"When the pair of you can stand on your own." She'd cleared a space at the clerk's table and laid a single sheet on it, squared to the edges. "There's a form."
It wasn't surprising. The Agency kept a paper for everything, and I'd spent the back half of my life learning to hate the smell of them.
This one I crossed the floor for.
It was short. A registration, Nezara said, of a permanent and irrevocable mate-bond between the contracted human female and the male named below. Filed with the office, copied off-world, not open to review. The kind of thing that, once it had twonames on it, no clerk and no audit, and no transport schedule could touch.
"You sign first." She held out the pen. "Then her, if she's willing. It can't be undone. I'd not have either of you put your name to it on a courtroom's worth of feeling and regret it by supper."
"Give me the pen."
I signed. My hand looked absurd around it, the way it always did, but the name came out plain enough.
Then I gave the pen to Chloe, and I made myself watch.
The last time I'd stood over a paper with her name on it, I'd read it upside down across a clerk's shoulder in a cold office and learned the whole shape of her in three lines. Third placement. Final eligibility. A red flag and a date and a transport that would carry her back to wherever men had taught her she was the kind you hand back. I'd left before she turned around. I'd gone home and sworn I would not be the fourth one to ruin her.
This one I got to watch her sign.
She bent over the table and put her name down without a breath of hesitation. No stalling, no joke to cover it, none of the bracing I'd watched her do over every good thing since I met her, that little flinch where she waited for it to be snatched back. She just signed. Like it was hers. Like it had always been hers, and the paper was only catching up.
Something went through me at that, hot and low, and it had nothing to do with the room or the fine or the gawkers on the benches. It had to do with getting her home. Soon.
"It's done." Nezara lifted the sheet and blew across the ink like a woman who'd closed a hundred of these. "Welcome to it, both of you. Go on. You've given the town enough of a show for one week."
Chloe slid her hand into mine, every one of her five fingers not making it around three of mine, and we went.
The forge sat dark when we came up the track, the fire banked, the whole place quiet. I got the cottage door open, and Chloe went in ahead of me, and I shut it behind us. Then it was just the two of us, the watercolors she liked on the walls, the low gray light. The noise of the whole long day dropped off at once.
She turned around to say something. I could see the joke coming up in her face, the one she reached for whenever a thing got too big to hold.
I got my hand to her jaw before she could find it.
I'd had a word behind my teeth since the first breath of her in that office. Through every night I handed her off to another male in my own head, through the forge and the knife and the wall and the cell, I'd carried it. I'd said it once today, to a room full of strangers, because I had to. I had never once said it to her.
"My mate," I said.
The breath went out of her. Whatever she'd been about to say was gone.
"Say it again."
"My mate."
The second time was easier, and the third I didn't say at all, because she was up off her feet and I had her, both arms, crushed in against me with my face down in her hair where the scent of her ran strongest, breathing her in like I'd come up out of deep water. I was hard already. I'd been hard since she signed her name, if I'm honest about it, since her hand moved over that paper without a single flinch.
She got a fistful of my shirt. "You waited until now." She didn't finish whatever came after that. She kissed me instead, hard, up on her toes, and I bent to make it easier for her and lost the thread of it.
When she pulled back to look at me, there was something new in her face. She'd always come at me bold, from that first night in my kitchen with the cocoa going cold. But there hadbeen a dare under it then, a question she would not ask out loud. The question was gone now. She looked at me like she already had the answer. Like she was sure of me.
She put both hands flat on my chest and pushed toward the bed, watching to see if I'd let her move me.
I let her move me.
"Sit," she said.
I sat.
Then she went down onto her knees on the floorboards in front of me, and my mouth went dry.
