"Day after tomorrow. There's a morning train."
She holds my gaze a moment longer than necessary. Then she reaches across the desk and puts her hand on my jaw.
I go completely still.
She has touched me many ways in the last weeks. Not like this. This is deliberate. Her hand against my face, her thumb resting at the hinge of my jaw, looking at me while she does it.
The warmth is running. I am aware the warmth is running. I do not lower it.
"Thank you," she says. The two words landing with full weight. She means the Rosalind. She might mean the Lena news. She does not mean anything I have earned, but she does not know that.
I cover her hand with mine.
Her hand is warm. I run cold everywhere, as I always run cold, and she has been sleeping against my back for weeks and she knows exactly how cold I run, and she reached across my desk in the lamplight and put her hand on my face.
I hold it there.
She takes her hand back. Stands. "Before breakfast tomorrow," she says. "The March logs."
"Before breakfast," I say.
She goes back to the workroom.
I sit in my study and both my cocks ache and the bond hums with her—with the residue of her relief, the warmth of what she just gave me, the deliberate reaching across the desk—and I feel the cost of it through the bond the way I always feel the cost of what people give me. I have six centuries of knowing what people give me and what it costs them.
I pull out the intelligence summary. Eastern cell. The transfer window opens in forty-eight hours—three handlers in sequence through a single corridor, all of them exposed. The picture from her analysis is complete and exact.
I put the summary in the dispatch box.
Then I get up and I go to the workroom.
She looks up when I come in. Still at her desk, the lamp burning, another file open in front of her. She reads me immediately—she always reads me, the truth-sight runs both directions, she has been learning me the same way I have been learning her—and she sets her pen down.
I cross the room. I reach for her.
She doesn't step back from my hands. She comes into them. That is what has changed since the claiming—not the wanting, the wanting was there before, but the crossing of the small distance. She moves toward me now. She doesn't wait.
Her hands at my chest. The press of her palms, warm through my shirt.
I walk her back toward the daybed—the narrow one against the workroom wall, surrounded by her files and her cipher notes and the map with the farmhouse icon she pinned last week—and I take my time getting there. My hands at her waist first, learning the shape of her through the fabric. Her neck against my mouth while we're still standing. She tilts her head without being asked, offering the throat mark, and I put my mouth there briefly and feel the shiver move through her before I've even pressed in.
The first button. The next.
"You can look at me," I say.
"I am looking at you," she says.
I look up. She is. Not at my hands—at my face. I hold her gaze and undo the rest.
I undress her slowly. Each layer, her skin warmer underneath than the fabric was on top, my hands cold on firstcontact and warming slightly from hers. She is more deliberate now than the first nights—she knows where to put her hands, knows the cold of my chest and presses her palms flat against it anyway, watching.
"Still surprising," she says.
"My temperature."
"Yes."
She runs her thumbs along my collarbone. I feel it across my whole chest.
