5: Heat

He was sitting on the floor of the corridor with his back against the wall and his forearms on his knees, and when the door swung open he looked up at me as if I were the one with teeth.

For a moment neither of us moved. The lamp at the end of the hall had burned low. His eyes caught the light and threw it back gold.

"Ruby." My name sounded like a warning. "Close the door."

"No."

He got to his feet slowly, using the wall, as if his body didn't fully belong to him. Up close, I could see what holding himself out here had cost him. A sheen of sweat at his temples. His hands fisted so tight the knuckles had gone white. A muscle jumping in his jaw.

"You don't know what you're asking for," he said.

"Then tell me."

"It's the heat. It's my blood. Tomorrow it'll pass and you'll look at me the way you looked at me in that clearing, and you'll be right to."

"Maybe." I stepped out into the corridor, barefoot on the cold boards. The heat rolled through me in a long, slow wave, and I let it, and kept my eyes on his. "Let me tell you something, Alpha. My whole life, people have decided things for me. Where I sleep. What I eat. Who I'm worth. My grandmother decided I was worth a cart ride and a basket of bread. The elders decided I was worth dying." My voice wavered and I made it stop. "I'm alive, and I don't know why, and I don't know how long. But tonight, I decide. Not your blood. Not my grandmother. Me."

He stared at me.

"Ask me if I'm sure," I said.

His throat moved. "Are you sure?"

"Yes."

He didn't kiss me like a monster.

That was the first shock. I'd braced for teeth, for force, for the thing in the clearing. Instead he lifted one hand and laid it against my cheek, and held it there, and when he finally lowered his mouth to mine it was slow and careful, almost a question, as though he'd forgotten how and was trying to remember.

Then I kissed him back, and he stopped remembering anything at all.

*   *   *

I don't know how we got to the bed. I remember the door slamming. I remember the linen shirt tearing down the front and not caring. I remember the shock of his skin against mine, fever-hot, the scars on his chest rough under my palms, the low sound he made when I traced them.

"Tell me to stop," he said against my throat, "and I stop. Whenever. You hear me?"

"I hear you." I pulled him down. "Don't stop."

The heat had been a torment all evening, a pull with nowhere to go. Now it had somewhere to go. Every place his hands touched lit up. His mouth found the mark on my neck, and when he pressed his lips to it I arched off the bed with a cry I didn't recognize as my own. The mark answered him. I felt it like a plucked string, a vibration running from my throat to the base of my spine.

"That's—" I gasped.

"I know." His voice was ragged. "I feel it too."

He took his time. That was the second shock. For all the hunger I could feel shaking through him, he was patient with me, learning me, reading every hitch of breath and every shiver, as though my pleasure were a language he was determined to master before morning. When he finally moved inside me, he held still, his forehead against mine, both of us breathing like we'd been running through the woods again.

"Ruby," he said. Just my name. As if it were something he'd been waiting years to say to someone.

After that there were no more words. Only the heat, rising and breaking and rising again, his hands laced through mine and pinned to the furs, the low rumble of his growl against my ear, the moment when everything in me pulled tight and then shattered, and his name tore out of my throat loud enough that the whole house must have heard it.

I didn't care. Let them hear.

The heat came back twice more before dawn. Each time he was there, and each time he asked, and each time I said yes.

*   *   *

I woke at first light with his arm heavy around my waist and his breath slow against the back of my neck. For one soft, stupid moment I was happy.

Then he moved, and the arm was gone, and the bed dipped as he stood up.

I rolled over. He was pulling on his trousers with his back to me. In the gray light, I could see new marks on his shoulders. Mine. Half-moons from my nails.

"Lucan—"

"Don't." He didn't turn around. "Whatever you're about to say. Don't."

I sat up, holding the fur against my chest. "I wasn't going to say anything."

"Good." He pulled his shirt over his head. When he finally faced me, his face was a closed door. "Let's be clear, so there's no confusion later. That was the heat. It'll come again, and when it does, I'll be here, because that's what the mark requires. But you're here to carry my line. That's all. In a month you'll be pregnant or you'll be dead, and either way, I won't—" He stopped. "Don't mistake this for anything else."

The words should have gutted me. A day ago they would have. I'd spent fourteen years learning to bleed quietly when people said things like that.

But I'd learned something else in those fourteen years, too. I'd learned to watch hands.

Grandmother's hands never shook. Not when she struck me, not when she lied, not when she fastened that clasp at my throat. People who mean their cruelty are steady.

Lucan's hands were shaking.

He noticed me looking and shoved them into his pockets, and his jaw went tight, and he turned away too fast.

And I understood.

He'd buried eleven girls. He'd written eleven names in a book, afterward. He'd sat outside my door all night with his head against the wall, rather than risk hurting me. And this morning, after the first night in God knew how long that something had been gentle in his life, he was standing in front of me trying to make me hate him, because he was certain I was going to die like all the others and he couldn't bear to care when it happened.

The Big Bad Wolf was afraid of me.

Not of what I could do to him. Of what it would do to him to lose me.

I should have felt pity. Instead, something colder and sharper settled into my chest, something I recognized from a lifetime of surviving my grandmother's house.

Leverage.

"All right," I said evenly. "I won't mistake it."

He looked at me sharply, as if he'd expected tears and didn't know what to do without them. Then he nodded once and went to the door.

He'd just put his hand on the latch when someone knocked from the other side.

Lucan went still. I smelled her before he opened it: jasmine and crushed violets, expensive and sweet, and underneath it something sharp as a blade.

The woman in the doorway was beautiful. Tall, pale-haired, wrapped in a gray fur that probably cost more than the Ashgrove house. She looked at Lucan, and then past him, at me, sitting in his bed in the ruins of his shirt. Her nostrils flared. She smelled exactly what had happened in this room, and her smile didn't move by so much as a hair.

"Good morning, Lucan," she said. Then, to me, sweetly: "So the vessel survived. How unfortunate."