The sensation went to his head. He eased over her more fully, pressing one leg between hers. The friction of denim cloth from their jeans was a quiet sound interspersed with the sound of their deepening breath. She ran her hands up his back, her touch on the expanse of naked skin sending a shudder through him.
He couldn’t believe he hadn’t been inside of her yet. He needed to know her response to that most basic and primitive joining. Her long lean body was a match for his. It felt amazing to stretch out along her and revel in her feminine strength, like it unlocked a previously unacknowledged part of him.
Somewhere inside of him, that wild, dangerous part that he kept so tightly leashed broke loose and started running unfettered again. He had just enough presence of mind to wonder where the hell it was going, and why it needed to get there so urgently.
Neither one of them was capable of consummating a goddamn thing, yet still they kissed and kissed. He ran his fingers up her torso, underneath her ruined T-shirt to stroke at the graceful swell of one breast. He played with her soft, distended nipple as she cupped the back of his head, holding him down to her mouth.
Finally he pulled away enough to kiss the corner of her lips, and he leaned his forehead against hers. She stroked his hair, and it felt like a miracle.
He sighed. “Okay, when you’re not making me batshit crazy, I guess maybe I like you after all. But if you tell anybody that, I’m going to have to throttle you again.”
A soft explosion came out of her nose. She said, “An hour.”
“What’s an hour?” He fingered a strand of her soft hair.
“I want to renegotiate our bargain, to be consummated at some future date when neither one has had the shit kicked out of us.” A thread of humor laced her words. “Unless that happens for purely recreational purposes, of course.”
He paused to listen inwardly to his own reaction. The loudest part was relief and respect. After admitting to how devastated she was, she had not only mustered humor and genuine emotion, but now she had taken the first step to making plans beyond taking revenge on the witch.
Underneath all of those reactions though, ran a bloodred pulse of hunger, coursing in a subterranean river through his arteries and filling him with greed.
An hour was an eyeblink, a mere moment in time. He had squandered more time than that when deciding where he wanted to go for dinner on a boring day. An hour was woefully inadequate considering all the things he wanted to do to her, and with her.
Considering all the things that she would do to him. Somehow he had gone from enduring that thought to wondering.
And wanting.
He said, “No hour. A night, from dusk to dawn. You get one, and I get one. No stopwatches, no alarms going off, no hourglasses.” The wild part of him ran harder, and his voice deepened. “No rules.”
A shudder ran through her, and the feel of it thrilled him. “You would do that, give up total control for that long.”
“I totally would do that, if you would.” He put his mouth over hers to feel her warm, moist breath. “Do you dare?”
She started to laugh almost silently. The uneven puffs of air against his lips were like bubbles of champagne. He breathed them down and felt them enter his bloodstream, coursing with his greed. She told him, “You know asking a harpy if she dares to do something is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”
“I had hoped,” he admitted.
Even as he said the last word, she spoke over him. “Yes.”
Triumph roared through him, and with it came an epiphany.
This thing with Aryal wasn’t aberrant. Those things in his nature that she showed him weren’t aberrant. They were a part of him that he didn’t know existed until Aryal brought a light to shine on them. This wasn’t sexual tourism. It was sexual discovery.
He barely heard over his internal realization what she said next. “You know other people—any other people—would think we were crazy.”
He understood exactly what she meant. Hell, they didn’t even do BDSM in any straightforward fashion, and they certainly didn’t follow the norm or any of the suggested guidelines. He didn’t think there were any subculture groups who would approve of the rampant disregard either he or Aryal gave for safety checks.
He didn’t want a safe word, and she didn’t ask for one. They were both dominant, and he knew for a fact he wouldn’t be a switch—someone who switched the dominant role with the submissive role—for anybody else but her. And he was almost certain she wouldn’t either.
She quieted that internal whip that drove him because she became the whip, her soul as sharp as a knife.
He could cut himself on her, wrap her in his arms and be her buffer. Heal her from herself, bruise himself on her.
Let her heal him. Let her be his buffer.
They were so unapologetic, so kinked.
He said, “We’re perfect.”
SEVENTEEN
After he spoke, they fell silent, as if they had gone more than far enough for one conversation. There were implications everywhere in what had just happened, and Aryal didn’t want to consider any of them, nor did she want to decipher any of the unfamiliar emotions that rioted inside of her. That crowd of strangers, yelling in an incomprehensible language, was back in her head.
Except one of those strangers was perfectly understandable, as it held up a giant spongy finger that pointed to a placard that said, “Total fucking win-win.”
She considered sinking back into despair, because at least she understood that emotion, and it hovered around the edges of all the others, ready to bring down the weakest in the herd.
But she was no longer as shaky and hollowed out as she had been before the nap, the food and the cuddle, and she couldn’t manage to give in to it.
Sometimes being too stubborn for her own good turned out to be the best thing for her.
So she broke things down into words of one syllable, since that was apparently what she could handle at the moment.
Fuck it then. Kill the bitch, have some great sex, go home.
She counted backward. Yep, all one-syllable words. That’d do.
While she deconstructed her life, Quentin eased off of her and stretched out on his back again.
