Page 38 of Blood & Bone

“Harder, Luca.”

He obeyed.

The next thrust tore a cry from her. June gripped the back of his neck and rode him faster, taking him as deep as her body allowed. The room filled with the slap of skin, the creak of the cot, and the wet sound of his cock moving inside her.

His mouth found her throat. Not biting. Just teeth against skin, the threat of it as sharp as the real thing.

Her pussy tightened.

Luca swore against her neck.

June had never heard him lose command of his voice. The sound pushed her closer than his fingers had.

“Do that again,” she said.

“What?”

“Lose control.”

His hand closed over her ass. He held her open and drove into her hard enough that the cot struck the wall again.

Her orgasm built low and fast, tightening every muscle through her pelvis. She pressed her forehead to his and watched the restraint strip away from his face one piece at a time.

“Come inside me,” she said.

The words broke whatever remained.

Luca fucked her through the first contraction. Then the second. His thumb stayed on her clit, rubbing until June came hard around his cock, her body locking over his as pleasure burned through her.

He thrust once more and held himself deep.

His cock pulsed inside the condom. His face buried against the side of her throat, and the sound he made was low, raw and entirely unlike the controlled man who had sat down on the cot.

For several seconds, neither of them moved.

June’s heart pounded against his chest. His hands remained on her: one at her hip, the other still wrapped around the wrist she had offered him. A thin line of blood had dried across the base of his thumb.

Luca raised that wrist to his mouth again.

Not to drink.

He pressed his lips over the closing punctures and held them there while their breathing slowed and the carriage house settled around them. He released her. Sat back. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. A gesture so slight it barely qualified as movement.

June pulled her wrist back. The punctures were already closing. Two neat holes, side by side, smaller than they had any right to be. She reached for an alcohol pad and wiped the site. The sting was negligible. She capped the pad, dropped it in the bin, and went back to cleaning up, the last sixty seconds filed away as a procedural step she’d simply forgotten to document.

The carriage house held its quiet. The lamp buzzed. The splinter sat on the metal tray. Luca’s shoulder was almost closed, the wound reduced to a thin pink line that would be gone by morning, and the blood on his chest had dried to a dark map that nobody had bothered to wipe away because wiping it would have required acknowledging it, and some things were better carried than discussed.

Neither of them said anything about the wrist. The quiet between them carried its own charge. Not the empty kind. The kind that was full of things that had been exchanged without being named and naming them would have cost more than the exchange had.

Then, because neither of them had ever been good at leaving a charge unspent, June found the last inch of space between them and kissed him: soft, unhurried, nothing like the two before it, the kind of kiss that came after wanting had already been answered and only tenderness was left to say. Luca’s hand came up to the back of her neck, careful of nothing but her, and for a moment the carriage house held only that: warmth, and the sound of the lamp, and two people who had run out of reasons to pretend otherwise.

June finished cleaning up. The kit closed with a soft click. Marcus was gone. He’d stepped out at some point during the procedure, the door closed behind him, the sound lost under the work. She didn’t remember hearing it. Didn’t matter. The carriage house was theirs now. The lamp. The tray. The splinter. The quiet that followed when something necessary had been done and the doing of it had changed the air between two people in ways that would keep until someone decided to address them.

She didn’t decide to address them. She looked at the splinter on the tray and thought about firewood stacked outside houses, and young men with squared shoulders, and a wound that should have killed a human in the first ten minutes and had instead become a line that was already fading on skin that had seen two centuries of worse.

Marcus stepped out to check the perimeter. The door closed behind him with a soft click that echoed in the quiet, and then it was just the two of them and the lamp and the tray between them with the stake lying on its side in a thin smear of dried blood.

The carriage house held its silence. The overhead lamp buzzed. The concrete floor was cold under June’s boots. The blood smell had settled into something older, less metallic, a mustiness that settled in when blood dried on surfaces and the room stayed closed long enough for the air to go stale around it.