Chapter 6 - The Ambush

The canvas is too tight to cut cleanly and I know it before I start. My blade goes in at the bottom seam and I draw it up in one slow pull, three inches, and the sound is a hiss that costs us everything. Almartín is at my shoulder, close enough that his breath touches my ear, and the tent is full of bodies that are not asleep.

I know it the way I know anything worth knowing: the quality of the silence. There are sleepers and there are men lying still, waiting to see what moves first. The difference is in the breathing. Sleepers breathe from the belly, loose and heavy. These men breathe from the chest, shallow and held.

I don't move. Almartín has gone still too. He's felt it.

Then a brazier tips.

I don't know who knocked it. The coals hit the mud and extinguish in a wet hiss and the tent goes black and everyone starts moving at once.

Four of them, maybe five. I lose count immediately because they are already up and armed and the only light is what leaks through the canvas seams from the lane outside, thin orange strips that illuminate nothing. A blade catches one of those strips and I step left and it passes my ear close enough to part the air and I have my dagger out and I put it under a chin before the man's eyes find me. His blood runs hot over my knuckles. He drops. One.

Two and three come together. Almartín takes them. I hear the sound: two fast impacts in the dark, then bodies hitting mud. He's already moving past them. Good. Fast. I'll weigh that later.

Four comes at me from the right and he's big and he leads with his shoulder like a bull and I let him take me into the tent wall because the alternative is stepping into the space where three might still be standing. The canvas gives under our combined weight and we hit it together, my back slamming against the pole beneath, and I get my forearm across his throat before he can bring his blade around. I hold it there with both hands and press. He bucks against me. His nails tear skin. I press harder. It takes a long time. My arms burn. When he finally goes slack I shove him off and move for five.

Five is behind Almartín.

I see it in the thin orange light leaking through the canvas: a shape rising from a bedroll, a blade already in its arc, and I don't think. My bow is in my hand and I draw and loose in one motion, barely a full draw, barely aimed, and the arrow crosses six feet of dark tent and buries itself in the shape's throat. The shape stops rising. It folds. It falls.

Silence.

Pulse fast. Arms shaking from the big man's weight. The tent smells like blood and spilled lamp oil, and I breathe through my mouth until it sits right in my chest.

"Five?" Almartín says. His voice is low.

"Four mine," I say. "One yours."

I feel him turn in the dark. "I had two."

"You had two before I stopped your five from opening your spine."

A pause. "Twenty-five," he says.

"Twenty-four." I crouch toward the shape nearest me, checking the throat out of habit, and my boot finds wet mud where the brazier spilled. "We're even."

"We're not even."

"We will be." I stand up and that's when I see it: the way he's standing, left side toward me, left hand braced against his knee. The right shoulder sits wrong. Even in the dark I can read the line of it, the way the muscle has dropped, the way he's holding the arm like something he doesn't trust. My throat goes tight. "Almartín."

"I'm fine."

"Show me."

"I said I'm—"

"Show me or I leave you in this tent."

He doesn't move. I cross to him and I don't ask permission. I put my hand flat on his right shoulder and he pulls in a breath through his teeth and I feel it: the leather of his vest is wet the way blood pools and runs, thick and slow in a channel down the back of his arm. Long cut. Deep enough that it won't stop on its own.

My gut clenches.

"Lie down," I say.

"We don't have time for—"

"Lie down or I leave you bleeding."

He looks at me for one beat. Then he lowers himself into the mud, flat on his back, and I crouch beside him and pull the cloth from my hip pouch. Two strips of linen I carry for exactly this. I know what I'm doing with wounds. I've been patching myself since I was twelve and the only alternative was bleeding out in an alley behind the Torrel fish market. I've patched other people exactly never because other people are liabilities, and I don't know what I'm doing right now, but my hands are steady and I tell myself that means I'm in control.

I have to get over him to reach the shoulder. The tent is too low, the angle is wrong, and this is the only position that works. I'm going to hold that thought very firmly and not think about anything else.

I swing a leg over and sit down on him.

His hips between my thighs. His groin pressed up against mine. The solid weight of him underneath me, warm and hard through the wet leather, and the mud is cold beneath my knees and his body radiates heat.

