Chapter 181: The Twelfth Love Scene

The tunnel behind the spring was not on any map Padraig had drawn for us. It opened where the wall markings thickened, a low split in the stone that a human would have missed and a wolf could just squeeze through, and the four of us went through it one after another: Ronan first, still shaking with what he had done, then me on three legs, then Nessa, then one of Bran's rogues whose name I had never learned. Behind us the chamber had gone quiet in a way I did not trust. Soren and Lorcan had stopped speaking. That was worse than the shouting.

The split opened into a round room, low ceilinged, with a basin in the centre and water running down the far wall in a thin constant line. The air smelled of wet stone and something older, like the inside of a church. Nessa found a lantern on a shelf and struck it, and the light showed us our own blood on the floor.

"I will stand the tunnel," the rogue said. "If they come at us from the chamber, you will hear me before you see me." She was gone before I could thank her.

Ronan shifted back first. I heard the change, the long grind of it, and when I turned he was crouched on the stone in his human skin, his shoulders heaving. The cut down his arm had opened again. He looked up at me and his face was a mess of anger and something I could not name.

"You cannot stay in that shape," he said. "Fiadh. Your side."

I knew he was right. The silver had gone deep, and the wolf shape held the wound tighter than my own body would. I reached for the change the way I had learned to in the weeks since the cave, and it came more slowly this time, the way a door comes open when the hinge has been bent. When it was done I was on my hands and knees on the cold floor, naked, with a line of fire down my ribs and Nessa already pulling a folded blanket from the shelf and putting it round my shoulders without a word.

"Give us a moment," Ronan said to her.

Nessa looked at him, then at me, and her freckled face did something complicated. "I will be just outside the tunnel mouth," she said. "Shout if the silver gets worse."

She went. The lantern guttered and settled. Ronan crossed the room and knelt in front of me, and his hands came up and then stopped, hovering, as though he was afraid to touch the wound.

"Let me see," I said.

"It is not my arm that worries me."

"Let me see it anyway."

He turned his arm so I could look at the cut, and I cleaned it with the water from the basin and bound it with a strip torn from the hem of my own shirt, which was still in one piece because I had not been wearing it when I shifted. My hands were steady. They had been steady through worse. His were not. I could feel them trembling against my fingers, and I could feel through the bond the low roar of everything he had done in that chamber, the guards he had put down, the joy he had taken in it, and the horror sitting underneath the joy.

"I lost control," he said.

"Yes."

"I could have killed them. I nearly did. The one with the silver, I wanted to."

"I know." I tied off the bandage and sat back on my heels. "I felt it. I was there."

He looked at me then, properly, and his pale green eyes were wet at the corners, and he did not wipe them. "You are not afraid of me."

It was not a question, but I answered it anyway. "I have been afraid of a great many things in my life, Ronan Blackthorn. You are not one of them."

Something in his face came apart. He reached for me and stopped again, his hands at my shoulders, and I could see him fighting himself, the way he always did, the pride and the shame pulling in opposite directions. I put my hand on the back of his neck and pulled him the rest of the way in, and he kissed me like a man coming up out of deep water.

I had missed him. That was the plain truth of it. We had been in the same rooms for months and there had been a trial and an exile and a war between us, and I had missed him the way you miss a limb. His mouth was warm and his jaw was rough and his hands slid under the blanket and spread across my back, and I felt the cold stone go out of the world.

He laid me down on the folded blanket and pulled the rest of it over us both, and for a while there was only the sound of the water running down the wall and his breath against my throat. He touched the wound on my side, gently, with his fingertips, and then his mouth found the skin above it and he kissed a slow line up my ribs. I put my fingers in his ginger hair and held on.

"You are so warm," he said against my shoulder. "I keep thinking I dreamed the gold. That I imagined it."

"You did not imagine it."

"I know. I can still see it." He lifted his head. "I have never seen anything like you."

I pulled him down by the neck and kissed him again, harder, and he answered it, and the bond between us opened all the way for the first time since the chamber, and I felt everything he was feeling, the want and the grief and the fear, and under all of it the stubborn fierce thing that had made him accept a false bond to save his pack and stand silent at my exile and come back anyway. I felt it and I gave him back everything of mine, and his breath caught as if I had touched him with my hands.

Afterward we lay in the lantern light with the blanket round us, and I listened to his heartbeat slow, and I thought about how few hours we had before Soren found another way in.

"We cannot stay here," I said.

"I know." His hand was still moving slowly up and down my spine. "Fiadh. When this is finished, if we are both still standing, I want to do it properly. A mark given in the moonlight, with the pack watching, and no Council anywhere near it."

I turned my head to look at him. He was serious in a way I had rarely seen him, the way he had been serious at the trial, and I opened my mouth to answer.

Then a scent came through the tunnel from the chamber behind us, cold and sharp and familiar, and the rogue standing watch said, in a voice pitched to carry, "There is a woman coming. Blackthorn scent. Copper hair."

Ronan was on his feet before she finished the sentence.