Lain half expected it, the way one expects lightning after the smell of ozone. Still, it stole her breath. Morgan’s hand closed around her wrist, hard enough to grind bone. The jolt of contact knocked her into the shelf she was near, and a few of the jars went skittering. The vellum slipped to the floor, the charcoal hitting stone and snapping in two.

  “Let go,” she said.

  “You wanted to hurt me,” he said through gritted teeth. “Congratulations. It worked.”

  She tried to yank her hand back, but his grip tightened. Pain flared up her arm. The bond mirrored it, echoing through him. He hissed, startled by his own hurt.

  “Good,” she said, breathless. “Feel it.”

  He stared at her as if she were some new species of animal he had never seen before, something small and furious and inexplicably unafraid of him.

  “You don’t know when to stop,” he said.

  “You don’t either.”

  His gaze drifted over her shoulder, to the shelves, to the sacks stacked neatly in the corner. Survival, order, control.

  A reckless impulse rose in her, hot and bright.

  She’d been raised to keep things tidy. The High Glinnel would have her scrubbing floors a second time if she’d left so much as a smudge of flour.

  Here, with Morgan’s hand clamped on her wrist and his need for control pressing down on her through the bond, the urge to break something rose like a summons to dance wildly around a fire.

  Lain shifted her weight and drove the dew claw of her hoof into the nearest sack. The canvas gave with a satisfying rip. A rush of grain spilled across the floor in a noisy cascade, bounding and rolling, turning the tidy corner into a mess of unruly seeds.

  Morgan stared at it, momentarily stunned. “What are you doing?”

  “Wasting,” she said.

  She hooked her hoof under another sack and kicked. This one burst at the seam, a white puff of flour exploding into the air. It dusted his bare chest, her hair, the diagrams. For a heartbeat the room looked like the inside of an old bell when someone struck it and shook the settled dust free.

  “Stop,” he said again, but there was real panic in it now. “Lain –”

  She yanked herself back against his grip, snagged a jar of beans from a shelf, and flung it sideways. It hit the wall and cracked, spilling little dark pellets that clattered and skittered under the shelves.

  “Enough,” he snarled.

  “It’s never enough!” she cried. “Not enough to last, not enough while you carve something new out of me. How much is enough, Morgan? How many people is enough? How much of me?”

  He yanked her away from the shelves, spinning her to face him. She stumbled. Her hoof slid on rolling grain. For a moment she teetered, almost going down. His grip on her wrist hauled her upright again.

  “Careful,” he bit out.

  “Why?” she said. “Will you be jealous of the floor if it bruises me?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll break your neck on your own stupidity,” he snapped.

  “Then you won’t have anything left to plug into your pretty machines,” she said. “Is that it?”

  His expression twisted. “You think that’s all I want from you,” he said. “A power source.”

  “That’s what you wrote,” she said. “‘Host integrity.’ ‘Conduit stability.’ You weren’t planning for my comfort.”

  His hand on her wrist trembled. His other curled into a fist at his side, the tendons in his forearm standing out.

  “I gave you a choice,” he said. “I showed you what was coming. I asked for your help.”

  “I said I’d look,” she said. “I didn’t say I’d kneel.”

  “Why are you provoking me?” he asked. The question sounded torn out of him.

  She thought of Saint Fillan in the field with the dream Morgan and did not know why that comparison came to her now, only that some stubborn streak that had survived the cloister and the Dagorlind and the Spire recognized the same terrible ground: the place where there was nothing left to lose but her own refusal.

  “Because there’s nothing better to do,” she said. “I’m trapped in a room with the man who stole my life and calls it destiny. You took from me and then curled up on my chest like a child and made me hold you while you wept into my skin.”

  His breath hitched. “I did not –”

  “You did. You won’t even look at that. You’d rather look at spilled grain.”

  The bond flared with something she couldn’t parse at first – it was too tangled and hot. But then pieces began to emerge, of shame, desire, fury. A child’s bewildered hurt that someone had seen him vulnerable and dared to name it.

  He pulled her closer.

  “Do you want to see what happens,” he said, soft, dangerous, “when you push past the place I know how to stop?”

  Fear licked up her spine. She refused to back away.

