"I know." Her chin lifts. "So tell me the reason, or kiss me. I'm done with the third thing."
The reason is that I was built to give my mother everything, and the thing she never saw coming is that a man built to obey can choose who he obeys—and once he chooses, there's nothing left to call him back. The reason is that I am not gentle underneath. The reason is that the men she trained to hold the death back hold it back because we have felt what it is when we don't.
I don't tell her the reason.
I kiss her, and the tether goes.
I have her against the window before I know I've moved her, the cold glass at her back and my hands buried in her hair and my mouth open over hers. I kiss her the way I've spent three months not letting myself. Slow at first, learning the shape of her mouth, the give of her bottom lip, the small catch of breath when I take it between mine.
Then not slow at all. She opens for me and her tongue meets mine and I make a sound into her I've never made in front of another living person, and her hands let go of my blazer to drag up the back of my neck and pull me down, asking for more of it. I give her more. I kiss her until she's breathing in pieces, until the careful thing in me that measures everything has nothing left to measure.
The shadow bleeds off me everywhere we touch—pooling thick around our feet, climbing the window frame—and I feel it the way you feel your own pulse when you've run too far. Too fast. Too loud. No longer mine to slow. I won't stop this. That's the new fact of my life, the one I sealed a door on this afternoon and can't take back: there is no version of me left that walks away from her.
Her hands come down off my neck and find my chest, my collar, the buttons there, working them loose without breaking the kiss.
"Callum." Just my name, breathed into the half inch between us, and it does something to me twelve years of training never touched. I'm already hard. Aching with it, pressed against the soft give of her stomach, and when she feels it she doesn't gasp and look away the way a girl from my mother's world would have. She rolls her hips up into it. Slow. Deliberate. Watching my face the whole time.
"You've thought about this," she says.
"Every day since the desert."
"Say it like you mean it."
So I take her jaw in my hand—the hand I didn't trust, and it's steady now, steadier than it's been in weeks—and I tilt her face up and I let the nothing-face go. The one I keep for rooms with my mother in them. I let it fall off my face and I let her see what's been underneath it since the night she made me choose.
"I chose you," I tell her. "In that office, the day she carved the mark into my hand and called it accountability—I had already chosen you. Over her. Over the legacy. Over twelve generations of Bolingbrokes who kept the world afraid of us." My thumb drags along her cheekbone. "I closed the last door into this house today. The Bolingbroke key, the one we cut into the wall before either of us was born. I shut my own blood out into the cold so nothing of hers can follow me to you. I would do it again. I would do all of it again, tonight, with my own hands, and feel nothing but glad."
Her breath catches hard. "Callum?—"
"I'm not the safe one." The shadow surges up the wall behind her, dark licking the leaded glass, and I let her see that too. "Whatever I've held back from you since September—I'm done holding it. Not tonight. I need you to know that before this goes anywhere it can't come back from."
"Good." She's already shoving my blazer down off my shoulders. "I don't want the held-back version. I want you. All of you, the part underneath, the part you've kept on a leash since you could walk." Her eyes don't leave mine. "Give me the thing your mother couldn't train out of you."
The blazer hits the floor and the shadow takes it under.
I get her out of the dress in the dark with my shadow doing half the work, and that should frighten one of us and frightens neither. It runs cold over her bared skin and she arches into the cold instead of away. Then it does what I don't tell it to: it gathers her wrists and draws them up over her head, bandingthem to the glass, holding her open for me. She tests the hold—pulls once, hard—and the dark only tightens, and the sound that comes out of her is low and wrecked and has nothing to do with wanting free.
"Oh," she breathes. "That's—do that."
So it does. The sight of her like that—arms pinned in my own shadow, brown skin against the black of it, gooseflesh rising where the dark touches and then my mouth following to warm everywhere it chilled—takes something out of me I didn't know I was still holding. I get a hand around her breast. Drag my thumb over her nipple until it tightens, until she gasps, and then I put my mouth there and the gasp breaks into my name. The shadow holds her wrists the whole time. It does not need me to tell it to.
Then it lets one band slide free, and her freed hand tears my shirt the rest of the way open and flattens against my bare chest, over the place my heart is slamming too hard for a man who's supposed to have no pulse worth counting. She feels it. She feels exactly what she does to me, and her eyes go bright with it. I kiss down the line of her throat, the dip of her collarbone, the soft skin under her breast, lower—her stomach jumping under my mouth, her breath coming apart above me—and her hand fists in my hair and pushes me down.
"Yes," she says. "Callum. Your mouth. Now."
Bolingbrokes do not kneel. We are the thing other people kneel to. I go to my knees in the dust of a house that won't tell anyone, and I hook her leg over my shoulder, and before I do anything else I look up the length of her once, because I want her to know it's me down here. Not the heir. Not the Frost King. Me.
"Nothing's making you do this," she says, breathless, half a laugh shaking out of her. "No bond pulling you down there, no bargain. You just want to. On your knees. For me."
"Yes."
"Then do it. Don't make me wait anymore."
I put my mouth on her.
She's already wet, already swollen, and the first stroke of my tongue against her clit pulls a sound out of her that I feel in my own cock, hard and ignored and throbbing against the seam of my trousers. I don't ignore her. I find the rhythm that tightens her thighs and I hold it—exactly it, no variation—because precision is the one thing twelve generations gave me worth keeping, and I will spend every scrap of it here, on her, on the floor.
Her hips chase my mouth and I let them. I bring my hand up and slide one finger into her, then two, curling them the way the change in her breath tells me to. She's tight and hot around my fingers and the taste of her is everywhere, and I am achingly, stupidly hard, and I don't care. This isn't for me. It's the first thing in my life that's been entirely for someone else, and I want it that way.
