Chapter 7 - The Turn, Tenderness

The shoulder hurts. I've had worse. I've had a rib separated from its neighbor, a knife buried to the hilt in my thigh, a boot heel stamped across the bridge of my nose that left me seeing double for a week. This is a line of fire from the trapezoid to the deltoid, deep enough to matter, shallow enough to ignore. The binding Perla put on it is already soaked through, rain and blood mixing into a warm compress I didn't ask for, and the cloth shifts every time I raise my arm. I raise my arm anyway. Pain is just the body keeping score, and I stopped listening to the tally a long time ago. The kiss is still sitting in my chest like I swallowed a live coal. I can still feel her mouth on mine. Everything after it lands different.

We don't talk about what we're doing. We just do it.

She opens the tent flap on the right side, three fingers splayed: three men inside. I hold up two, tap my chest. She shakes her head. One finger, points to herself, then two back at me. She wants the pair. Fine. I take the single. She slips through the canvas slit she cut with the slim dagger, liquid silence, a shadow folding into a shadow, and by the time I've stepped through the main flap the second man is already gargling around a throwing knife buried in his throat. I put my blade through the eye of the first, twist until the socket gives, lower him to the bedroll without a sound, and we're done in the space of four heartbeats. Four heartbeats. The two of us just cleared a tent of three armed men in the time it takes to draw a deep breath.

She steps back over the body. I watch her bare foot find the dry ground between the bedrolls without looking down, like the floor of a dead man's tent is a road she's walked a hundred times. I watch the set of her mouth first, the calm in her face, the way she gives the dead exactly as much attention as they rate and not one drop more. Then my eyes go lower. Her leg is slick from the knee down, rain and mud streaked across the calf, and a long smear of someone else's blood runs up her inner thigh from three tents ago, dark against skin that looks warm even in this light. My whole chest kicks sideways. Heat and want tangling with something stupidly tender, pulling tight behind my ribs, and I let it happen because I've stopped pretending it doesn't.

"Twenty-six," I say, outside in the lane.

"Twenty-five," she says.

"I'm ahead."

"You were ahead. I've been busy."

We move. The inner camp is thinning out. We've cut through the eastern half together for the last forty minutes, tent by tent, bodies stacking in the mud behind us. The rain keeps covering everything: the screams, the wet sound of a blade finding purchase, the splash when a man goes down face-first into standing water. Some tents have two men. Some have six. One had a dog that didn't bark, just watched us with wet yellow eyes while we worked around it. We left the dog. I liked the dog. The dog had the good sense to stay out of it.

She goes wide around a guy rope while I go under it, and we swap sides without speaking. Muscle memory, like there's a groove worn between us that fits. I don't know when we carved it. Maybe tonight. Maybe four contracts ago when she ruined my clean exit in Casarta and I spent the whole ride home cursing her name and thinking about her hands.

The next tent has four men. She signals from the far side, two fingers close together: leaders. I feel the familiar drop in my gut, the good one that means the next sixty seconds are going to be technically brutal and completely alive. My shoulder pulses. My hand finds the blade before my brain gives the order.

She goes through the side. I go through the back. Two of the men are awake, sitting up on bedrolls over a game of dice, and they're good enough to reach for weapons before I've cleared the canvas. The nearer one gets my blade across the wrist before his fingers close on his sword hilt. He screams, short and sharp, and I drive my forearm across his throat and slam him back into the tent pole. The pole buckles but holds. The scream cuts into a wet wheeze, then nothing. The second man is on his feet. He's fast. He gets the sword half-drawn before something hits him in the back of the neck and he drops straight down, knees folding, dead before they touch the ground. Perla's throwing dagger sticks up from the base of his skull like a handle.

The two sleeping men die without waking. We're thorough.

Outside, she pulls the dagger free, wipes it on the dead man's coat, and doesn't look at me. "Twenty-seven."

"I had the wrist man."

"You had the wrist man and he was screaming loud enough to wake the south lane. I had your man and mine."

"Twenty-seven," I concede. She's right and I don't love it, and the frustrating part is that the frustration feels good, like a hand pressing down on something that wants to rise.

I don't say anything else. She doesn't either.

We move deeper into the camp.

I watch her work. I've been watching her work and I've been lying to myself about why, and the lie has gotten so thin I can see through it, like wet canvas over firelight. She moves through the dark like the dark is hers. Her legs are the part that get me. Long, bare from the bottom edge of those leather shorts all the way down, slick with rain, flexing with every step and drop and pivot. Between tents she ducks below a guy rope and comes up in a roll, and I see her thighs tense with the landing, the muscle definition catching the low light, and my jaw tightens so hard my back teeth ache. I'm supposed to be watching the lane. I'm watching her. My cock doesn't care about operational discipline, and right now neither do I.

Then she wraps her legs around a man's neck.

