"More," she says, barely sound.
I give her more.
"More than that." Her voice is wrecked and I barely recognize what's happening to my chest. "Ren. More."
"Yes." I curl my fingers inside her?—
She bites down on my shoulder, muffled and desperate, and it takes everything I have not to say something I can't take back. I keep going. My thumb doesn't stop. Her pulse is climbing fast now, her blood pulling tight, her whole body straining toward it?—
She comes apart against my hand. I feel it in my chest before I hear it: a rush of heat, sudden, hers, flooding into me. Her breath breaks against my shoulder. She shakes. Her hand twists in my shirt and the seam tears a little and I press my mouth into her hair and work her through every second of it, slow, not stopping until she goes still.
I hold her through it. Every second. Until her pulse starts to settle and the high note of it comes back down.
I want more.
That's the simple truth of it. I want to push her skirt up the rest of the way and fuck her against these shelves. Months of knowing what she wants from inside her blood, and I'm done standing on the other side of it.
The mark burns.
Low on the back of my hand, a slow climb of heat. I've been here too long. The tether is counting down the distance between me and Vitae Hall, and in another minute it won't be low anymore.
I step back. Take my hand out from under her skirt. Press my palm flat to the shelf.
I'm shaking.
She watches my face. She sees me look at the mark. She understands without my having to say it—she always does—and her hand drops from my shirt.
"Later," I tell her.
She holds my eyes. Nods once.
Her blood is warm and opened, the fear underneath quieter than it was, like she's set some of it down. I want to stay in this corner until the mark burns through to the bone. I don't.
I hold her wrist before she goes. Loose, a thumb at the pulse point, a half second, not a grip. She stills.
I lean in.
The fear spikes—old reflex—and then levels when she understands it isn't anything she needs to brace for. I put my mouth to the side of her jaw and breathe, and then lower, the hinge of her neck where the pulse runs close to the surface, and I taste her.
She lets me. Her free hand finds the shelf.
The salt and the warmth of her, the taste of her blood that I'd know in a dark room at a hundred yards, and below that?—
Old metal. The flat cold taste of stone that has been worked with magic for longer than anyone now living has been alive. It isn't the ordinary hum of the campus, which I've tuned out the way I tune out my own heartbeat. This is something heavier, something with a direction to it. The quiet pressure of a place that has been the same place for a very long time and intends to go on being it.
She's been in that building. The one next door to Callister House, the one that the campus tries to make your eyes slide off of. She's been inside it, and its cold has gotten into her blood.
I feel it in my thumb at her pulse point. I feel it on my tongue.
I pull back. My thumb brushes once against the inside of her wrist and drops.
She looks at me. Doesn't flinch. Doesn't ask.
I lick it off my thumb. The taste of the building, old and cold and patient, dissolving against the back of my tongue.
I don't tell her what I tasted. Not because I won't—because she already knows, and she isn't ready. I can feel that much. When she is, she'll say so.
But I am made of blood magic, and she has been somewhere old and wrong and patient, and the worry of it sits like a stone in my throat and I don't show her.
