Her body tightened around his with impending release, and he bit the curve of her neck with a raw moan, hauling her closer to take her more deeply. A fierce kiss, and his hand on her throat cut off her breath. She flew over the edge with a scream. Her body twisted, scattered, inundated with fierce wave upon wave of pleasure. A base, thick sound tore from him as he spasmed, thrusting in deep, desperate strokes as wet heat filled her.
“Fuck, take it all, Sarai.” He rumbled a string of filthy praise, shuddering into her, rubbing his stubbled cheek against her hair. His heartbeat slammed against her skin. Boneless, she breathed to it, protesting when he withdrew to clean her.
A generous lover, he was quiet with his affection and had only said that he loved her once, after the Unraveling. Yet, she felt it in the brush of his lips against her temples and the arms that always banded around her in sleep.
“That,” she pronounced, “was a first. I didn’t think the extremely proper Magus Supreme Kadra ravished women before nightfall.”
He raised an eyebrow drolly, looking more relaxed than he had in months. “I asked you to live with me after knowing you for a day. Propriety isn’t one of my strengths.”
She turned into his neck with a laugh. “Are you certain you aren’t needed to manage the storm?”
“No, this is the last of it. Let’s take a few hours.”
“Do you think the country’ll be standing when we wake?”
“There’s a fair chance.” He cradled her and loosed a gravelly sigh of contentment when she wrapped an arm around his waist.
She allowed the tension and fear of the past few months to slip through her fingers like nightmares. And when sleep found their entwined figures within Aoran Tower, they succumbed peacefully.
Eleven years ago, a month before escape
In truth, he did not understand why he had to kill the man.
Blood slid down the walls of the stone cell where Noceo had just forced one of their former workers to saw off his own wrist. The man screamed at the mangled stump, pleading for mercy.
It was a foolish crime to skim from Clan Kader’s warehouse stock of blazeleaf rolls and attempt to distribute it on Komis’s streets for cheaper prices than the Clan’s. It was even more foolish to do so while bragging that Clanlord Clevsin was too much in his dotage to find out.
The man had likely expected that his fellow workers and the street rats to whom he’d sold would keep his secret. But solidarity among the captive and the impoverished was a pretty myth. Everyone stood equal before greed. The man had been turned in by both groups within a week.
Still Drenevan believed the loss of a hand sufficed, in addition to the offending tongue if Clevsin were so inclined. To splay his entrails over the warehouse seemed unnecessarily taxing.
Yet, here he was.
“Get him upstairs,” Clevsin coolly ordered Noceo. “Make them all watch.”
Inclining his head, Noceo directed his voice to Coerce the man, who lurched to his feet and sped down the short hallway toward the stairs that would take him from the holding pen underneath the Clan’s blazeleafwarehouses to the aboveground production facility where leaves were cured, sorted, and rolled. His compatriots in the other cells were already dead. No one lasted long enough to stay there indefinitely.
Dalvia wrung her hands. “Clanlord, do you wish for me to tidy the cell?” She indicated the bloodstained walls with a trembling finger.
Drenevan exchanged a glance with Noceo. The girl kept giving herself away.
The grooves bordering Clevsin’s lips pulled back in a chilling smile. “Trying to hide again, Clandaughter?”
She flinched. “No, Clanlord.”
He tsked. “Such unbecoming behavior in a woman. Lying.” His smile held a black victory. “You will present yourself afterward for punishment.”
Dalvia’s features crumbled for a hair’s breadth before she bowed and tottered upstairs. Drenevan’s back throbbed as he followed her unsteady gait. The oppressive damp down here was hell on his bones. By the way his brother was subtly rotating his wrists, his injuries were acting up too.
The scent of blazeleaf struck in a rush as he emerged on the landing. Theirs was the largest illegal warehouse in the country with over eight hundred workers, all forcibly confined to the compound, with no hope but to toil. He passed workers sorting blazeleaf by size, color, and quality into steel pans. Others cut and moistened the leaves in preparation for steaming to make them more pliable.
“Anapproximation of life,” Clevsin had informed him while breaking his spine again last week for failing to bring in more workers. “Someday, you will hold all power here, Drenevan. But it is not yet that day.”
It never would be if his plan with Noceo succeeded.
They walked past the steel threshing pans for a final sort of the leaves, then the re-drying ovens that set the leaves’ moisture content close to the necessary twelve percent, and the cylindrical irons that pressed and rolled the cured product into wrappings of flavorless bemizan leaves for smoking.
The warehouse exit loomed ahead, wagon tracks gouged into the snow beyond the parted doors. A last glimpse of unattainable freedom. Drenevan’s victim walked with stuttered desperation to the stage of his demise and halted at a word from Noceo. His brother turned to the crowd, forehead wrinkled in strain as he yelled at full Coercive strength.
