Chapter 19 #2
I think back to it against my own will: the first weeks, before I understood anything about him, the way he'd catch my wrist to correct a channeling exercise and my whole body would forget its assignment.
The way I'd catalogue the disruptions to his control like they were evidence of a crime I couldn't name.
The way I lay in a salt cellar and thought about hazel eyes when I should have been thinking about survival.
None of that came through any tether. There wasn't a tether yet.
"That's not fair," I say, and it's barely a whisper.
"I'm not trying to be fair. I'm trying to be honest, which I have been catastrophically bad at with you.
" His jaw works. The wall wants to come up.
He holds it down through what looks like sheer will.
"I won't manage you. I won't decide what you can handle.
You asked me not to and you were right to ask.
So here is the unmanaged version: I have wanted you since before I had any right to, tether or no tether, and I will feel it whether you stay or go.
That part was never yours to catch or lose.
It's mine. It has been mine for a long time. "
The room is very quiet.
I read people for the lie—the angle, the want they won't say out loud. It's the one skill that's never failed me. I turn it on him full force and it comes back empty. No angle. No play. Just a man who handed me the truth and then stepped back to let me leave with it.
That’s what unnerves me.
Because I don't trust. It got trained out of me a sedated year at a time, until the only safe assumption left was that everyone wanted something and the wanting would cost me. Since then, I haven’t given my true self over to anyone. Maybe Nellie, but not like this.
Not in the way I want to with Aamon.
So the bravest thing I've ever done—braver than the chapel, braver than the vault—is this.
I don't go back to my room.
I cross the space he opened between us.
He goes still when I reach him—that struck-note stillness his whole body does when I touch him first. I flatten my hand over his bare sternum.
His chest isn't moving; he doesn't breathe, mostly doesn't bother.
So the slow breath he takes now, the one that lifts my hand, is a thing he does for me. A concession.
"If you're managing me right now," I say, "I'll know."
"I'm not managing anything." His hand comes up and closes over mine, pressing it flat against him. "I've never been less in control of anything in my life. That should frighten us both."
"It does."
"Good."
And then he kisses me.
His lips meet mine, and it's nothing like the mornings—the stolen ones, rationed out with the door cracked and one ear on the hall.
There's no clock on this. He kisses me slow, like he's got the rest of eternity and means to spend a good stretch of it right here, one hand still pinning mine to his chest, the other sliding up into my hair to tilt my head exactly where he wants it.
I feel the shape of him against me and my whole body goes molten. His mouth opens mine, unhurried, tasting, and a sound I don't recognize climbs out of my throat and gets swallowed between us. My free hand fists in the damp towel at his hip. I want it gone. I want all of it gone.
My magic answers, because it always answers him—it lives a half-inch under my skin and responds to everything I feel before I process the touch. Heat floods up under my sternum, pushing toward my palms, and my stomach drops with the old dread: careful, contain it, you'll level the room—
—except his magic's already there.
It slides into mine the way it does in training, except nothing about this is training.
It finds the surge and doesn't crush it.
Doesn't flatten it. Doesn't do the thing the fail-safe does that makes me want to claw out of my own skin.
It just holds. Steadies. Gives the heat somewhere to go that isn't out through my hands and into the walls.
The same thing he's done for months with two fingers on my wrist—except now there's nothing clinical left in it, and he doesn't pretend there is.
"Breathe," he says against my mouth. Not a command. Closer to a plea.
I breathe. And then I stop bracing and let myself want it—want him—with nothing held back for the first time in my life.
He spins me and walks me backward. The backs of my knees find the edge of the bed and he follows me down onto it, careful, bracing his weight on one forearm so he doesn't crush me, and I get both hands into the wet mess of his hair and pull. His mouth crushes onto mine.
His control comes apart under my hands and I'm greedy for every degree of it.
The muscle of his shoulders shifting as he holds himself over me.
The old silver scars under my palms, a history I drag my fingers across.
The sound he makes—low, wrecked, nothing like his level daylight voice—when I flatten my hand on the cool skin of his ribs and slide it down.
