Chapter 189: The Thirteenth Love Scene

The keeper's boat could wait until morning. That was what Ronan said, and I agreed with him, and we went up the hill to the pack house with the rain coming down soft and steady and Nessa trotting ahead of us complaining that nobody ever told her anything.

The Alpha's quarters had been aired out and the fishing gear moved to the shed at the back, and the room smelled of beeswax and the sea. There was a fire already lit in the grate and a jug of water on the washstand and the wide bed made up with clean linen, and Ronan stopped in the doorway and looked at it as though he had never seen it before.

"I have not slept in this room since the trial," he said.

"I know."

"It feels like it belongs to somebody else."

"It belongs to you." I closed the door behind us. "The pack said so in the drying shed. They were very clear about it. Aisling will be disappointed if you sleep anywhere else."

He laughed, and then he was not laughing, because I had come up close to him and put my hand flat on his chest. I could feel his heart going under my palm, quick and hard, and I could feel the warmth of him through his shirt, and behind my ribs the hollow place turned over and something on the other side of it stirred and settled again, easy as a wolf turning in its sleep.

"You are sure," he said. His voice had gone low. "After everything. You are sure."

"I have been sure since the cave," I said. "I was too angry to say it and too frightened to act on it. I am not angry anymore and there is nothing left in this house to be frightened of except the roof falling in, and Padraig says that will not happen until Tuesday."

His mouth came up at one corner. Then he bent his head and kissed me, and it was slow, the way a tide comes in, and I put my arms round his neck and let him take his time.

There was no hurry in that room. That was the thing I remember most about it. Every other time we had come together there had been a wall at our backs or a war outside the door or a clock running down in one of our heads. This time there was a fire and a jug of water and a bed with clean linen, and the rain on the window, and nothing at all waiting for us until morning except four keepers on a boat in the harbour who could very well wait.

He unbuttoned my shirt one button at a time and pushed it off my shoulders, and his hands came round my ribs and found the new scar, the long pale line the silver had left, and he bent and kissed it. I felt his mouth on the scar and my knees went soft, and I put my fingers in his ginger hair and held him there.

"Your turn," I said.

He pulled his shirt off over his head and I looked at him properly, in the firelight, the way I had not been able to look at him in a cave or a boathouse or a stone room under the Council seat. There was the old scar on his shoulder where the silver had burned and refused to heal, and the new bandage on his arm, and the long ridge of muscle down his back that had gone thinner over the winter, and I put my hands on all of it. He stood still and let me. His breath came faster but he did not move, and when I stepped in and pressed my mouth to the hollow of his throat he made a sound that I felt all the way down my spine.

We got to the bed eventually. He laid me down on the linen and came over me, and the firelight moved on the ceiling, and for a long while there was nothing but his hands and his mouth and the weight of him and the sound of the rain. He was unhurried in a way that undid me, drawing it out, coming back to my mouth whenever I started to say something, and when I finally caught his face in both my hands and told him I was not going to break, he laughed against my skin and said, "I know exactly what you are, Fiadh. I have seen you in a fight."

Afterwards we lay in the wide bed with the blanket over us and the fire settling down to embers, and I put my cheek on his chest and listened to his heart slow. My wrist was warm where the pale crescent was, and I could feel the other side of the hollow place, and there was something there now that had not been there in the morning. Not a voice. A warmth, like a hand resting on a hand through a wall.

"Ronan."

"Mm."

"Can you feel her?"

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, very carefully, "I can feel something. It is not the bond. It is quieter than the bond was. When you came in from the harbour wall I felt it in my chest, like a door opening in another room." He turned his head on the pillow. "Does that frighten you?"

"Everything frightens me. I have a great deal of practice at being frightened." I put my hand flat on his chest again. "It does not frighten me the way it used to."

He covered my hand with his. We lay there while the fire went down, and outside the rain stopped, and the harbour bell rang the hour, and I thought about the keepers on their boat and what they would say in the morning and what they would ask of me. I thought about the mark on my wrist and the empty spring and the moon priestess Padraig had written to three days ago and had not yet had an answer from.

Then I thought about nothing at all, because Ronan's hand had gone slack and his breath had gone deep and even, and he was asleep beside me for the first time in months without a wound or a worry keeping him awake, and I lay still and let him sleep.

I was nearly asleep myself when the mark on my wrist turned cold.

Not cold like ice. Cold like the other side of a door in winter, and I sat up in the bed with my heart going, and in the dark by the window a shape was standing that had not been there a moment before.

It was a wolf. Small and grey, with a coat like old smoke, and it stood in the embers' light and looked at me with eyes that were pale green and not Ronan's at all, and it said, in a voice that was inside my own head, "The keepers are not the ones you should be afraid of. I am what they are bringing with them."