What are your intentions?
Pleasuring you. Over and over. Again and again. You can choose whether you want my hands or my mouth.
“Never want to say a word of truth to me, midwife,” Reed said, distracting me from my memory of him.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean anything I ask, you evade a true answer. You won’t even tell me what jest it is between you and your apprentice about pea shells.” His words were said in his usual detachment, but there was a chilliness to them, as if a thin sheen of ice had formed over a pond in cooler weather.
I turned to him. “I can speak in truth. Ask me a question.” I could have bitten my tongue. It ran away from me every time he was near, and perhaps that was why I kept evading him. I knew I would spill secrets if I did not keep up some kind of a guard, even if it meant being always opaque.
“How generous of you. I expected some retort about how you did not owe me an answer. Which is true, but I really don’t care. Very well. What had you unable to breathe and practically ablaze that first night in Griston?”
My eyes were trained on the back of the wagon. “If Itell you, please promise not to shout in response or tell another soul. At least not a member of my family.”
“So, the truth, but with conditions.”
“Reed.”
There was a beat. The sounds of thousands of wagon wheels grinding into dirt and thousands of feet and hooves plodding forward, the call and response of soldiers, the chatter of penitents—all of it was like a low hum compared to the heavy silence between us after I had said his name for the first time.
“Ah,” he finally spoke, and there was a scrape in his voice. “I have earned the having of my name in your mouth.”
I repeated his name, a plea for his promise, for his discretion.
He made ahmmnoise, cleared his throat and, with a smile, asked, “May I attribute this to your pretty, sated song in the alley? You cry so prettily when you come, midwife. Perhaps next I’ll hear my name in that song.”
Had I not been standing in the doorway of an ugly truth, I would have blushed, but I asked, “Do I have your discretion, salt man?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him go from relaxed to alert. “Yes.”
I sidled a bit closer and looked up into his eye, surprising us both. Our arms grazed. And though his right hand had clutched and stroked my sex a week prior, his hips lustily digging into my rear, his mouth on my neck, this brush of our arms and sides seemed twice as intimate.
I swallowed and said, in the lowest voice I could muster, “The priest, Starling, the lord’s son, the older one, and the army’s captain are in collusion. There is a plot to kill me by Skow. I had just escaped them when you found me.”
Reed asked me a handful of questions—short, direct, meant to pinpoint the facts of this terrible thing—and I gave him a complete account of all that had happened, even my using fire magic. Then he, having made me recount both attempts on my life and havingascertained what he needed, reached a hand up to his jaw and manually moved it back and forth, making an audible cracking noise.
“Gods,” I exclaimed. “You’re going to crack your own skull.”
“No,” he replied, a sneer in the word. “You’regoing to crack my own skull, Robbie. I’m going to break my teeth into fragments because of you and your secrets. You may not be a piss-poor criminal, but you’re a shit survivor.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Who experiences a threat on their life and tells no one?”
“I told Ilsit!”
“Because you had to. You drive memad, woman. In all of your worries of the world around you, do you ever consider yourself?”
He was incensed. He may have been a man of repose, always lackadaisical with his polite disinterest, but with his cracking jaw, clenched fist, and the least bit of gravel in his paced speech, I could tell he was livid with me.
“Why are you so angry?” I ventured.
He breathed in deeply through his nose, shutting his eye and wincing, which deepened the lines on his face. When he answered me, the derision in his low-pitched voice was venomous. “You mean aside from the reason I just stated in regards to your wildly lacking in judgment? I can provide two more reasons. Firstly, I’ve been walking around with a hard prick for a week, no matter how much I jerk myself, because of your radiance in the night with your wet hair—and now what I know was complete indifference to your own death. I thought you were merely proud of your most recent conquest, likely having just brought some poor man to his knees in the woods by the river, cruelly ruining him for any other woman. And then your—your littlenoisesin the alley? I’ve been hearing nothing else in my ears for days.”
The blush I had resisted at his sayingYou cry so prettily when you come, midwifefinally blossomed over every bit of skin I had exposed.
Reed was still speaking. “And secondly, I have kept away from you for ten days because I wanted to prove to myself that I was notentirely lost to this damnable, inconvenient lust that not only binds me like a captive but unleashes me like an animal from a cage. I am frenzied, confused, pestered, bothered, andunwellbecause of how much I want you. You are a distraction. But I come to find out, you were being stalked and nearly killed during this time.”
