Chapter 5 - Escalation

The rain is so loud I can't hear myself think. Good. I stopped wanting to think about twenty minutes ago, right around the time the sixth man in the last tent tried to run for the flap and I caught him by the collar and opened his throat before his hand touched canvas.

My right shoulder burns where the fourth one clipped me with an elbow. Both blades are slick, grip sliding every time I adjust, and I wipe them on a dead man's thigh because his trousers are the driest thing in the tent. Six bodies. Three sleeping, one half-awake, one who fought, one who ran. I count them the way a butcher counts carcasses, bored, and step over the last one toward the far wall.

Perla is two tents over.

I know because I heard her. One soft crack, the kind a neck makes when someone with perfect technique gets both hands on the vertebrae and twists. Then nothing. Then a wet thud, a body meeting mud. I track her the way you track a loose blade on a crowded table: eyes loose, constant, never quite looking, never forgetting where the edge is.

Twenty-four for me. I stopped counting hers after fourteen because the number was making me want to punch something.

I cut the canvas wall at knee height, push through into the next tent. The brazier died when the rain got in, so the inside is pure black, the kind of dark that has texture. I stand still and let my ears work. Three sets of breathing. Two slow and even, one ragged with drink or sickness. I take the close ones first: left blade, right blade, lean into the weight of each stroke, keep the spray off my face. The third man sits up when he hears the second drop. He opens his mouth.

I get a hand over it before a sound comes out.

He bites my palm. Hard. I press harder, thumb finding the soft place below his jaw, and lean in with my full weight until the struggling slows, shudders, stops.

"Twenty-five," I mutter at the tent wall.

The canvas beside my shoulder moves.

Perla comes through the slit I cut, low and fast, and straightens up with water streaming down her face and both hands already empty. She's breathing hard. Her chest rises and falls in the dark, leather top straining with each inhale, and even like this, soaked, covered in someone else's blood, she is the most dangerous thing in this valley and my cock knows it before my brain catches up.

Joder.

I stop that thought. I stop it the way you stop a blade at the last second, by grip alone.

"How many," she says.

"Twenty-five."

"This tent?"

"Three. You're late."

She steps over a body without looking at it and moves to the far wall. Puts her ear to the canvas. I watch her do it, and this is where things go wrong for me, because the brazier is dead but there's enough glow bleeding through from the next tent that I can see everything. Water beading on her skin. Running in thin lines down her bare arms. Pooling in the hollow of her collarbone, that little valley of bone and shadow, before it spills down between her breasts where the leather holds them together. Her stomach is bare and wet, the pearl belly ring catching the faint light, and her legs are slick with rain and mud and something darker, something that used to be inside a person, and she looks like she walked out of a war and found it boring. She goes still when she listens. Total. Deliberate. Every muscle locked. I watch a single line of water track down her inner thigh and I forget what I was counting. I forget what numbers are.

Fuck.

"Next one has four," she says. "Big tent. Two with good armor, at least."

"My side."

"You're on my side."

I look around at the tent we're both standing in. She's not wrong. The rain turned me around and I've been working back toward center for twenty minutes without realizing it. "Temporary," I say.

She moves for the far canvas wall. I follow her without deciding to. My legs just go where she goes. That should concern me.

Outside is ankle-deep mud and rain so heavy it feels like walking through a river stood on end. Guy ropes catch me at the thigh. I duck, she ducks beside me, and we move in step, matched stride for stride, and I notice that and do not mention it because saying it out loud would mean thinking about what it means.

The inner lanes are empty. Every tent sealed. The only sound is rain hammering canvas and the distant noise of the outer camp not knowing yet that their men are dying in the dark.

A patrol rounds the lane end.

Boots in mud. Two of them, talking low to each other in that guttural camp tongue I can't parse. They're not rushing. They're miserable in the rain and taking it slow, hunched inside their cloaks, and they have maybe thirty seconds before they're close enough to see us.

I pull back against the canvas, pressing into the recess where a tent panel folds double. The shadow is deep enough if they don't look hard. A barrel sits in the lane to my left, rain drumming steady on its lid.

Perla drops.

Not behind the barrel. In front of it. Crouching in the dark at my feet. I think she's hiding. I think that for about half a second before her hands find my belt and start working the buckle.

No.

She looks up at me. I can barely see her face in the rain and the dark, but I can see the grin. Slow and wide and completely, deliberately evil.

No fucking way.

She gets the buckle open. Her fingers hook the waistband of my trousers and pull, and my cock is out in the rain, already hard because my body has been running ahead of me since she walked through that slit. Her hand closes around me first. Warm, slick from the rain, firm without haste. One stroke, then another, short and deliberate, like she's reminding both of us where we left this. My knees almost unlock on the spot. Then she leans in and takes me into her mouth. Warm and wet and the patrol is fifteen feet away and closing.

