What The Stone Remembers

Chloe's POV

He came to my room three nights later, and he knocked, which I had not expected.

"You can come in," I said.

He did not, at first. He stood in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame and looked at me for a while.

"Marcus says the third mark is ready to go," he said. "He says the attunement work has taken us as far as it can. After this it needs the rest of it."

"I know what it needs."

"I want to hear you say it anyway."

I put down the book I had not been reading. "You want to sleep with me."

"I want you to decide whether I do." He came in and shut the door. "Those are not the same thing and I would like us to keep them separate for as long as we possibly can."

"You have said something like that before."

"I will keep saying it." He sat down on the end of the bed, which put him further from me than he needed to be, and I understood that was deliberate. "There is no part of this I am comfortable with. I am asking a woman who has lost everything to give me one more thing, and I am the one who benefits."

"You are not the only one who benefits."

"No?"

"You are looking for my wolf." I made myself hold his eyes. "You sent to four courts before I was even awake. That is not nothing to me."

"It is not payment either."

"I did not say it was."

The fire had burned down and neither of us had done anything about it. I could hear the wind against the window and somebody's boots in the corridor two floors below.

"Theron."

"Yes."

"I have been sitting in this room for three days thinking about it," I said. "And the honest answer is that I stopped thinking about the curse two days ago and started thinking about you, and that frightens me more than the ritual does."

He did not move. "Say that again."

"No."

"Chloe."

"I said what I said. I am not saying it twice." My face had gone hot. "Are you going to sit at the end of the bed all night?"

He crossed the room and kissed me, and it was not gentle. His hand came up into my hair and closed there, and the sound I made against his mouth was not one I had planned on.

"Tell me to stop and I stop," he said against my jaw. "That was the condition. It stands tonight and every night after."

"I know what the condition was. I wrote it."

"Then tell me what you want."

"I want you to stop asking me questions."

He got my dress off, over my head and dropped it on the floor, and then he took his time, which I had not expected either. His mouth went down my throat and across my collarbone and lower, and he was not in a hurry about any of it. When he closed his mouth over my breast I put both hands in his hair and held on.

"Lie back," he said.

I lay back.

He pushed my knees apart and put his mouth on me, and I stopped being able to think straight. He was slow and thorough and completely unbothered by how loud I got. When I tried to close my legs he put his forearm across my hips and held me open and kept going.

"Theron."

"Say it again."

"Theron, please."

He slid two fingers into me while his tongue worked, and I came apart with my heels digging into the bed and his name in my mouth. He did not stop until I was shaking and pushing at his shoulder.

He came up over me. His mouth was wet and his eyes had gone dark and he looked at me for a long moment.

"Still yes?" he said.

"Still yes."

He pushed into me slowly, and it had been a long time for me, and he felt it and held still until I moved first. Then he did not hold still anymore.

It was not careful. I did not want it careful. I got my legs around him and my nails into his back and he swore into my shoulder and drove into me harder, and the bed moved on the stone, and somewhere in the middle of it the light started.

I felt it before I saw it. The warmth in my chest lit up the way it had in the garden, but there was nothing to hold back this time and no reason to. It ran out of me and into him with every stroke, silver, and the room went bright with it.

"Do not stop," he said. "Whatever happens, do not stop."

"I could not if I wanted to."

He got his hand between us and found me with his thumb and I broke apart around him a second time, and that was what did it. He went rigid and came with a sound I felt in my own chest, and the light went white.

The third mark cracked. So did the fourth. I heard both.

Afterward we lay there for a long time without saying anything.

The marks on his throat had gone thin and grey. Four of them broken now, out of I did not know how many. He was breathing like a man who had run a long way.

"That is more than it should have been," he said eventually.

"Is that bad?"

"I do not know. Nothing about this has gone the way the texts say." He turned his head on the pillow. "How do you feel?"

"Tired. Good." I thought about it. "Warm."

"Warm."

"All the way through. It has not stopped since the garden."

He was quiet for a while after that, and I fell asleep before he answered.

I got up for water somewhere near dawn, and that was when I saw the pendant on the table by the window, sitting on top of a stack of things he had emptied out of his pockets days ago and never put away.

Silver, gone dark with age. A crescent moon, but cut down the middle, so that only half of it was there.

I picked it up. It was warm, and the room was cold, and it had been lying on a stone table all night.

"Where did you get this?"

He was awake, watching me from the bed.

"It was Aldric's." He sat up. "It came out of the working, whatever he did in that hall, and it has been in this family ever since. It was made in two halves and nobody has ever known where the other one went."

"Why is it warm?"

He stopped.

"It is not warm," he said. "It has never been warm. I have carried that thing since I was nineteen years old."

I held it out to him. He took it, and I watched his face change.

He looked at the pendant. Then he looked at my hand.

"Give me your wrist," he said.

I gave it to him. He turned it over, under the window, in the grey light coming up over the yard.

The sigil Maris had burned into me was still there. Silver, ugly, healed over now.

And around it, very faint, so faint I had walked past a mirror a dozen times and never noticed, the skin had started to darken. Thin lines, spreading out from the mark, so pale you had to hold the arm to the light to see them at all.

Neither of us said anything.

Then Theron got out of the bed and started pulling his clothes on, and his hands were not steady, and he said, "Get dressed. We are going to wake Marcus up."