He's a sentry stepping out of a tent to piss, bad timing, worst night of his short life. She drops from a tent rope before I've even spotted him, ankles crossing behind his skull, thighs clamping tight on either side of his throat. She brings him down in one smooth rotation, her whole body torquing, and his neck breaks against the mud with a clean wet snap. She's on her feet before he's stopped twitching. Her thighs are still flexed. There's mud on the inside of her knee and a smear of fresh blood where his mouth hit her shin going down.

Dios mío.

Hostia puta, every drop of blood in my body just went south and I'm standing in a lane full of corpses with a hard-on and a grin and absolutely no shame about either one.

I'm still hard. I've been hard for the better part of an hour, shoulder wound and all, which is either impressive or embarrassing and I've decided it's impressive. The hunting does this to me. The danger does this to me. She does this to me, and all three are the same chemical tonight, the same hot current running from my chest to my cock and back again, and I've run out of ways to pretend they're different. The arousal and the adrenaline taste identical. They always have. I've just never had someone next to me who made both of them spike at once.

We clear a run of four tents together, fast and bloody, coordinated without ever agreeing on a plan. She flushes them out the back. I'm waiting. Or I flush them and she drops them before they make a sound, arrows at a range she shouldn't be able to hit in the dark, in the rain, through a moving tent flap. She hits every time. The quiver has to be getting thin. I don't ask. It's not my business. I just watch the arrows fly and think about the fingers that released them and about what those fingers would feel like on the back of my neck.

The third tent has a problem. A big warrior, bigger than the one who carved my shoulder open, with a hand axe in each fist and enough sense to sleep in his armor. He comes up swinging before I've cleared the flap, and the axe head catches the tent pole beside my face and buries three inches into the wood. I feel the displaced air across my cheek like a slap. I duck left. She comes in right. The warrior yanks the axe free and rounds on her, and she drops under the swing, flat on her back in the mud, and puts a dagger up through his groin while I bury both blades in his back. He doesn't go down. He turns, slow, like a bull deciding which matador to gore first, blood sheeting down the inside of his leg, and I drive my wounded shoulder into his chest and take him backward into the tent pole and feel it splinter under our combined weight. My blades are still in him. I can feel his body resist the steel, the thick drag of muscle and leather and bone, and then Perla is there with a second dagger and she puts it through the side of his neck where the artery lives, and the three of us go down together into the mud and the collapsing canvas. His weight settles on me, all of it, two hundred and forty pounds of dead man pressing me into the wet ground, and she rolls him off with her boot braced against his hip and I lie there for a second, breathing like I've been held underwater.

She offers no hand. I don't expect one. I get up on my own and she's already watching the lane and we move.

We come out the other side of the cluster and there's a gap, fifteen feet of empty mud between us and the next row of tents, and she stops. Her chest rises hard. She's working for breath the same way I am, ribs expanding under the straps of that leather top, and the pearl catches the faint torchlight from two lanes over, a small bright point, and my eyes find it on their own.

She turns toward me and I'm already moving.

I don't plan it. My hand finds her waist, the strip of bare skin between the leather top and the shorts, warm and rain-slick and real under my palm, and I pull her in hard. She comes. No resistance. No hesitation. My mouth goes to the side of her neck, just below the ear, and I'm not gentle about it: teeth first, scraping, then my tongue flat against the tendon, then my lips dragging down to the soft spot where her pulse lives. She makes a sound between breath and groan, low in her throat, and it goes straight through me like voltage. My hands drop to her hips. My fingers hook into the waistband of the shorts and I pull them down, not all the way, just enough that the cool rain hits bare skin and she shivers against me and I feel that shiver in my cock and in my teeth and in the base of my skull all at once. I lift her, backing her into the nearest tent wall, the canvas bowing behind her with a wet creak. The instinct is simple and it's loud: fuck her right here, up against this tent, in mud and rain, let the whole camp hear it.

Her leg comes up around my hip. My thigh finds the space between hers and she uses it, actual friction, actual pressure, her hips rolling against me in a slow grind that makes my vision blur. The canvas shudders behind her back. I've got one hand braced on the tent pole and the other on her bare hip, fingers pressing hard enough to leave marks, and we're both breathing through it. Her skin is hot against my thigh where the shorts are pulled down, slick with rain and sweat, and she moves against me with the kind of certainty that isn't new. It would take nothing. Half a second. One decision. I could be inside her and she'd let me and the sound she'd make would ruin me for every other woman I'll ever touch.

Then I feel her pulse under my mouth.

It stops me. The feel of it, right there against my lips, fast and hard and real. That pulse belongs to the neck that snapped the sentry clean. The throat that said my name in the dark like she was testing the weight of it, rolling it around on her tongue before she decided whether to keep it. I've got my mouth pressed against her pulse point and I can feel her heart going like it's trying to get out, hammering under the thin skin, and something about that, the raw honest speed of it, the way her body is telling me something her face never would.

I don't pin her.