I go completely still. Back flat against the canvas. A blade in each hand. Patrol fifteen feet away. Her mouth on my cock, her lips sealed tight around the shaft, her tongue doing something that makes my vision white out at the edges. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She is doing this on purpose. Doing this because she can. Because she's paying me back for something I haven't figured out yet and she knows I can't make a single sound, can't move, can't do a goddamn thing about it except stand here and take it.

Dios mío.

She pulls back. Slow. Letting me feel every inch of her mouth sliding off. Looks up at me through the rain with that grin still on her face, water running down her cheeks, her lips wet and swollen. She's watching my face. Savoring it. This insane, gorgeous, evil woman is going to take her time with me and I am going to let her because what else am I going to do, say no? I have never wanted to say no to anything less in my entire life.

She takes me again. Deeper this time, all the way to the back of her throat, and I breathe through my nose and stare at the rain and bite down on every sound trying to claw its way out of me.

The patrol is ten feet away.

I drop my hand to the back of her head.

"Perla," I breathe, and it comes out rough, raw, scraped from somewhere below my ribs, nothing like a name. More like a prayer ripped out of a man who stopped believing in god about five minutes ago and just found religion on his knees. Her knees. Hostia.

Not gently. I grab her hair, wet and tangled and thick in my fist, and I pull her in and roll my hips forward and she gags on it. Real. The sound is half-swallowed by the rain but I feel it in my whole body, feel her throat close around the head of my cock, and I push deeper anyway. The patrol is ten feet away and something in my skull has gone white and loud and completely animal, a fuse burning down to nothing, and I cannot stop.

She chokes. Her hands come up and grab my thighs, nails biting through the leather hard enough that I'll have half-moon bruises tomorrow.

I don't stop.

I pull her hair harder and push my hips forward again and she takes it, gagging, louder, and I feel her throat working around me, feel her struggling to breathe, the muscles of her neck contracting, and the sound of it is obscene, wet and desperate, and I shove it under the noise of the rain and grip harder. Fuck. Fuck. Her eyes are watering. I can see it even in the dark, the gloss of tears mixing with rain on her cheeks. She's looking up at me through it all, through the rain and the tears and the choking, and her eyes are not asking me to stop. Her eyes are daring me. I pull her hair so hard her head tilts back and I push into her throat and hold there and I am not letting go.

The patrol passes. Five feet. Three. I can see the shoulder of the nearest one, the dull gleam of a wet cloak, rain running off the edge of his hood, and he's saying something and the other one laughs, easy and careless, and they are right there, close enough to touch. I have my fist knotted in her hair and my cock down her throat and I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper, and the pain is the only thing keeping me silent.

They walk past.

The boots fade. Ten feet. Twenty.

She grabs my wrist. Both hands. Peels my grip off her hair one finger at a time, deliberate, slow, like she's doing me a personal favor. She pulls back. My cock slides out of her mouth and the cold rain hits it and the contrast makes me shudder like I've been stabbed. She catches her breath. Wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist. A single clean motion, efficient, the way she wipes a blade.

I'm shaking. Both hands. My knees feel like someone cut the tendons.

She stands up. The rain runs between us, a curtain of silver and dark. She looks at me the same way she always does: like she already knows what I'm going to say and finds it boring.

"Twenty-two," she says.

It takes me a full three seconds to understand that she is talking about her kill count.

"What," I say. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone who got hit in the head with a brick.

"I took three while you were busy." She reaches past me and pulls her blade from the tent canvas where she'd left it stuck, and the fact that she planted it there before she dropped to her knees means she planned this, all of it, and my brain shorts out a second time. "You're welcome."

I'm standing in the rain with my belt undone and my cock out and she's already moving toward the next tent. I tuck myself back in with hands that will not hold still, fumble the buckle twice before it catches, and lean against the canvas for five seconds because I need five seconds. Because my legs are not working. Because I just had the mouth of the most dangerous woman on the continent wrapped around my cock while two armed men walked past close enough to spit on and I did not die, which feels like a miracle on the level of religious scripture.

Joder. Mierda. Hostia puta.

I start laughing. Silent, shoulders shaking, rain pouring into my open mouth. She just sucked my cock while a patrol walked past and then told me her kill count. That's the funniest thing that has ever happened to me. That is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I am going to remember this moment on my deathbed and beyond, burned into the back of my skull before the dark takes it.

I pick up my blades from the mud, not sure when I dropped them or how I hadn't noticed. That woman took my blades out of my hands without touching them. That's a kind of magic that isn't in any book.

I follow her. The rain hammers my shoulders and runs into my collar and I don't feel any of it. What if we slow down. What if we take the whole night. What if we split the contract and walk out of this valley together, because the money stopped mattering to me somewhere around her grin in the dark and I'd give her half just to keep this going. I'd give her all of it. I'd give her everything I own and call it a bargain, and that's the part I don't say out loud. Not yet.

"We could split it," I say instead, catching up to her in the lane. Casual. Meaning every word. "Walk out together. Even share."

She doesn't turn around. She doesn't slow down.

"No," she says, and the word lands hard and flat like a blade hitting stone.

The camp has maybe two hours of dark left.

I'm going to make every one of them count.

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