5. Chapter 5
Amake-out. That was all Lance had signed up for, and he held onto the word as long as he could, which turned out to be about as long as it took Roman’s mouth to find his.
Mouths only. Clothes on where it counted.
He could have that and still get in the jeep, still get out at the gate, still walk into Bedlam with his heart more or less his own.
That was the plan, and the plan caught fire the second Roman kissed him.
“Seedy bars, flat beer, a dingy motel room.” Roman got the words out against his jaw, between kisses, like he couldn’t stand to lift is mouth of Lance’s skin long enough to say them. “This isn’t what you deserve. A hotel. Champagne. A real date.”
“A few years ago I’d have held out for the date.” Lance tipped his head back and gave him more throat, careful be damned. “Tonight you’re the only thing on the menu I want, Romeo. Rest’s window dressing.”
“Window dressing.” Roman laughed into his neck. “You’re going to be insufferable about that line.”
“I’m putting it on a shirt.”
Then Roman got a forearm under him and lifted, and Lance’s legs locked around him without a thought, and the joke died in his throat.
The heat of the man came through two thin shirts like a brand.
Lance pressed into it, shameless, every part of him crowding the one person he was supposed to be leaving, and gave up pretending he wasn’t.
“Get over here,” Roman said, which made no sense, he was already there, and Lance laughed against his mouth and kissed him deep and stopped caring what he was allowed.
Then control went, all of it, fast. Roman carried him from the door to the bed without breaking the kiss, and Lance let him, hands fisting in the shirt and then dragging it up, needing skin and getting it, the flat hard plane of Roman’s stomach under his palms. Roman made a sound Lance felt in his own teeth.
He laid Lance down and came over him, and even now kept one hand cradled behind his head so he wouldn’t crack it on the headboard.
That was the problem. Not the heat. Anyone could want a warm, willing body in a cheap room.
The way Roman cradled the back of his skull, careful, like it was worth protecting, said he wanted him, the whole sorry half-blood of him, and that was what Lance couldn’t walk away from clean in the morning.
“Off,” Lance said, dragging at cloth. Roman’s shirt went. His own followed. Skin on skin, finally, and the want roared up white-hot, and he arched into it, and a whine got loose before he could swallow it.
Right behind the whine came a word. Not Romeo, not the joke they’d played all day.
The real one. The one that meant yours, keep me, claim me.
The one that would burn Roman’s whole life down if it ever left Lance’s mouth in front of the wrong wolf.
Or the right one. He bit it back until his jaw ached.
The whine, he let Roman have. The word he kept.
Roman’s hand dropped to the button of his jeans and a growl rolled out of him, low and old, the alpha asking for the rest of him, and God, Lance wanted to give it.
Wanted to give him everything, right here, in a thirty-eight-dollar room with the neon buzzing through the curtains.
And that, the wanting, was the thing that finally scared him sober.
He was off his suppressants. He had no business letting this past the line, not when the line was the only thing standing between Roman and a bond that would chain a prince to a dead-end half-blood.
“Yes,” he gasped, “but no.”
Roman went still over him. Lance watched him haul himself back from the edge by sheer will, watched the wolf retreat, inch by unwilling inch. And the fact that he stopped, on one word, when not one soul in Lance’s whole life had ever once stopped for him, wrecked him worse than if he hadn’t.
They broke up laughing at the same second. That was the two of them all over, the way the heat could flip into a joke before either of them went under.
“I think Roman and Lance just beat out Romeo and Juliet,” Lance said, breathing like he’d run the whole way on foot.
“Romeo and Juliet had a worse third act.”
“We catch our breath a second.” It was the exact opposite of what every cell in him was voting for, and he kept his voice easy so Roman wouldn’t hear the vote.
Roman rested his forehead against his a moment, then pushed up off the bed. “I’ll grab us something to drink. There’s a machine over by the office. And some cold air, before I forget I’m a gentleman.”
“You’re barely a gentleman on your best day.”
“Slander.” He bent and kissed Lance one more time, quick, helpless, like he couldn’t quite finish leaving. “Back before you miss me.”
The door clicked shut.