My hands slow down. I don't pull the shorts back up. I don't step away. I stay right where I am, thigh between hers, her leg hooked around my hip, her back against the bowing canvas, rain dripping off both of us, but my grip changes. The grip shifts from take to hold. The rough version doesn't happen. I feel it not happening, feel it as the door I almost opened and stepped back from, and my hands settle on her hips instead of driving them down. My fingers spread out, holding her with pressure but not urgency. The intent shifts.

Her forehead drops to my jaw.

That's it. That's the thing that gets me worse than her legs around the sentry's neck, worse than the sound she made when I put my mouth on her throat, worse than the friction of her hips against my thigh. Her forehead against my jaw. Her breath going unsteady against my throat, warm and fast. She's still pressed into me, leg still hooked, skin still bare where I pulled the shorts down, and none of that changes, but something inside it does. I want to do something that has nothing to do with fucking and I don't know what that means. I don't know what you call the thing where you're standing in the rain with a woman you've wanted to kill and wanted to have in equal measure for two years, and your hands are on her bare hips and her heart is hammering against your mouth and you want to just stay here. Just this. Just her weight against you and the rain coming down and the sound of her breathing.

I've never wanted to stay anywhere before.

"Almartín," she says, very quietly.

"Yeah."

"Your shoulder."

My shoulder is on fire. My shoulder is the last thing I'm thinking about. "What about it."

She shifts, turning her face up, and she's close enough that I can see the mud on her cheekbone, the spray of someone else's blood along her jaw, the rain running down her temple into the corner of her eye. She blinks it away. Her eyes are dark and steady and looking at me the way she never looks at me: directly, without calculation, without the performance of calm she wears like armor. I've watched this woman dead-eyed over the top of a drawn bow. I've seen her slide a blade between two ribs without changing her expression. This is different. She looks uncertain, which she never looks, and I am in so much fucking trouble it's not even funny. The kind of trouble that doesn't end when the contract does.

"The competition," she says.

"It's over."

She considers that. Her fingers press flat against my sternum, right over the shadow step charm, and I wonder if she can feel it pulse under her palm, or if that's just my heart. "Is it."

"You're at twenty-seven. I'm at twenty-six. We've cleared the east half of the inner tents. There's maybe an hour of dark left." I make myself look at her straight, hold her gaze, let her see whatever's happening in my face because I don't have the energy to hide it. "Whatever we were proving, we proved it."

Something moves across her face. Her mouth almost curves, not quite, lips pressing together, eyes holding ground. "And what were we proving?"

I don't answer that. I press my mouth to her neck again, slower this time, no teeth, just my lips against the tendon and the pulse beneath it, and I feel her exhale against my cheek. Controlled first. Then not. The breath breaks apart against my skin and I stay there, tasting rain and salt and the faint copper edge of someone else's blood, and I don't move because moving would mean deciding what comes next and I don't want to decide. I want this. This exact second. Her pulse under my mouth and her breath falling apart.

"Not bad," I say, against her skin. It means nothing it used to mean. Three hours ago it was a taunt. Two hours ago it was a flirtation. Now it sounds like something I'd say to someone I want to see again, and the weight of that scares me more than the big warrior with the axes did.

The corner of her mouth shifts. I feel it against my temple. "You're getting sentimental."

"I'm getting something."

She doesn't pull away.

Behind us, somewhere in the west lane, someone steps out of a tent with a torch and sweeps it left. We both go still by reflex, her hands gripping my vest, my arm tightening around her waist, her bare hip pressing into my palm. We hold it while the torchlight swings across the mud and the bodies and the rain, a slow yellow arc that passes ten feet from where we stand pressed together in the shadow of a dead man's tent. The light moves on. The man goes back inside. We stay still for a beat after. Then another. Her fingers are tight on the leather of my vest and mine are tight on her hip, and neither of us lets go first.

Her forehead drops against my jaw again. Briefly. The same gesture, forehead to jaw, and this time I feel the full weight of it, how much it costs someone like her to lean into someone like me, even for a second. Then she straightens. Her hands slide off my chest. She pulls the shorts back up herself, one smooth motion, and she's back to being herself: steady, separate, composed. The woman who's been one step ahead of me all night and known exactly what she was doing every second of it.

I let her go. My hands open. The rain fills the space between us.

"One hour of dark," she says.

"About that."

"Let's not waste it."

She moves toward the next tent. I watch her go for half a second, the bare legs, the straight back, the way she doesn't look over her shoulder because she knows I'm following. She always knows. That's the thing about Perla. She doesn't look back because she doesn't need to. She already knows where I am, and where I'll be, and what I'll do, and she's right every time, and it should make me angry but it just makes me want her in a way I can't put words around, in a language I haven't learned yet.

I'm following.

Whatever this is, it's got my hands shaking worse than the guarded tent, worse than the big warrior. My shoulder burns. My blades are warm in my hands. The rain runs into my eyes and I don't wipe it away because I don't want to stop looking at her, not even for the half second it would take.

I follow her into the dark, hands still shaking.

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