I made a small sound in the back of my throat.
“The bond does not complete without your consent in writing,” he said. The breath of the words moved on the bridge of my nose. “It is the law of the magic, dove. It is also my law. I told you this last night and I meant it last night.”
The gloved hand at the back of my skull tightened by a fraction that was not a fraction.
“I will not take a single thing from you in this gallery,” he said, “that I cannot keep.”
“I don’t want you careful,” I said.
The words came up out of me without the small old apparatus in front of them. No sort of. No I think. No qualifier.
“I want the bare hand,” I said. The sentence opened on its own. “I do not want you careful with me. I want—I want what you didn’t come to me with last night.”
I did not apologize for telling him. The not-apologizing took the shape, in my chest, of a small private opening, the kind a door does when it has at last been opened from the right side.
He closed his eyes against it.
The pale gold along his cheekbone deepened by a single shade. The shimmer held.
“Yes,” he said. “I know, dove. I know.”
He pulled me, then, against the front of him.
He did it with the gloved hand. The right stayed at his side. He brought his hand from the back of my skull down along the line of my spine and curved his arm at the small of my back, and he pulled me against him, and I felt—through the dark soft cloth of his coat, against the bone of my hip, along the long held line of his thigh—exactly what the discipline was costing him.
He was hard.
He was hard the long full length of him, hard against my hip, hard with the slow heavy heat I had felt on the wire last night when the bare palm had closed around something that had not been my instep. I felt it. He let me feel it. He did not move into me. He did not, with the gloved hand at the small of my back, do the small old motion a man would have done in any room I had ever been in, the use of the press to take. He held me there. He let me know, against the bone of my hip, that the not-taking was a thing he was choosing in real time, with the body that wanted to be doing the opposite of choosing.
It was, the way the not-reaching had been in the gallery, the most erotic thing in the room.
“Will you sign?” he asked.
His mouth was at my hair. The voice was low—impossibly low. The breath of the question moved at the part along the crown of my head.
“Tell me you will sign,” he said. “Tell me three times, Rachel. The bond will hold a yes said three times. I want the bond to have it.”
I lifted my face.
“Yes,” I said.
It cracked. It cracked the way survive had cracked. The fissure came across the s and the rest of the word carried the load over it.
The pale gold along his cheekbone took a deeper note.
“Yes,” I said.
The second one came out steadier. There was no fissure in it. The voice that gave it was the voice that had said the speech in the gallery, the thinner surer voice, the one with the apparatus off it.
He did not move. The gloved hand at the small of my back held.
I drew a breath.
I gave him the third one.
“Yes,” I said.
The sigils along the inside of my left forearm flared.
