Chapter 10 - Walking Away

The binding holds.

I smooth the last strip of cloth over Almartín's shoulder and sit back on my heels. Even tension. Clean wrap. It'll keep through the cook lines if he doesn't do anything stupid, which is a bet I wouldn't take. I drop my hands to my thighs and look at what I've done.

The tent is quiet. Forty bodies and one brazier burning itself out and the rain thinning to nothing outside the canvas. We are both naked and there is blood on both of us, his and not his, and neither of us has reached for our clothes.

He reaches for me instead.

His hand comes up slow, testing, and finds my hair. Just that. Fingers pushing it back from my jaw, smoothing it behind my ear, thumb dragging light across my cheekbone. Tender. He's looking at me the way he looks at things he's trying to memorize, like the shape of my face is something he needs to keep.

He thinks we're done.

He's spent, shoulder rebound, jaw going soft at the edges, that particular stillness men get after they've finished. He's touching my face like I might disappear when he stops. He's not wrong that I'll go. He's wrong about when.

The night has me lit up from the inside. Thirty-four kills and one rogue and one round in the furs among the dead and I am nowhere near finished. Something got loose in me in the mess tent, some door I've kept bolted since the first time I saw him work. I should close it. Price the risk. Walk away now and call it a good night and a better fuck.

I'm not going to.

I pull back from his hand. He lets me go without question.

I find his belt in the pile of discarded clothes by feel. Good leather, heavy buckle, still warm from his body heat. I come back to him and he's watching me with those brown eyes, tracking the belt, tracking my face, and I watch the understanding settle behind his grin.

His mouth curves.

"Oye," he says.

"Shut up."

I push him flat with one hand on his chest. No negotiation. He goes. His wrists follow me up to the tent pole behind his head without being told, offered like a gift he's choosing to give, and I wrap the belt twice, pull it tight, buckle it to the wood. He watches the whole thing. That grin. Grey predawn light filtering through the canvas, soft and even, and he is not remotely worried.

"You don't have to do this," he says.

"I know."

"I want to be clear that I'm letting you."

I look at him. Bare and ruined by the night, shoulder freshly bound, his skin smeared with blood that isn't his and sweat that is. Tanned. Scarred. His chest rises and falls in a steady, deliberate rhythm, like he's proving something.

"I know that too," I say. And I climb on top of him.

His breath changes when I settle over his hips. The smallest hitch, caught and controlled, and I burn that sound into memory because I want to hear it again. I want to feel every second of this. Every small adjustment he makes under me. Every tight flex of his jaw when I shift my weight and he can't follow. His hands pull once against the binding, testing it, and then he lets them rest. He's choosing this.

So am I.

He's not hard yet. I fix that.

My hand wraps around him and he goes still, all that deliberate control focusing down to a single point where my fingers close. I stroke him slow. I watch his face. I watch his jaw set and his eyes stay on mine, stubborn and warm at once, refusing to look away even as his cock thickens in my grip. When I lower my mouth to him he makes a sound low in his throat that hits the base of my spine and keeps going, and his hips push up before he catches himself and holds. Proud. Stubborn even now, even with his hands tied and nowhere to go. I take my time. I drag my tongue along the underside of him, slow, tasting salt and skin and the copper edge of the night. I feel him thicken against my tongue, feel the pulse of blood filling him, and I feel the exact moment he stops being spent and starts being mine again.

I sit up. Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.

He's breathing harder. He's ready.

I lower myself onto him inch by inch, and his whole body goes rigid underneath me. Jaw locked. Tendons standing in his forearms as his hands strain against the leather. He cannot touch me and he cannot move me faster and he knows it and the knowledge is eating him alive. I feel every centimeter of him stretching me open. I take him all the way and sit there, full, breathing, watching his face twist between discipline and want.

"Perla," he says. His voice has gone rough, scraped raw.

"Still here," I tell him.

I start to move.

"You don't get to touch," I tell him. My hips roll slow, deliberate, grinding down. "You don't get to move. You just take it."

His jaw tightens. His wrists strain against the leather, and I hear the creak of the belt. Good.

The sound he makes when I find my pace is worth the whole night. Worth thirty-four kills and every ounce of blood on this floor. His head goes back. His hips want to rise to meet me and I press my weight down through my thighs and he stays pinned. Mine. Every angle is mine. Every second is mine. I set the pace slow, slower than he wants, slow enough that I feel the full length of him with each stroke, slow enough that he's grinding his teeth by the time I let myself speed up.

His hands pull against the belt again. Harder this time. The pole creaks.

