He was watching me now.
I was cross-legged on the floor beside the low table in his study, going through a stack of manifests from the latest smuggling routes, making notes in the margins with a stylus. Completely ordinary. Except that I was naked, because he’d asked me to be, and there was a jeweled tail seated deep in my bottom, because he’d put it there this morning without a word of explanation beyondhold still and take it, little pet.
I’d held still.
I hadn’t even argued.
That was the part I kept turning over. Weeks ago, I would have bitten him for less. Now I just held still, felt my whole body go liquid and warm, and tried to look like I was thinking about shipping manifests when I absolutely was not.
“You haven’t turned that page in eleven minutes,” Bane said.
I didn’t look up. “I’m thinking.”
“Mm.” The sound of him setting down his glass. Footsteps across the carpet, closer and closer still, until he was standing just behind me. His hand settled on the top of my head, heavy and warm. “Come here.”
He didn’t move his hand. He didn’t have to. I set the stylus down, turned toward him, and when his fingers curled just slightly, beckoning me to him, I went onto my hands and knees, facing him where he’d settled into his chair. He looked down at me with those feline eyes, soft and dark and entirely too knowing as I slowly crawled to him.
“Tell me what you need tonight,” he said.
“I don’t—” I stopped. Started again. “I don’t know how to say it.”
“Then show me.” He reached out, traced one finger along my jaw, tilted my chin up. “I’ve got time.”
The thing about Bane was that he never rushed. I’d noticed it early, starting from the way he’d waited in the market for me to take that first step toward him and the way he’d held still while I raged and fought and tested every edge he had. He always had time. He always waited. And that particular quality of patience broke me open in ways that shouting and struggling never had.
I lowered myself onto my hands.
The carpet was soft under my palms. I kept my eyes up, watching his face, daring him to make it strange or clinical or anything other than what it felt like, which was right. Which was the most frightening thing I’d ever admitted to myself.
His expression didn’t change except to warm.
“Good girl,” he said softly. Just that. And my entire chest caved in.
He leaned forward and petted me, that was the only word for it, the slow stroke of his broad hand from the crown of my head down to the nape of my neck, again and again, and I felt the tension I carried everywhere begin to unspool. My shoulders dropped. My jaw unclenched. Some knot behind my sternum that had been there so long I’d forgotten it existed quietly came loose.
“You’ve been carrying something all day, little pet. Tell me what it is.” he said.
“The Kessler route,” I said to the carpet. “I think there’s a problem with the third checkpoint.”
“That’s work.” His hand didn’t stop moving. “What else?”
I didn’t answer for a long moment. The plug was a warm, constant pressure. The room was quiet. His hand kept moving.
“I keep waiting to mind this,” I finally said.
“And?”
“And I don’t.” My voice came out smaller than I intended. “I keep waiting to find the part of me that minds and it’s just not there.”
He was quiet. Then he slid off the chair, down onto the floor with me, and gathered me against his chest and held me there, his chin resting on top of my head. My hands fisted in the fabric of his shirt. He was warm and solid and smelled like whiskey and cedar and something that had just started to mean safe in a way nothing else in my life had.
“It doesn’t have to be complicated,” he said quietly. “You’re mine and I take care of what’s mine. That’s all this is.”
“That’s a lot,” I said.
I felt him smile. “Yes,” he agreed. “It is.”
He was quiet for a moment, his hand stroking slowly down my spine and back up. “I have something for you.”
