He kissed her, feverish, parched by the sort of desire that could only be quenched with satisfaction. She struggled to match his pace, his ardor, his eagerness, fucking him like it would be the last time. She had never been such an active participant in their coupling and it gave their union a doomed and desperate intensity that threatened to subsume him whole as her body rocked beneath his.
He reached between them to rub her clit and she bucked into his next thrust, the small gesture causing him to bottom out. Cal stilled, his stomach tensed against hers, savoring the feel of her stretched to fullness, the tremors of her body like rippling aftershocks.
Nadine sobbed when he pulled out this time, scratching him so deeply that he pictured his skin coming unseamed in long furrows, revealing garnet beads of blood. It had the feeling of a ritual and as he took his brave, beautiful sparrow and made her his in every way that mattered, Cal thought he might have finally gotten a glimpse of what had driven his great-grandfather for all those years of brutal rapacity. In each violent conquest, he must have been searching for something that had even a fleeting taste of this gifted surrender.
“Cal,” she cried against his mouth. “Daddy.Please.”
His kiss was a siege of gentleness, a tangled meeting of teeth and tongues. He pulled the collar of her shirt aside to admire the marks he’d left, smoothing his thumb over the yellowed edge of a bruise blooming at her throat. “You’re all mine,” he told her, with no small amount of satisfaction, and she tilted her head, offering the unmarked side of her neck.
He would have given her anything, then.
Even his heart, pulled bloody from his chest.
He came inside her with a fury that left both of them panting against the sheets like survivors of a disaster. Cal collapsed on top of her, cradling her head in his arms. She let him, her eyes slipping closed into something too wary to be sleep.
When he was able to force his passions back into retreat, Cal pulled on his pants and went to get her a glass of water and a warm towel. She was still there when he came back, lying unmoving as he cleaned between and around her thighs, propped up on one arm to watch him with a guarded, curious expression.
“You’ve never been more beautiful,” he told her, as he tossed the soiled cloth into the wastebasket and rejoined her on the bed. His weight dipped the mattress and rolled her against him, where she nestled easily into the crook of his arm. She leaned across him to set the glass on the nightstand, wincing a little as she did.
He was sorry for that. But part of him—the darker, wicked part—was pleased to see the effects of his claim asserting themselves so visibly.
She toyed with her necklace. “Am I a sparrow?”
“You’re my sparrow,” he confirmed. He leaned forward, resting his chin on the crown of her head. Her hair still smelled sweet. “My sweet little sparrow. I would have chosen you that first day if you hadn’t run away. But I enjoyed trying to catch you.”
Nadine nodded and sank back against him the way she used to do only in the dark. Her shirt still gaped open and he buttoned it tenderly, recentering her necklace in the hollow of her throat, which elicited a sleepy little hum of contentment.
The festival was tomorrow and she had chosen—
Not the knife, but him.
C H A P T E R
E I G H T E E N
to reject the legacy
It didn’t feel like other festival days.
The tension in the air crackled like it was charged with electricity. Cal could almost taste the ozone. Beyond the window, bruise-colored clouds promised more than just bad weather. His father would be aggravated but the hunt would continue, regardless. As far as Cal knew, they had never canceled a Running of the Deer festival.
His sparrow stirred beside him, still naked from the waist down. Cal pulled his legs away and slid out of her bed, the chill of the room dogging him as he passed through that narrow hallway, into his own room, to retrieve the black dress he had ordered for Nadine tonight. It was a simple, tie-wrap dress, the kind his mother wore, and loose enough that she would have very little trouble running in it. He would have even less trouble taking it off her, later.
Ignoring the throbbing between his thighs, Cal jotted down a quick note and left it, and the dress, on her vanity table. But his eyes slid back to her sleeping form, taking in the hair spilling over her pillow like autumn leaves, surrounding her face as if she were lying on a bier. She had sprawled out in his absence, her arms spread out at her sides.
She looks like a sacrifice, he thought, disturbed. And if his family had any say in the matter, she would be. Apparently, even if she had already agreed to be his bride.
Cal had rarely challenged his family on anything. Their collective will seemed inevitable, in the same way that a storm ora landslide did. You could prepare for it, of course, and hope to steer or alter its course, but ultimately the chips would fall where they would.
The idea that he could simply . . . not comply was both novel and thrilling.
It was terrifying, as well.
It suggested that there were other times he could have chosen not to comply, but had anyway. That he had erroneously believed his father and his brother to be infallible.
That he was complicit in the very sort of schemes that he worked to unknot in his day-to-day life, only on a much larger, more destructive scale.
There was something in biology called the ecology of fear. The more damage a predator did to its prey, the more blood was exacted, the more fear was spread, the higher the toll. Eventually, an invasive enough predator might run out of things to hunt entirely and then turn on each other in times of scarcity.