  “I already have,” she said.

  His hand left her wrist.

  For a moment she thought he might step back. That he might leave the room, slam the door, go to the cistern and break his knuckles on the rock instead.

  But of course he didn’t.

  His hand closed on her shoulders, fingers digging in, and shoved her backward.

  Her calves hit the edge of the cot and she went down hard, the breath jolted out of her. The world narrowed to the ceiling above, to the weight of his body looming over her, to the thunder of the sea and the hammering of both their hearts in the bond.

  “Too late for regrets now,” Morgan said, voice low and shaking as he placed his hands on either side of her, caging her in. She cringed away from him. “What’s wrong? Find something left to lose after all, pet?”

  The disgust that rushed through her must’ve unnerved him because his face soured.

  “I don’t like that,” he said.

  “And I don’t like this.”

  “What part don’t you like?”

  “Is that a serious question?” Lain asked. Her throat felt raw. “You know what you’re doing.”

  He sighed, and she felt the needle of compromise pricked through his desire. For a moment he could almost step back.

  But he pushed past it.

  Morgan caught her under the arms and hauled her higher on the cot, as if the problem lay in the angle and not the act itself. “It’s not about what you like,” he growled.

  He put his mouth to her collar bone, pressing just hard enough that the bruising there flared with pain.

  The same pain hit him.

  He hissed and jerked back, his hand flying to his own chest. He stared at her with angry astonishment, as if she’d had the nerve to bite him back. “Stop doing that.”

  “You did it to yourself,” she said. “You can stop.”

  The fury that rose in him at the word stop was huge and hollow, a storm trying to hide a sinkhole under it. For a moment he wanted to break something just to prove he still could. For a moment he wanted to break her.

  He lunged at her again, teeth to bone, and this time she hit him with the full force of hurt and loathing, the sick twist of being trapped. She didn’t flinch away from the bond; instead, she reflected it, a perfect mirror.

  He jerked back, his hand flying to his own collar as if expecting blood. The revulsion slammed into him as if he were the one pinned to the bed.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “Fuck,” he breathed, reeling, the crude language surprising her. “I know you can keep that to yourself.”

  “I know you can stop,” Lain said quietly.

  He weighed it, wanting now more than ever to force her into submission, but wanting, too, the avoidance of such humiliating pain and emotional turmoil.

  “You can stop,” she repeated, more softly this time, but she realized too late she’d insulted his resolve, as if her softness could sway him from his course.

  “I’ll take what I’m owed,” he muttered. He unbound the knot at her waist and pulled her robes open. Desire blossomed in him at the sight of her. She turned her head aside, disgust like bile in her throat as he kissed her neck, her chest, then bit, digging his claws in – softer this time, more measured, as if to meter out the pain, deciding on just how much he was willing to take of what he was giving.

  He would adjust his behavior, then. But he was right, too. He would have her one way or another. Every time she shoved at him physically the bond fed her fear straight to him and he rode it like victory.

  If she couldn’t stop him, she could change the ground he stood on.

  “You don’t want me like this,” she said.

  His head snapped up. “You don’t get to tell me what I want.”

  “You want to stop feeling like you’re dying,” she said. “You want to not be alone. You want something that doesn’t hurt.”

  Something in his chest stuttered. The Tuning brought it to her, raw, white-edged, the same scraped terror she’d felt when the Underserpent tore itself from the bowl. It lived in him now. She could see it.

  Lain lifted a hand, slowly, so he could see it coming, and set her fingers against his cheek.

  “Let me show you,” she said.

  She reached back for the memory she could still bear to touch: hands that had been careful with her, a body that had waited when she’d been overcome by instinct. The feeling of being met, not used. The first time she’d trusted someone with the full weight of her wanting and hadn’t been punished for it.

  She didn’t send him details. The bond didn’t need the shapes of bodies or sounds of breath to make its point. She sent only the core of it: safety in the middle of vulnerability. The sense of being held, not trapped. The way fear eased when the other person chose not to take and take and take. So great a splendor had filled her then that Mallow had come awake in her body, arriving as if to a freshly crossed horizon, until she could not tell his pleasure apart from her own. He came to comfort Lain, and their reward had been the Kelthi bond.