Somehow, something had shifted when she hadn’t been paying attention, and the part of him that was feline no longer bothered her. She simply enjoyed his animal grace.
He tucked one hand behind his head with a sigh. “Are you going to come over here or not?”
She decided that it sounded like a great idea, so she edged close to settle against him, putting her head on his bare shoulder. Fitting herself against his body felt incredible, her leg hooked up over his. She shook out her tablecloth/blanket over both of them and draped her arm across his chest. He put his arm around her and pressed a kiss to her forehead. He seemed to be more demonstrably affectionate than she was. It took her outside of her comfort zone, but she … liked it.
Sleep stalked her, but she fought it off enough to mumble, “I bet you act romantic with every female you’ve ever dated.”
His response was a long time in coming, more of a grunt than a real word. “Yup.”
Not that they were dating, but … “You talk like shit to me.”
He grunted again. “Can’t tell you what a relief that is.”
Tucked in between pockets of decency and a conscience, he was still a bastard.
One corner of her mouth lifted in a smile. She let sleep take her.
The pale light of predawn woke her.
Razor teeth. Crushed.
Adrenaline flooded her system, bringing with it a wash of nervous energy. Her body ached all over. Caerreth had closed her wounds and started them on the right path, but they were still healing. She needed more rest. She needed real rest and recuperation, but she couldn’t relax enough to let sleep claim her again.
She eased her head off of Quentin’s shoulder and looked at him. He was sound asleep, his lean jaw covered with more pale gold beard
. His face wore the marks that the last couple of days had put on him. Even asleep, it made him look edgier and more dangerous than he did back in New York, and she had thought he’d looked dangerous then.
Then, he’d looked like a sleek, well-fed predator cruising through a crowd of unsuspecting pussycats. Now he looked more like what he really was, a man who would do anything he had to in order to survive.
A man who tried to be good in spite of himself, but who was really bad enough that she wanted him at her back in a tough fight.
She hadn’t told him that she liked him too, when he wasn’t driving her batshit crazy. It wasn’t any of his business how she felt about him.
But in the predawn silence, in the privacy of her own mind, she admitted a truth. Maybe she more than liked him.
The crowd in her head woke up and tried to riot again. She rolled her eyes and eased away from Quentin, trying not to disturb him. He had not been as injured as she had, but he needed more rest too, and he didn’t stir as she sat up.
She tucked the tablecloth around his torso, crawled over to the food they’d left strewn over the floor and ate a weird but filling breakfast. Actually, pickled eel and apple brandy weren’t so bad together. Then she went into “her” cell, where the blood on the floor had dried, used the crude latrine in the corner and splashed her hands off with water from the wineskin. A proper wash and clean clothes were high on her list of needs that day.
Second only to finding weapons and Elven armor.
When she went to peek out of the window, Linwe was keeping watch by the cell block door. She nodded to the young Elf and looked outside. The sky was cloudless, the wide expanse of water calm. It was going to be another scorcher of a day.
She went around to the other side of the cell block, gesturing to Linwe to follow her. The other woman did, her fine-boned face sparking with curiosity. “Let’s wake the other two,” Aryal said to her quietly. “We need to make some plans and act on them.”
“Okay,” said Linwe.
Together they shook Aralorn and Caerreth awake. The males sat up readily enough, wiping at their tired faces. Despite the short night, they all looked miles better than they had before.
Aryal sat back on her heels, testing her thigh wound. It held. The other three were watching her expectantly. She said, “Here’s the plan. You guys are leaving as fast as you can.”
“Wait, what?” Linwe said. The two males looked confused.
Aryal told them, “You need to take enough food to get you through a two-day run, harvest water on the go, and leave Numenlaur. On the other side, one of you needs to hike out of the forest to update Ferion, and make sure that Ferion updates Dragos. The other two will stand watch. Don’t let anybody into Numenlaur. If the witch and her wolves are the first ones out, the news about us won’t be good. If that happens, don’t do anything. Hide and let her pass. But neither Quentin nor I are planning on letting that happen.” She looked at the three sober faces. “Who has magical aptitude aside from Caerreth?”
“We all have some,” said Linwe. “Caerreth has the most aptitude, but Aralorn has more offensive Power. I know some basics like how to spell a light, but my strengths are more physical.”
“She’s killer with a bow and arrow,” Aralorn said with a small smile. “A little like Hawkeye in the Avengers.”
Dear gods, he was talking about comic superheroes. They were so young.
Aryal rubbed her tired, gritty eyes. “Okay,” she said. “If I were Galya, I would have sent one of the shadow wolves back to the passageway to stand guard, so we have to expect that. I doubt it will try to follow you back over the passageway, because if there is one there, I think its purpose is to bring back word of someone crossing over. Plus it might not be able to travel that far away from Galya. There’s something that connects her and the wolves, and that connection might be a magical one. If it is there, it might not attack you. Then again, it might, so you need to be prepared. If you don’t know how to throw a simple repel spell yet, Quentin will teach you when he wakes up. You’re going to have learn it fast, because I want you out of here by midmorning.”
All three of them argued. They had heart, she’d give them that.
Aralorn said, “But you need us.”