"Good boy," I say, and I don't recognize my own voice, low and mean and pleased, the voice of a woman who has stopped pretending she doesn't want this.

I lean forward and put my mouth against his ear. "Mal," I murmur.

He laughs. The sound of it vibrates through his ribs and into mine and I feel it between my legs, a deep hum that pulses through me where we're joined, and that was not strategic. That was him. Just the sound of him. I straighten before he can see what it did to me.

I ride him until my thighs burn and I'm close, heat coiling low and tight in my belly, and then I slide off him.

He groans at the loss. "What are you, "

I move up his body.

He goes quiet when he realizes where I'm going. A different kind of quiet: present, focused, every drop of his attention narrowing to a point between my thighs.

"Earn it," I tell him. The same words he said to me. I let them land.

I settle over his face and he opens his mouth and his tongue finds me and I stop thinking about anything at all.

My hands go to the tent pole above his wrists. I grip the rough wood. His mouth works against me, hot and wet and deliberate, tongue pressing flat then circling, finding the exact spot that makes my spine arch and my breath stutter. His hands pull at the belt and I can feel how much he wants them free, wants to hold my hips and control the angle, and he can't, and that's exactly why I'm here. He finds what I need by instinct and pressure, the flat of his tongue dragging slow and then faster, reading my body like a contract he's memorized. My knuckles go white on the pole. My hips rock against his mouth, grinding down, riding the rhythm he's giving me. The dawn light is getting brighter through the canvas, grey bleeding toward pale gold, and I don't care. I'm close. I'm right there. I come with my thighs clamped hard against his jaw and my fist pressed to my mouth to muffle it, shaking, my whole body clenching around nothing while his tongue keeps working until I shove his head back and hold him still.

I stay there until I stop shaking.

Then I climb back down his body.

He's harder than before, jaw wet, lips swollen, breathing ragged, watching me with those brown eyes that don't miss a single thing. His wrists are red where he's been pulling against the leather. Raw skin. I don't apologize.

I take him inside me again and I fuck him until I'm done.

No teasing. No slow build. I take what I need. My hips slam down and he fills me and I ride him hard, hands braced on his chest, feeling the slap of skin against skin and the burn in my thighs and the sound of both of us breathing like we've been sprinting. He comes with a groan pulled from somewhere deep, hips finally driving up against my weight because I let them, and I feel him pulse inside me, hot and thick, and I take everything he gives me. I hold it. I feel it move through my whole body like a tide pulling out.

Thirty-four kills. One rogue. Right now I am this: his weight inside me, sweat and blood, the grey Torrel dawn. Not lust. Want. The kind I can't put back.

I sit still for a moment. His heartbeat thuds against my palms where they rest on his chest.

He says nothing. Good man.

Then I stand.

The mess tent is silent around me. The bodies don't object. I find my top by feel, the straps and buckles familiar in my hands. Then my leather shorts. I dress slow. Buckle by buckle. His eyes follow me, and I feel that specific quality of attention on my bare skin as it disappears under leather. Different now from what it was in the camp lanes. Warmer. It knows things about me it didn't know before.

I buckle the last strap.

I slide my daggers home.

My hand drops to the pearl and I feel the smooth curve of it under my fingertip. Cool metal. The one honest thing. I touch it for a breath, and I don't know I'm doing it until I've already done it.

I look down at him.

He's lying on his back, hands still tied to the tent pole, bare and muddy and marked by the night in a dozen places I memorized without meaning to. He looks like someone who has been thoroughly used and is pleased about it. His shoulder binding has held. His eyes are on my face.

That grin. God, that grin.

"Not bad," I say.

I turn and walk out of the tent.

The dawn hits me: warm and pale, the last of the rain-smell lifting off hot summer mud, the camp quiet in the way only a camp full of dead men can be quiet. My boots find the wet ground between tent poles. I don't look back.

Behind me he is naked and tied and his blades are somewhere in the mud outside and his shoulder has been bleeding for six hours. The command zone is quiet. The rest of the camp will be awake soon. Two miles from the city walls, three thousand marauders who haven't eaten breakfast yet, and when someone walks into this tent and finds what we left here the whole hive is going to come apart. He has whatever time he has.

I keep walking.

His laughter follows me out into the morning. Low and real. He thinks he knows what this is.

The sun rises over the valley and I walk north toward the cook lines, his smell still on my skin, thirty-four kills in my belt pouch, and my mouth does something without my permission.

I don't stop it. I don't slow down.

My fingers find the belly ring. Cool silver. Smooth pearl. Mamá's.

Thirty-four kills. Full contract. Enough.

Mamá, I'm coming to get you.

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