The training yard had stripped him to the waist and nobody had offered him a shirt since, and either this was normal in demon culture or the Lord of Wrath simply didn't notice his own bare skin the way I noticed it, which was: constantly, peripherally, with a low-grade awareness that sat in my body like a fever I couldn't break. The dark expanse of his chest. The sigils—my sigils, our sigils—traced in amber light across the planes of muscle. The scars. The architecture of him, dense and deliberate, every line earned rather than sculpted, built for use rather than display. The ember-veins that pulsed when the conversation veered toward anything that mattered.
I had been holding a question for twenty minutes and it was burning through my composure like acid through paper.
I could ask it. I was a nurse.
"There's—" I started. Stopped. Picked at the edge of the parchment with my thumbnail, a nervous motion I couldn't control. "I have a question."
He waited. Of course he waited. The man had the patience of a geological formation.
"About the—physical. Aspect." My face was on fire. Not the bond-fire. Plain, ordinary, human mortification. The blood rushing to the surface of my skin in a comprehensive announcement of exactly where my thoughts had gone. "Of the bond. The—when the bond is—if it's—"
I looked at the table. At the parchment. At my own hands, which were gripping each other in my lap so hard the knuckles had gone white. Not at him. Absolutely, categorically not at him.
"You're—" I gestured. Vaguely. A motion that encompassed the general territory of his body and everything about it that made my question necessary. The height. The breadth. Thescale. The hands that wrapped mine the way an adult's hands wrapped a child's. "—significantly larger than—than I am. Than a human man. And I—physically, practically—"
I was dying. This was how I died. Not in Hell, not by demon, but by my own inability to finish a sentence about sex with a near eight-foot being who was watching me with those molten gold eyes and an expression of absolute, unbearable neutrality.
"How would that even—" I waved my hand again. A smaller wave this time. More specific in its trajectory. "—work."
He didn't laugh. He didn't smirk. His expression didn't shift into amusement or satisfaction or the particular brand of male self-congratulation that would have made me want to crawl under the table and live there permanently. He looked at me with the same steadiness he'd held through every clause of this contract—patient, direct, present.
"When the time comes," he said, and his voice had changed. Not louder, not lower. Something else. The hard consonants had softened a fraction. The clipped military cadence had slowed. As though the words required a different kind of care, and he was giving it. "I will make it good for you."
My breath caught. A small, involuntary contraction somewhere between my throat and my sternum, the bond translating the promise before my brain could process it.
"I will go slow. I will prepare you." His eyes held mine—he was not looking away from this, not flinching, not treating my question as anything other than what it was, which was important. "I will stop when you say stop. You will not be hurt."
The way he saidyou will not be hurt. Not a reassurance—a vow. The same register he'd used to speak his binding clauses into the parchment, the words carrying the weight of magic that would enforce them whether he wanted enforcement or not. He was promising my body's safety with the same absolute, structural commitment he'd promised my life's safety, and thefact that he made no distinction between the two—that my pleasure was as non-negotiable as my survival—sent something through me that I didn't have a clinical term for.
"And it will—" My voice had dropped to almost nothing. A whisper. The question of a woman who had never been with anyone who made her consider the logistics of accommodation, who had fumbled through the small, forgettable encounters of her early twenties with men whose bodies had never once made her wonder. "—fit?"
He held my gaze. Steady. Gold. The pupils wide and dark, the ember-veins in his forearms pulsing once—a single, slow beat of light that matched something I felt deep in my belly.
"We'll make it fit."
Oh.
The sigils on the parchment flared. The ones on my wrist flared with them. And the bond—that constant, humming presence behind my sternum—sent a wave of heat through me so sudden, so comprehensive, so devastating in its specificity that I grabbed the edge of the stone table with both hands and held on.
Not warmth. Heat. The kind of heat that started low and spread in every direction at once—through my belly, my hips, the insides of my thighs, the soles of my feet, the tender skin of my inner wrists where the sigils burned gold. Every nerve I had lit up like a circuit completing, like a current finding the path it was built to travel, and the sensation was so intense, so complete, so much more than anything I'd felt alone in the dark of my room with his memory and my hand that I stopped breathing.
Fuck I wanted him. I wanted him so much that I felt like I was going to burst.
He hadn't touched me. He hadn't moved. He was sitting across a stone table with his hands flat on the surface and his bare chest carrying the glow of our shared sigils and he had said four words—we'll make it fit—and I was more aroused than I had ever been in my life. More than the nights alone. More than the training yard kiss. More than any fumbling encounter with any boy in any cramped apartment in any life I'd lived before this one.
He knew.
Of course he knew. The bond was a shared nerve, a two-way wire, and everything I felt he felt and everything he felt I—
I felt it. His. Through the bond, a pulse of heat that was not mine—darker, heavier, edged with something that tasted like smoke and restraint, the particular frequency of desire held under enormous pressure. He wanted me. The knowledge arrived not as a thought but as a physical sensation—a tightening, a hunger, a gravitational pull between our bodies so strong it warped the air between us the way his fire warped the air above his horns.
Neither of us moved. Neither of us acknowledged it. We sat across the stone table in the silver light with the parchment glowing between us and the air thick with a mutual awareness so total it was almost a sound, and we pretended—carefully, deliberately, with the concentrated effort of two people clinging to the last shred of a formality that was the only thing keeping them on opposite sides of a table—that we were simply discussing terms.
He licked his lips.
"One final clause," he said.
His voice was not entirely steady.