  This she fed to Morgan, and he met it with such a hunger that he lunged toward it like a starving man toward a lit hearth.

  “I want that,” he said.

  She nodded. “I know.”

  “You’ll give that to me.” His hand slid from her robe to her wrist, not quite gripping down, but not loose, either.

  She shook her head.

  His eyes narrowed. He snagged her wrist and brought her hand above her head, digging his nails in deep enough to hurt. The first flare of rage rose, but fizzled when it hit the memory she’d shown him. It mixed instead with something like baffled hurt.

  “Bellborn,” he said. “Give that to me.”

  She shook her head again. “You can’t have that and this at the same time.”

  “This?” he echoed.

  “This,” she said, and let the bond fill with the feeling of the cot beneath her spine, the wedge of helplessness lodged inside her chest. The knowledge that if he chose to hurt her, again, she could not physically stop him.

  For the first time he felt all of it from inside her instead of skimming it as background noise he could ignore.

  He made a raw sound in his throat and recoiled half a handspan, his grip on her wrist loosening.

  She seized the opening. Lain drew every scrap of warmth out of the bond. She stripped away the memory she’d offered and left him with only what he was actually doing in this room, in this body, to this woman.

  Morgan’s face twisted. He wanted to force his way back to that brief illusion of gentleness, that remembered hearth. But now he couldn’t get there by pretending she wanted this when she didn’t. The Tuning wouldn’t let him lie to himself that completely.

  He shut his eyes. The defeat unfurled within him, like a muscle realizing it could no longer hold a blade aloft.

  When he spoke again, his voice had lost its edge. “Please,” Morgan said.

  “What?”

  “Please,” he repeated, barely audible. “Show me. That feeling. Just for a moment. I don’t…” his throat worked. “I don’t know how to get there by myself.”

  There came a crack in his armor. The part of him that didn’t know how to be anything except cruel or commanding, suddenly confronted with a third option and no map.

  She told herself this changed nothing. He was still going to do what he wanted. She was just trying to survive the shape of it.

  She opened the memory again, just a sliver this time. Enough to pull his focus away from punishment and the thrill of domination and toward something that at least resembled care.

  He responded at once, grappling with her flesh, pressing hard against her –

  She withdrew again and he groaned in frustration. But he slowed his rough handling, gentled his grip on her, and as he did so she revealed more of her willingness to him. He found a softer kiss at her jaw, something that spoke of real mutuality, and she nodded, and guided him with her Tuning.

  He unbound his clothing and let them slide from the bed until he was naked above her. He pressed hungrily against her.

  But she shook her head. She wasn’t ready. It would hurt to start now.

  She guided his hand to her and a new sort of desire flared in him at her engagement. He liked that she wanted him to make her feel good. She let him have that feeling.

  “I want to make this good for you,” he cooed in her ear in a way that was almost sweet. He shuddered with pleasure when he felt her own pleasure rise. He adjusted the pressure of his hand – it wasn’t even conscious, Lain realized; he was following her stimulation without thinking. “You’ll want this by the end.”

  There it was again, that ego of his gloating at any indication of excitement. He didn’t know the difference between pleasure and want. She didn’t want him. It was with some difficulty that she didn’t balk at this.

  But she could find some peace in knowing he preferred her enjoyment. She would not hold off the way he sought to please her; and while she didn’t understand the full complexity of his feeling, it was ever her way with any two things to care for the more mysterious of the two. So Morgan came on his own to draw the pleasure out of her, cooing in her ear; he pressed his mouth to her breast without teeth, and soon he was so thoroughly coiled about her that he writhed with her in shared pleasure.

  It wasn’t long before he understood the full power of what it meant, to give and receive at once in their new bond, and he reveled in the discovery with such freshly tapped innocence that even Lain had to admit there was some sweetness in it.

  Her back arched as she flexed into his hand, and he spoke warm against her, telling her how good she was, his pretty lamb, and there was no mockery in him, only a sharing of pleasure as they intertwined.

  This time when she came for him, it was a reward he’d sought and earned for the act of giving more than he received. Her vision flared to white and it wasn’t Morgan’s face in her mind but Mallow’s, his black hair sweat-dampened at his brow, giving her one of his precious smiles, abloom with pride at having coaxed her so sweetly to pleasure. She thanked Mallow in quiet gratitude, for all he'd given her.