She leaned her elbows on her knees and gave him a level look. “No, we don’t,” she said. She’d never been one to mince words, and now was not the time to start just to save this young man’s pride. “We need each other, we don’t need you. You need to leave so that you don’t become collateral damage. Two communities of Elves have lost enough. Your people need you, and you can’t forget it.”
Something happened then, a shift of their eyes, a change in the air. Even though she hadn’t heard anything, she looked over her shoulder.
Quentin stood behind her, arms crossed, leaning one bare shoulder against the frame of the cell door, and she was struck all over again by the differences between him and the others. He looked mature, muscled and mean, and his steady gaze met hers.
She didn’t know the words to describe his expression. All she knew was that his regard was so intent, it caused her to flush hot all over. He nodded to her. Then he looked beyond her to the other three.
“Who needs a magic lesson?” he asked.
Caerreth raised his hand. Aralorn said, “I know the spell.”
Linwe said, “To be honest, I won’t learn it fast enough. I’ll be of more use helping with something else.”
“Okay, Caerreth,” said Quentin. “It’s you and me, buddy. Let’s go into my office.”
He led the younger Elf away to the other side of the cell block. Aryal called after him, “Unlock the door as you go, will you?”
He raised a hand in acknowledgement just before he disappeared. She turned to the other two. She squinted at Linwe. “Weren’t you wearing battle armor back in January? Where is it now?”
Linwe looked at the floor. “Back home.”
“Ah,” said Aryal. As Linwe’s skin darkened, she said with a twisted smile, “I usually wear fighting leathers, but you know what? Leather tends to get squeaky in the cold so on this trip I decided to wear jeans instead. Who knew. Can you make the two-day run in full Elven armor?”
Both Linwe and Aralorn looked very sharp and alert.
Linwe said, “I can.” Aralorn nodded.
“Then here’s what I think,” said Aryal. “I think if Elven armor is magic resistant, then it’s very possible it’ll do a damn good job of protecting against those shadow wolf bites. We need to find a barracks and an armory, where we can get five sets of armor and weapons. You know that’s gotta be close by the palace. I’ll tell you what else I think. You remember that three-day feeding pattern you were talking about, Linwe?”
“Yes.”
“Yesterday was the day she was supposed to feed you and she didn’t, right?”
“That’s right.”
“I think Galya’s been traveling back every three days from the island to feed you. Bringing us down on the same trip yesterday was killing two birds with one stone.” Aryal rubbed the back of her neck. “And I think Quentin was right—she didn’t make the choice to stop feeding you until we showed up, and I recognized her. Anyway, the point is, if her search is focused on the island, I think she’s still over there now. And except for any sentry that she’s probably sent to the passageway, I think the shadow wolves are with her, or they would have attacked you and Quentin last night when you went to get food.” She paused to consider her own logic. “So I think it’s still a risk to go hunting for the barracks, but it’s a calculated one, and the odds are in our favor. Are you game to go with me?”
“Hell, yes,” Aralorn said. Linwe hopped to her feet in answer.
Aryal smiled. Galya Andreyev must want something pretty fucking badly, if she was willing to be responsible for six people’s deaths in order to get it. And if she was willing to kill that many people, what she wanted was something she wasn’t supposed to have.
It felt good to take steps
toward stopping her.
She stood too. “Let’s go.”
She walked around to the other side of the block where Quentin was teaching Caerreth the steps to throwing the repel spell. Caerreth wouldn’t be able to practice it until he left the cell block, but at least he would know how to do it.
“You need to practice this every time you stop to eat and rest,” Quentin was telling him. “If the shadow wolf attacks, it’s going to be wicked fast. You won’t have time to dither.”
The young healer looked even more scared than he had last night. Aryal said to him, “Imagine it’s like an arterial wound. You have to act fast before your patient bleeds out. This is the same thing, only you might become the bleeder.”
Caerreth paled. “I guess I see your point.”
Quentin said to her, “You’re not helping, sunshine.”
She gave him a wide-eyed look. “Was it something I said?” She watched with furtive pleasure as he bit back a smile. She told him, “I’m taking two of the kids, and we’re going to the mall, honey. You know, looking for weapons, armor, that kind of thing. We’ll be as quick as we can.”
“Drive safe,” he said, his gaze going sharp.
She gave him a limpid glance. “Oh, you know me. I can never parallel park the minivan right.”
He burst out laughing. “Now that is a nightmarish image.”
She smirked and walked out.
He called out after her, “Be fast. Don’t make me come after you.”
Linwe and Aralorn waited for her at the cell block door. Aralorn looked a little leery of the banter, but Linwe’s eyes were dancing.
When Aryal reached them, she said loudly, “What can I say. When your dad hit middle age, he turned into a worrywart.” More quietly, she said, “Let’s go.”
Finding the barracks was as much an exercise in logic as anything. They had to work their way upward, and for the first part of the journey, Linwe took the lead until they reached the kitchens, which were on the ground floor and not dug into the cliff itself.
The kitchens were located on the side of the palace that faced inland, away from the Temple of the Gods and the sea, and they had plenty of windows to allow for fresh air and natural light.