"Forty-seven."
"You counted."
"I always count."
She grins. Wild and bright and devastating. "Then count this."
She kisses my throat. One.
My collarbone. Two.
The scar above my sternum where a crossbow bolt punched through my armor at Ashfeld. Three.
I stop counting.
Her tank top goes. My cargo shorts go. The rest of it goes, piece by piece, scattered across the grass like the cedar splinters, and the cool night air wraps around both of us and we don't feel it because every point where her skin touches mine generates enough heat to grow orchids in January.
She arches against me and the sound she makes is better than any war cry, any victory bellow, any chant the old masters ever taught. My mouth finds the hollow of her throat, the curve of her shoulder, the soft impossible place behind her ear where her pulse drums fastest.
The stars wheel above us. The grass flattens beneath us into the shape of two bodies pressing the earth flat, bluegrass and wild clover tangling together, indistinguishable, inseparable, and I can't tell where my lawn ends and hers begins and that is the entire point.
Her nails rake down my back. I growl her name into the dark.
The combined yard holds us both.
The stars don't move fast enough to notice. But they move. I know this because I've been watching them for what might be ten minutes or an hour or the rest of my natural life, and I cannot bring myself to care which.
My back is pressed into the grass. The combined grass. Kentucky bluegrass under my left shoulder blade, wild clover under my right, and the difference in texture is so obvious it borders on absurd. One side is clipped to regulation height, dense and springy, each blade standing at attention like a soldier in formation. The other side is a riot of soft, uneven green that tickles my skin and carries traces of honey and doesn't give a single damn about regulation anything.
Junia's head rests in the hollow below my collarbone. Her hair fans across my body in dark curls that have collected three splinters of cedar, a smear of golem mud, and what appears to be a small purple wildflower that has physically rooted itself into a tangle near her left ear. Her breath comes slow and even against my ribs.
My arm weighs a thousand pounds where it wraps around her shoulders. A good weight. The weight of something you never want to put down.
Above us, the sky has gone fully dark. The party noise faded an hour ago. Or ten minutes ago. Mrs. Patterson's porch light flicked off at some point, and the dwarf contractors loaded their truck and drove away singing something about barrels, and now the street is quiet in a way that Cedarbrook Estates has never been quiet in the three years I've lived here. Not the enforced silence of neighborhood ordinances and noise curfews. The easy silence of people who went to bed happy.
A cricket starts up somewhere in the fence wreckage. Then another. Then a whole chorus, filling the dark with a sound so chaotic and unpredictable and alive that old Flynn, fence Flynn, would have sprayed the perimeter with repellent.
I close my eyes and listen.
Junia shifts against me. Her knee slides across my thigh, finding a new angle, and the canvas tarp we dragged out of my garage at some point crinkles beneath us. She insisted on the tarp. Not for comfort. For the grass.
"We'll crush the root systems," she'd said, already naked and shivering in the moonlight. "The bluegrass needs its crown tissue intact or it won't recover."
I'd unrolled the tarp so fast I pulled a muscle in my shoulder.
Now she burrows closer. Her palm flattens against my sternum, fingers spread wide, and her index finger begins to move. Slow. Deliberate. Tracing the line of the first rune thatclimbs me. The Ashfeld mark. The one they burned into my skin the night I made my first kill, fourteen years old, shaking so hard the brand master had to hold me down with both hands.
Her finger follows every curve. Every angle. Like she's memorizing the shape with her skin instead of her eyes.
"This one's different from the others."
"Older."
"It's deeper."
"First marks always are. The skin doesn't know how to scar yet."
Her finger moves to the second rune. Then the third. She traces them the way she traces the veins on a leaf, reading the structure, understanding the architecture of something that grew under pressure and pain.
