She lies on me for a long time, her ear over my heart, my hand moving slow up and down her spine. When she talks again, her voice is half asleep and unguarded, nothing managed in it anywhere.
“You realize this is the first bed we’ve ever been in.”
I think about it. Stone, slate, a cot built for one, a stairwell wall. “Huh.”
“Don’t you start with the ‘huh.’” She smiles against my chest; I feel it. “A bed, Decker. We’re practically respectable.”
“Never that.” I’m smiling. And then I continue, “Grace…”
“Yeah?”
“I think I could love you.” I know I could. Because I’m pretty sure I already do.
She goes still. There’s a long pause. Too long.
Then, “I think I could love you too, bear.”
I pull her closer. We stay like that for a while, warm and silent.
Eventually, she moves. “I’m so tired.” Her breathing is going long and slow between the words, slurring slightly. “Wake me before six, okay?” She yawns. “Marek’ll worry…”
She’s asleep before she finishes the sentence. Mid-word, in my bed, with an enemy somewhere out there. She sleeps like none of it can reach her in here.
It can’t. Not with me between her and the door. I’m the most dangerous thing in this room by a long way, and she’s out cold on my chest without a lock or a knife between us, because to her I’m the safe part.
I reach up and flick the light off. She doesn’t stir. Her hair has fallen across her face, and I move it back. The long line of her neck lies bare in the half-dark, her pulse going slow and even under the skin.
That’s when he comes for it.
No heat left to blame, no cry of hers to ride in on. Just her bare throat a hand’s width from my mouth and the whole weight of him rising to finish the thing we left open.
Now. Do it.
She’d never feel the first of it as pain.
Torbjorn’s voice comes with him:it climbs, it doesn’t level off, and you do not want to feel what it’s like at the end of it.
My jaw aches with how little it would take.
I don’t.
I put my palm over her pulse instead, light, covering the spot where the teeth want to go.
Soon, I tell him.
Once she’s free. Once she knows the rest and says yes anyway.
The bear doesn’t settle. He stays up against the back of my teeth, and I lie there wide awake with her asleep on my chest and the one thing I want most in reach.
I keep my mouth shut and don’t take it.
Chapter 36
Grace
The day starts with a nod. The woman from the comms room, the one who wouldn’t look at me the day I came in. She’s coming the other way down the corridor while Marek walks me to the admin floor, and instead of finding something interesting on the wall, she looks right at me and nods. Small. Real.
I nod back, and it takes me half the corridor to notice my shoulders. They’re down. I’ve walked this building for days with them set rigid, waiting for the next look, and somewhere between my door and here they came down without asking me.
