever he can't tell me, this is the closest he'll get to telling it—
I don't know which of us moves. Maybe the inch between us just gives.
He kisses like nothing else about him. Kage burns; Aamon drowns.
Slow, deep, deliberate, a hand sliding into my hair and the other flattening at the small of my back and pulling me in, and a whole month of held breath goes out of him at once and into me.
I make a sound against his mouth. He answers it with my name, muffled, like it hurts to say.
My back finds the wall. He follows. Careful even now—he can't switch it off, the care—a knee coming between mine, a hand skating down to my hip and stopping there like he needs to be told.
I pull him in to tell him–yes, yes, yes.
I get my hands under the torn shoulder of his shirt and his skin is cool and the muscle jumps under my palm and he shudders, this old controlled thing shaking because I'm touching him, and that undoes me more than the kiss did.
Then his hands drop to the backs of my thighs and he lifts me off my feet.
Like I weigh nothing. Like he's done deciding to be careful.
My legs go around his waist and he carries me like that, still kissing me, out of the wreck of the common room and through the ruined doorway into my little room.
The world tips as he lowers me down onto the cot and follows me onto it, his weight coming over me, his forearms bracketing my head.
"Calypso." My name against my jaw. My throat. My mouth again, like he can't stop saying it, like it's been building in him for a month and now that it's out he can't stop.
"I hate you," I breathe against his mouth.
"I know." He kisses the corner of my mouth. My jaw. Comes back to it. "Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Hate me." Barely there. "Don’t hate me."
"You're a liar." I'm pulling him closer even as I say it, both hands fisted in his shirt. "You put me on that floor. You stand there every day like I'm nothing to you—"
"Everything I do down here is so they let you keep breathing." Fierce, against my lips. "If it looks like nothing, then I've done it right."
And the wall comes down.
The whole month of it—warden and asset, the cold I've kept my hands in so I wouldn't reach for him, the story I keep telling myself—it just vanishes.
Because his mouth is on mine and my body knows the thing my head won't say, which is that this is right, every impossible dangerous wrong part of it.
We fit together and ever fiber of my being recognizes it.
I get a hand in his hair and drag him back and stop fighting it. He goes where I put him, pressing down on me, kissing my skin, licking the tracks of fire he ignites inside me.
His hips settle into the cradle of mine and press down, and I gasp, and the sound of it pulls something loose in him.
He does it again. Slower. Deliberate. I feel every inch of it, feel the hard line of him through two layers of clothes, and my body answers before I decide anything—my knees coming up, my hips lifting into his, chasing the friction of it.
He groans into my mouth, low and wrecked, and I swallow the sound and want more of it.
His hand slides up under my shirt, along my ribs, thumb dragging just under the band of my bra, and I arch into the cold of his touch.
The grip he keeps on himself is slipping, notch by notch, and I want it gone.
I want to see what's under the last of it.
I hook a leg over the back of his and pull him harder into me, and he lets his weight down and rolls his hips and I make a sound I'd be embarrassed by if I had a single thought left in my head—
Then he goes rigid.
His head comes up, sharp, listening.
Past the door, in the common room: a groan. A body dragging itself up off stone.
Zeva.
He's off me and on his feet in the space of a breath.
Fast, clean, all the way, and the cold air where his body was hits me like a dropped floor.
His face is already going back together—the mask sliding down over all of it—and it happens so fast I could almost swear I invented the last thirty seconds.
"She can't see you like this," he says. Level. Wrecked underneath, but level on top. "Or me. I’ll go."
Then he's gone, out into the common room toward Zeva and the wreck and whatever lie keeps us both breathing past tonight, and I'm left flat on the cot with my mouth swollen and my shirt shoved up and my whole body still humming where his was.
I lie there a while. I can't help it. I stare at the stone ceiling and I breathe, and under my skin the magic that had been sizzling right at the surface—lit up by him, by all of it—settles back down slow, banking low behind my sternum, the sun sinking back under the water.
In for four. Out for four. My pulse takes longer to come down than the magic does.
I can still feel the shape of him against me.
The weight of him. The sound he made when I pulled him closer, wrecked and low, a man coming apart on top of me.
I wanted him. I wanted all of it, everything I'd have gotten if Zeva had stayed down another ten minutes, and the wanting is still there, banked like the magic, waiting.
And that's the problem. That's the whole problem, and I finally make myself sit up and look at it.
An hour ago I had my hands in Kage's collar and his blood on my tongue and I wanted him just as badly. I chose him at the worst moment of my life, in the one second I had nothing left to lie with. And I meant it.
I still mean it.
I don't get to want both of them. That's not a thing a sane person does. You pick. You feel a real thing for one and a passing thing for the other, and the passing one fades, and that's how it's supposed to go.
Except when I sit here in the dark and take an honest inventory of what's under my ribs—past the grief, past the fear, past the sun that wants to burn the world down—what I find for both of them isn't passing. It's not small. It's not the kind of thing that fades because I decide it should.
Kage, feral and certain and furious on my behalf.
Aamon, careful and wrecked and lying to the whole world to keep me alive.
I want them both. Not one now and one later. Both. At the same time, with my whole chest, and I have absolutely no idea what a person is supposed to do with that.
I pull my knees up and drop my head onto them.
The real question is: will I survive the inquest and get to tell them both how I feel? And if I do… what if one of them kills the other?
What if Leopold gets to me first?