  When she descended from her pleasure Morgan coiled an arm under her shoulder so he could turn her panting face to his. He kissed her cheek, her forehead. Gratitude effervesced from his Touch to sparkle against her skin.

  As she came back to herself Morgan chuckled with real happiness. He parted her legs with his own, bringing one of her knees up. He looped one arm around the leg before descending to her.

  He pressed at her. She felt like a blackbird in the woods, listening suspiciously as this interloper entered her space, but this time she didn’t flee him, only uttered slowly her warning notes to keep him from moving too fast or with too much force, so he wouldn’t break the charm of her woods. Into that charm Morgan moved with awe. A solemness came on his face as he entered her, as if going on quiet feet through her woods was the work of his life.

  This time he met her with real pleasure, unbound by any hatred or anger or dominance, his one arm spooled about her thigh, his other hand caressing her face, then coiling in her damp hair as he leaned forward to bury himself. A spirit grew in him that was well-matched with the new power he bore, an empathy beyond simple human decency.

  Lain wondered at how quickly the Tuning had helped him unearth this humanity, in spite of all the monstrous things he was capable of.

  She reinforced him in the bond when he did what made her feel good; discouraged him when there was pain. And now that he knew the doubling of pleasure when he pleased her, his motivation evolved in the process. He grunted with happiness when he coaxed small sounds of pleasure from her; he held her fast when some movement made her wrap her hands about his shoulders or grip tight to the feathered base of his wings.

  He let her leg fall beside him so he could reach her face.

  “I want this,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I can make you want this, too.”

  She realized it wasn’t a statement, but a question. She shook her head. “No.”

  Some deeply buried flower pushed up through the untended garden of his feelings. At first all he released was frustration at her honesty, but once that emotion had rained upon the field, what came forward next was a blossom of understanding. Wanting could not be forced. It had to come from a seed inside, and spring outward.

  He buried himself again as if hopeful he might dig up that seed anyway, and while she nodded and accepted his desire, she did not return the wanting. It wasn’t there for him to receive.

  His pleasure built and she coaxed him toward its unburdening. With a few final thrusts he emptied himself of his concerns, and she held him as he panted, as he filled her.

  He collapsed for a few hurried breaths.

  Then, he eased himself onto an elbow so he could gaze with wonder at her face.

  For the first time since he’d taken her by force two days ago, he brought his mouth to hers, and kissed her.

  Her instinct was to recoil. But then she felt the plea in him, and the gratitude. She leaned toward him, opening her mouth so slightly, sharing his breath for what must have been his first true kiss in years.

  This was not yet an apology.

  But that might come with time.

  They dozed together as the morning waxed to early afternoon, until Lain shivered with cold and Morgan’s stomach growled hungrily.

  Morgan stood from the bed and stacked the iron stove with wood from their small provisions. She watched him do this, surprised he would work naked in the chill, noting his unblemished skin and corded muscle.

  If she ignored his silhouette, and squinted her eyes just the right way, she could imagine he was Mallow, building the fire at the little cabin rest house in the mountains.

  She held fast to the fantasy of that. But as the little flame Morgan made went up, it seemed somehow to reveal her monstrous loneliness, in the shape of a winged shadow against the wall.

  What do you do when there’s nothing left to be done?

  You cry, sweetheart. You cry.

  Morgan glanced at her with surprise in his silver eyes. She pulled her robes up and rolled away before he could catch her crying. But of course he felt it, and came to lay behind her, and for the first time he held her with no desire at all as she cried quietly with her back at his chest.

  Her tears waned as the cabin warmed with the little fire. When he felt she’d calmed enough, he propped himself up, and stroked her hair, tentative and child-like.

  “Lain.”

  Her heart fluttered senselessly at his use of her name. Not Bellborn, a thing to be used; but Lain, her personhood. “Yes?”

  “Teach me to make bread.”

  She said nothing.

  He paused for a breath. “Please. I want to learn.”

  She wiped her eyes, then patted his hand. “You’re learning already. Fetch some water and we’ll get started.”