He goes very still.

The cut runs from the trapezoid down toward the deltoid, long and ugly and still weeping blood. I press the linen against it hard and he makes no sound and I respect that more than I should. His hands come up and settle on my hips, loose and careful, fingers resting along the bare skin between my shorts and the top of my thighs. I tell myself that's for balance and not for anything else.

"Deep?" he asks.

"Long." I press harder. "Hold this."

His left hand comes up and takes over the pressure on the wound and I use both of mine to work the second strip around the front of his shoulder, under his arm, pulling it tight. I have to lean forward to reach. My weight shifts. My hips settle lower against his.

That's when I feel it.

He's hard under me.

The full length of him, rigid against the seam of my shorts, and the heat of it pushes through the leather like a brand. Of course he is. I'd knelt in front of him in the lane with a patrol five feet away and taken his cock into my mouth and pulled him apart with my tongue and then I'd stopped, mid-act, because the stopping was the point. The look on his face when I pulled back. The way his hands opened and closed on nothing. I chose when it ended and he let me choose, and that was the part that lodged in my chest afterward, the power of walking away from it.

And now he's flat on his back in the mud and I'm sitting on him and he has nowhere to be except exactly where he is.

I sit with that for a moment.

Then, carefully and deliberately, I shift my hips.

Not because I need leverage. I have the leverage. I do it because I can. Because he's wounded and pinned and I'm on top and he can't do a single thing about it, and my pulse climbs in a way I recognize from other things: the moment before a kill, the edge of a roof with nowhere left to run. The same part of me that liked stopping earlier. The part that is apparently never going to behave.

I roll my hips forward, slow, grinding the length of his cock against my cunt through the leather. He presses back. My breath catches. I cover it by pulling the binding tighter.

He exhales through his teeth. Controlled. Disciplined. His hands tighten on my hips and his fingers dig into the bare skin and he doesn't pull me down. He doesn't push me off. He holds on.

I do it again. Slower this time. A long, deliberate drag of my hips that presses him right against my clit, and the heat pools low in my belly and my thighs clench against his sides.

"Perla." His voice is low and rough and very careful.

"Hold still," I say. "I'm working."

I lean into the knot, pressing my weight down to get the last inch of tension, and I feel him underneath me, all of him, his cock thick and hard between my legs, and my hands are doing exactly what they should be doing and the rest of me is doing something else entirely. I grind against him. Slow. Deliberate. The wet heat of me soaking through the thin leather of my shorts until I can feel every ridge of him. His jaw clenches, eyes going dark in the thin light, and his hips twitch up against mine and the friction pulls a sound out of me I don't mean to make.

Wounded. Flat on his back. Mine.

I tie off the binding.

Then I reach down and undo his trousers.

He doesn't stop me. He watches me with those dark brown eyes, half-lidded in the dim orange light, and his hands are still on my hips, thumbs pressed into the hollows beside my hipbones. I pull the linen of my shorts to one side, fabric twisted against my inner thigh, and I settle back down.

Nothing between us now.

His cock is hot against my cunt, against the slick wet of me, bare skin on bare skin, and I feel him go very still in the way a person goes still when they have stopped breathing. The length of him slides against my folds, thick and hard and impossibly warm, and I can feel my own pulse where we're pressed together.

"Fuck," I say. Just that. The word falls out before I can catch it.

I'm not breathing either.

I rock forward. Slow. His cock slides through the wet of me and it's filthy and easy and my whole body lights up and his jaw goes tight and his hands clench on my hips hard enough to bruise and he still does not pull me down, still does not push, he holds on and takes it and lets me take what I want. I rock again and the head of him catches at my entrance and I feel the specific stretch of it, that exact edge where my body is opening for him, where one shift of my hips would put him inside me, and I hold there. His cock notched against my cunt, the head barely pressing in, slick with me. He makes a sound low in his throat that I feel in my teeth.

Bodies. Just bodies. This is the part I know how to handle. This is the part I can name and turn over and put down when I'm done with it. The hunt. The kill. I'm good at this.

I put my hand flat on his chest and lean down. His heartbeat slams against my palm.

