2. Sorry, Not Sorry

(Maxine)

They led each couple out behind the smoking censer and down a corridor lined with doors, one room apiece, just for us. Somewhere to get acquainted, the officials said, before the couples were flown off to their new kingdoms within the hour. Every other woman in that corridor walked toward her door like it was a cell.

I got Morrison through ours and let it click shut behind me.

The room was small and warm, a single settee in the middle and not much else. He put the settee between us on instinct and stood with his hands loose at his sides, which, on a man that controlled, was the equivalent of raising a shield.

"Whatever you're planning," he said, "you should know I don't perform on schedule."

"Good." I came around the settee. "I hate a schedule."

"I mean it. I don't know you. We have ten years to—"

I stopped right in front of him, took a fist of shirt to pull him closer and I kissed him.

For one long second he stood there like a man who'd decided in advance not to be moved, and I felt the exact moment the decision died. His hand came up to my jaw, not gentle, and he kissed me back like he resented every part of it, which was so much better than the alternative. I'd expected control. I hadn't expected the control to be this — the slow, deliberate way he took my mouth apart, like he had all night and fully intended to use it.

His pulse was roaring now. I could feel it everywhere I touched him, that clean electric edge of a careful man losing the thread.

I got a hand inside his jacket. He backed me into the door, his mouth dragging down to my throat, and I laughed, breathless and delighted, because of course the mage went for the vampire's neck, and of course it worked. 

Heat pooled low and insistent. My fangs ached against my gums. For a few honest seconds I forgot I hadn't come here for this at all. Then he braced his hand flat against the door beside my head. Wrist bare. Pulse right there, close enough that I could feel the warmth of it against my cheek.

Now or never. I'm sorry, I thought, and found, a little to my own surprise, that I mostly wasn't.

I turned my head and bit down.

Not a graze. Not a lover's nip. I sank my fangs into the inside of his wrist and took, and witch/mage blood — poison to my kind, every physician had sworn it, my own body shrieking wrong, danger, spit it out the instant it touched my tongue—

didn't break down. Didn't burn.

It woke up.

His magic went through me like a match dropped down a fuse, tearing along every nerve I owned, faster than thought and brighter than pain. It found the ache he'd already built low in my body and it detonated there. I heard myself cry out against his skin. My knees buckled. Pleasure ripped up my spine with no hands on me, no warning, no mercy at all, and I came apart against the door with his blood in my mouth and his name half-formed on my tongue, shaking, undone, wrecked by something I hadn't known a body could do.

And Morrison answered.

Not with his hands. With his magic. Power slammed out of him in one hard defensive wave, the little room bending around it, and it caught me square in the chest and threw me. I went over the settee and hit the floor beyond it, the taste of him still impossibly bright on my tongue, my whole body still ringing with an aftershock I had no right to feel.

I lay there. Panting. Grinning, probably, in a way that looked unhinged.

Because it had worked. Whatever I'd gambled on when I closed my teeth over a mage's wrist — the thing that should have killed me, the thing every physician alive would have sworn would kill me — it hadn't. It had done something no one had a name for, and it had done it because of him. 

Him, specifically. 

I was sure of that the way I'd never been sure of anything, and I was still shaking with it as he stood over me, blood sliding down his wrist, something cold and furious rebuilding behind his eyes.

"It's you," I whispered.

Morrison looked at his bleeding wrist. Then he looked at me, sprawled and shivering on the floor of a room that was supposed to make two strangers slightly less strange to each other.

"Who," he said, very quietly, in the voice of a man discovering exactly how badly he had misjudged the situation, "the fuck are you?"