Alone, Lance let the grin slide off his face.
He wanted to ask it. Did that mean what it sounded like?
He didn’t, because not asking was the only way he got to leave in the morning.
He had until Roman came back. He told himself the memory of tonight, Roman’s weight over him, the way he’d stopped on a single word, would be enough to get him through whatever waited on the other side of that gate. He almost believed it.
***
The room was too quiet with Roman gone, and that was how Lance knew he was in trouble.
Quiet had never bothered him before. He’d slept in ditches and bus stations and the beds of strangers’ trucks and been fine with his own company every time.
A few days next to one alpha, and now the quiet felt wrong, the way your tongue keeps finding the gap where a tooth used to be.
He sat up and pulled his shirt on. Think it through, he told himself. Cold, clean, the way he’d work any other job.
He’d told himself the plan was simple. Roman drives him to the gate, gives him a kiss and a blade, drives home to his pack and his life and forgets the stable rat inside a season. Almost there now. Almost done.
Except it wouldn’t be, and the last hour had proved it.
Because he’d been one word from handing Roman an invitation no alpha alive would refuse, and Roman, being Roman, would have taken it.
One word. Alpha instead of yes-but-no, and Roman would have claimed him right there on a bedspread that stank of fried onions, and that was not the kind of thing a man got to undo.
The rest of the drive. The gate. The goodbye.
Roman’s mouth one more time before the border.
He didn’t trust himself for any of it. He’d thought the danger was out there, the ‘nats, the distance, the wasteland past the gate.
The danger was across the parking lot feeding coins into a machine for his creme soda.
And here was the sick joke of it. A bond would save him.
That was what made it unbearable. Find your anchor before the madness takes you and you’re spared, every half-blood grew up on that story, and somehow his anchor had turned out to be a wolf prince who’d kissed him stupid in a roadside motel.
Saying yes would buy Lance a whole life.
It would cost Roman his. The pack, the crown, his brother, his name, gone the day a Leitner heir mated a half-blood.
Lance was not going to buy his own survival with Roman’s entire world.
He’d take his chances past that gate first.
And there was the fear he didn’t say out loud, even alone.
He knew what the early talk sounded like.
He’d watched it take other half-bloods, the temper that wasn’t yours, the thoughts that crawled in like someone else’s.
Once it set in there was no coming back, no anchor, no mate, nothing.
And the ones who broke didn’t go quiet in a corner.
They turned on whoever was closest, and a strong one left bodies.
That red thing at the cottage had wanted to take a man’s hand off and keep going, and it hadn’t cared whose hand.
Next time the closest body might be Roman’s, and Lance might not get a say.
So if tonight was the first crack, staying wasn’t just ruin.
It was Roman on the floor and Lance the one who put him there.
Maybe it was nerves. Maybe nothing. He couldn’t bet Roman’s life on maybe.
Either way the answer was the same.
He got up.
He left the duffel Roman had packed. Taking it felt like theft, and he wasn’t going to walk out of Roman’s life with his arms full of Roman’s things.
He took his own satchel. He’d make the gate on foot and by thumb, the way he’d made everywhere his whole life.
He’d done harder with less. No note. A note just gave Roman a thread to pull.
Better to be gone, the way he’d gone the first time, except this time it was his choice, and that was supposed to feel like power but felt like swallowing glass.
He’d write it in his head and never send it. You’d throw it all away for me, I know you would. So don’t. Keep your pack and your brother and your crown. I won’t be the reason you forfeit any of it.
He cracked the door for one clean breath that wasn’t all Roman, one last look at a night sky he wouldn’t get on the far side of a gate.
The night air came in.
A half second later, so did the door, kicked in hard enough to split the frame.
***
It caught him across the shoulder and knocked him sideways before he’d even fully turned. He went down, rolled, came up already moving, because down was how half-bloods died.
Three came in behind it, dark gear, no scent he could detect, moving together like one trained animal that had done this a hundred times. Not pack. Not anyone’s pack. Venators.
“Lance Dominic.” The one in front had a woman’s voice, bored, like she was reading a parking ticket. “Don’t make it stupid.”
He made it stupid.