His face is two inches from mine in the dark.

I kiss him.

I don't plan it. I'm looking at his mouth and then I'm on it. Nothing calculated. Nothing taken. Nothing I can bury with the rest. Just my mouth on his. And he goes still for one beat, one single beat, and then he kisses me back, slow and certain, one hand coming up to the back of my neck. His fingers thread into my hair. His thumb settles against my jaw. This is the kiss of someone you've been watching for a long time, the one you stopped pretending you didn't want. His mouth is warm. He tastes like blood and rain.

And something in my chest comes apart.

Maldita sea. I kissed him. The one thing I cannot afford. The man who is competing for mamá's money and I kissed him like I had something to give. Like I had anything to spare.

I pull back.

He lets me go. He doesn't grab. He doesn't chase my mouth. He just lets me go and looks at me, brown eyes in the dark, all the cockiness stripped away, and what's underneath it is patient and real and I am not equipped for patient and real. I have no name for it. I don't know where it goes.

I pull my shorts back into place. I rearrange his trousers. My hands are steady. I need them to be steady so they are.

I could have fucked him. I was right there, his cock at my entrance, my body ready, and it would have been fine. Bodies and heat and the particular satisfaction of winning, of taking what I wanted from a man who wanted me to take it. I've done it before with other men and walked away clean. That's not what stopped me.

The kiss stopped me. The kiss was the thing I hadn't counted on. Sex was bodies, commerce, a transaction I knew how to close and walk away from. The kiss was something I recognized. something that had weight and warmth and settled in behind my teeth like a word I can't unsay, already unpacked, already staying.

That scared me more than his cock inside me would have.

I touch the belly ring without thinking about it. My mother's pearl, warm against my skin. Mamá.

I look at the wound instead. The binding is holding. The bleed is slowing to a dark stain that isn't spreading.

"Not bad," I say.

His mouth curves. He knows what I mean. He knows I don't mean the kiss and I don't mean the fight and I don't mean the binding. He knows I mean: don't die. Don't you dare die on me.

I stand up. My legs are steady. I'm very proud of that.

"Twenty-five to twenty-four," he says, getting to his feet with more grace than a man with a shoulder wound should manage.

"Ask me again in an hour." I step over the body nearest the slit in the canvas and push through into the rain.

The lane is empty. Rain drums on every tent and runs in channels through the mud and I stand in it for a moment with my hands at my sides and let the water hit my face and run down my neck and soak into the leather of my top. I breathe. The rain is cold. My skin is still hot where he touched it.

I've done jobs where men got hurt beside me. Watched contractors take wounds and kept moving. Walked past people bleeding out in stairwells and doorways and never slowed my step. I've always been able to do that. Always. The truth is simple: they bleed, I don't, the job continues.

This is different and I don't want it to be different and wanting doesn't change a single thing.

The lust was easy. The lust I could name and put down when I was done with it. This is something else. It sits right where mamá lives, in my bones, and it doesn't care what I think about it.

And underneath it, the weight. He offered to split. In the lane, after, his trousers still undone, his voice still wrecked. Said it like it cost him nothing. Walk out together. Even share. And the worst part is he meant it. I heard it in his voice the way I hear a lie and this was not a lie. He meant it the way people mean things when money has never been the difference between a mother in chains and a mother free. Half the contract is not enough. Half doesn't buy mamá off that ship. Half doesn't pay the debt that's been carved into my bones since I was old enough to understand what "sold" means. Half is a generous offer from a man who can afford to be generous, and it cut me open because I wanted to say yes. Dios, I wanted to say yes. I wanted to take his hand and his half and pretend that was enough.

It isn't. I need all of it. Every coin. Every last copper piece. And that means I cannot afford him, and the kiss was already more than I could pay for.

I hear him behind me. The soft sound of his boots in the mud.

"Still bleeding?" I ask.

"Slowing," he says.

"Good." I check the nearest tent for light, for the sound of bodies stirring. Nothing. "We've got an hour, maybe less. Stay on my left side."

"Your left."

"So I can see if the binding shifts."

A pause. "Right."

I move. He follows. The rain covers everything.

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