Just watching him react to my touch has me arching into him.
"Tell me if you want to stop." His mouth is at my throat, and I feel the careful press of fang behind his lips—restrained, never breaking skin. "Any moment. You say the word and it stops. I need you to know that's true before—"
"I know it's true." I drag his mouth back to mine. "Stop asking me for permission like this is an exam. I'm here. I want this. I want you—so quit being so damn careful and touch me like you mean it."
Something in him snaps its leash. It hits me through the tether—a surge of want so total it stops being shaped like a feeling and more like a basic necessity.
He undresses me slowly, like the unwrapping is half of it, like he won't be rushed through a single inch.
My uniform comes off, and the cool air of the room raises goosebumps everywhere his hands aren't. But then he’s everywhere—warm, slow, moving over me like he's trying to memorize the whole of me by touch.
No one has touched me like this. No one has touched me like anything—twelve years of clinical hands, of contact that meant procedure, of being handled like a live wire—and now a man is taking me apart with the whole weight of his attention, and my body lights up.
"You're shaking," he says, mouth at the hollow of my throat.
"I'm fine."
"I know you're fine." He drags lower—my collarbone, the swell of my breast, the plane of my stomach, unhurried, thorough. "I'm not asking because I doubt it. I'm asking because I want to know every true thing your body does, and this is one of them."
God. He’s so sexy when he talks to me like this. Keeps me present in the moment. Wants me to feel everything he has to give.
He takes his time like time is the one thing he has in endless supply.
His hand slides down my stomach, unhurried, and lower, and when his fingers find me I'm already slick for him—embarrassingly so, and the low sound he makes against my throat tells me he's felt it too, felt what he does to me.
He strokes through the wet heat of me, slow, learning the shape of what makes me gasp, and when he pushes one finger into me my hips come off the bed.
"There," he murmurs, like he's found something he was looking for. "That's it."
He works me open like he has all night to do it, one finger, then two, curling into a spot that makes the breath punch out of me, his thumb circling the aching knot of nerves until my thighs are shaking around his hand.
And then his mouth follows—he moves down my body, presses my legs wide with his shoulders, and puts his tongue on me, and I whimper at the jolt of electricity.
I fist my hands in his hair. He groans against me and it vibrates through my whole body, and he doesn't stop, doesn't slow, tongue and fingers working me in tandem, patient past the edge of reason.
My magic awakens, answering his call. Climbing. Cresting. The ring starting up in my ears that always used to mean danger and now means only this.
My magic surges hard enough that the lamp gutters and the window glass hums in its frame.
I gasp out a warning I never finish—because his power sweeps in under the surge and holds it, folds it back down, keeps me from bringing the room down around us even as I fall apart on his mouth.
Both things at once: the pleasure and the containment, his tongue and his magic, the shattering and the safety of it.
I come with his name in my mouth and the whole room trembling and nothing, for the first time in my life, actually breaks.
I'm still shaking when he rises back over me. His eyes have gone dark, the control hanging by a single visible thread.
"Still yes?" he asks. Rough. Barely holding. He reaches down and palms his bulge through the towel and my mouth waters.
"Still yes."
He sheds the towel. I let myself look at him—all of him, the hard length of his cock, and my breath catches somewhere between want and nerves. He notices, because he notices everything. He settles over me, braced on one forearm, and I feel him nudge against my entrance, and he goes still.
"Look at me," he says.
I do. His eyes are black with want and steady on mine, and he pushes into me slow, giving me every inch by degrees, watching my face the whole way.
“Oh, fuck,” I hiss.
There's a bright edge of pain I expected and breathe through, and he feels it—of course he feels it, the tether carries it straight into him—and he stops, buried deep, jaw tight with the effort of holding still.
"Breathe," he murmurs, forehead dropping to mine. "I've got you. I'm not moving until you tell me to."
I breathe just like he tells me to and then he gives me something else to focus on. His tongue slides up the length of my neck before he suckles gently below my ear. The electricity resumes, my entire body lighting up in flames for him.