Page 28 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

I think about the nightstand drawer at the compound and the first intake card she ever filled out for me. The Cooper's hawk with the broken wing, her handwriting slanting hard to the right because she writes fast and never goes back to fix it. I've kept that card in my field guide for months.

"I kept yours too," I say.

She nods. We don't make it into more than it is.

She marks the pen placement and sits back. The pencil taps the table edge. She looks at the map.

"This is going to be our lives," she says. "Animals, not children."

I set my pencil down.

"Is that what you want?"

She's quiet for a long time.

"I'm thirty-nine. I've never wanted children. I love other people's kids, but they were never on the books for me." She meets my eyes. "I wanted to build something worth protecting."

I nod. "Rachel wanted kids. I said yes because she wanted them, not because I did. I spent fifteen years thinking I owed the universe a family I never got to build." I lay the pencil flat on the graph paper. "I don't owe anyone a life I never wanted. I want this one. With you."

She reaches across the map and takes my hand. Her thumb runs over my knuckles, and the purring starts in my ribcage, low and continuous, and I don't try to stop it.

The bedroom lamp on its lowest setting. She sits on the edge of the bed with her knees pulled up, watching me.

I open the nightstand drawer and take out the leather pouch. The carving tool inside sits in a felt lining, the handle worn from Garrett's grip before mine—he gave it to me three years ago, after Nina, and said: "When you're ready." I didn't understand what he meant but I do now.

"Minotaur claiming is different from orc claiming." I sit beside her, the pouch in my hands. "The orc bite is magical. Instant, permanent. A bond that transmits heartbeats." I touch my right horn. The broken one. The jagged edge where it shattered against the windshield frame fifteen years ago. "This is deliberate. I file a piece from my own horn. It never grows back. What I give you, I lose."

She looks at the tool. Looks at my horn. Her face doesn't change, but her breathing does.

"I'm filing from this one." I run my thumb along the broken edge. "Not the intact horn. This one."

"Why?"

"Because I'm giving you the part of me that broke. Not because I'm done carrying it. Because I want you to carry it with me."

She doesn't say anything. Her palm settles on my knee, and that's enough.

I position the tool against the broken edge. The metal meets keratin, and the first stroke sends an ache through my skull that settles behind my eyes. Nerves run from the horn base through the temporal ridge and into my jaw. Every minotaur knows what this costs. Garrett told me he bit through his lip.

I file. The second stroke grinds deeper and my breath catches. I'd planned to do this for Rachel on our wedding night. Never got there. The grind of metal against keratin fills the apartment, and Isla's grip tightens on my knee but she doesn't tell me to stop. She just lets me do what I need to do. I'm not waiting this time.

The piece comes free on the fifth stroke. Small, curved, dark. The broken edge smoothed by the filing until the jagged line runs clean. I hold it in my palm. A piece of the worst night of my life, filed smooth.

I tie the piece to a leather cord I've kept in the pouch since Garrett showed me how to knot one. Isla lifts her hair. I tie the cord at the back of her neck, and the horn piece settles against the hollow of her throat.

My hand covers hers over the pendant.

The purring shifts. Deeper than it's gone before. For the first time in fifteen years, I'm not fighting it. I let the purr come because I want her to hear all of it.

I kiss her. Slow. Her mouth opens under mine, and her fingers slide up my jaw into the fur at my temples. The purr deepens until I feel it in my chest and my jaw and the base of my horns. She pulls me down. The bed takes our weight, and I brace over her the way I learned she likes, close enough for my chest to press against hers but enough space for her to breathe.

Her fingers find my broken horn. She traces the filed edge where the piece used to be, the fresh gap where keratin meets air, and the sound that comes out of me doesn't have a name in any of my four languages. Her thumb follows the ridge, and my hips press forward and she wraps her legs around me and pulls me closer.

Two years of watching this woman — her coffee order, her bird intake numbers, which boot she laces first, the way her voice drops when she's tired. Now I learn the rest. The hitch when I drag my mouth down her neck. The way her back arches when I slide between her thighs. The pressure and rhythm that makes her fingers dig into my shoulders and her whole body shake apart.

She straddles me, her knees pressing into the mattress on either side of my hips, and when she sinks down onto my cock the sound I make comes from somewhere I didn't know I had. She's so wet and tight and takes me inch by inch, her thighs shaking with the effort of going slow. I grip her hips hard but I don't guide her. She sets the pace.

Her hands find both horns. Her grip on the filed edge sends a jolt straight down my spine and into my cock and my hips buck up into her before I can stop them. She moans and rolls her hips and the pendant swings between us, the piece of me she's wearing while the rest of me fills her.