Page 24 of Fated to the Fang

"It's a cage. You pick what I hear about. You decide how I research. You are making me feel managed and stupid." My voice doesn't shake. I make sure of it. "You were already there when the tourist boat came in. You knew where to stand, who to watch, what Owen's camera meant. Then you let everyone lie while I stood there feeling insane for noticing the pattern."

"I never called you⁠—"

"You didn't have to. You implied it." I step in. "That's worse."

"Being near me is the most dangerous thing you have done since you got here. The things I can't reveal are too life changing for you."

"Can't, or⁠—"

"My life has rules you can't see. People keep them. Old, organized, and they do not take kindly to people that know too much. If you knew what you're standing on, I hand them a reason to take you apart and call it law. The not-knowing is keeping you safe. For now, only for now. The moment you see enough to name it, ignorance stops protecting you and starts making you easier to use.”

"That wall you've built through the middle of me. You don't get to call that protection and expect me to thank you for it. The not-knowing is taking me apart." I'm close to see his pulse beat, slow while mine is hammering. "I was engaged for four years to someone who lived a whole life I never got to see. Don't do that to me again. I'm not grateful for a closed door with a draft under it because you aren't man enough to be honest."

He looks like the words sting him. "Everyone I've kept close I've outlived, buried, or had taken to make a point to me. I learned to create distance. It's better that way. It's mercy."

"It's a coward's mercy."

"Yes."

That undoes me more than an argument would have. He doesn't defend it. He just sets it down between us, true.

"Go inside," he says. "In the morning this is a night that didn't happen."

"I'm holding the door open for you, why aren't you taking it?"

"I see it, but walk away, Avery."

"No."

I close the space and put my hand flat against his chest, over the slow drum of him. He goes very still under my palm, the stillness of something deciding whether it's allowed.

"Last time," he says, rough.

"I know where the door is."

He kisses me like he's been rationing it. His hand comes up into my hair, and his fingers thread through carefully, then not. He tilts my head to a position he wants and the outside cold falls away. I get my fingers into his collar and pull, and he lets me move him back inside the B&B, into the dark and small heat of the house.

My shoulders find the wall. He braces an arm above me. The plaster gives a small warning crack under his palm, and he shifts his weight away from me with visible effort, breathing hard enough that I can hear him fighting himself. I drag his mouth back down. "Don't make this another thing you manage," I say against it. "Be honest with this, at least."

A sound leaves him I haven't heard before, low, almost pained, and his restraint slightly breaks. His hands map me slow—jaw, throat, the dip of my collarbone—each touch a question I answer by arching into it. I get his shirt open. The skin unmarked where the knife entered, and I press my mouth there, on the lie of it, and feel his breath go ragged under my lips.

My sweater goes. His hands are cool, thumb tracing the underside of my breast until my head goes back against the plaster. He follows the line down, mouth to my throat, my sternum. The pressure comes again now, deeper, behind my eyes, behind memory: a second pulse laid under my own. I don't understand it. I stop trying. I pull him closer instead, and the echo swells, the strange certainty of being known clean through and not held down by it.

He lifts me like I weigh nothing and I lock my legs at his waist, and we lose the rest of our clothes between the entrance and my room, slow only because he keeps stopping to look at me, to wait, to make me say it.

"Yes," I tell him. "Stay."

He stops anyway, not because he doubts me, but because some part of him needs the choice given twice. His hands are cradling either side of me, arms locked, shoulders tense.

"Say it again," he requests.

I catch his jaw in my hand and make his eyes meet mine. "I want this. I want you. Not your secrets. Nor your silence. But I want this."

His eyes close, and when they open, whatever is left of distance between us burns down. He kisses the inside of my knee, then higher, slow making me furious, and ache at the same time. I shove a hand into his hair and feel him smile against my skin, brief and disbelieving, like the shape has startled him. Then his mouth turns serious again. Devastatingly serious. He learns me with the same attention he gives everything else. I am the thing ruining him, and he makes sure I know it.

Around me narrows to his hands, his mouth, the scrape of my breath, the old bed shifting beneath us. I try to stay sharp. Angry. In control of every inch I give him. Then he looks up from between my thighs, his silvered stare brightening and wrecked, waiting again, and the control I have left slips its leash.

"Dorian."