“Jae…”
“She is amazing, grounded, perceptive, emotionally aware, and she showed me how to shift the moment.” He pressed a kiss to her temple, her hair slipping over his cheek with a soft slide. "Not even the guys know that stuff?" he said, his voice hushed.
"I need to know something else," she said, her fingers tracing the chakana on his ribs. "Last night...was it just the energy? The mountain? The font? Was I really free to choose?"
He considered his answer carefully, resisting the urge to make a joke, to deflect, to keep things light. This was what she needed from him, depth.
"You were always free to choose, Killa," he said finally, his voice low and serious. "The rest was just...amplification. A cosmic sound system for what was already playing between us. That’s why it matters."
A tear escaped and traced a path down her cheek. He caught it with his thumb, his heart aching with a tenderness so intense it almost overwhelmed him.
"I'm not going anywhere," he promised, his voice thick with emotion. "I’m in. Figure out what you want to do with that."
She nodded, her lips curving into a watery smile. "That sounds smart aleck enough for me to think about retribution."
“Bring your A-game, woman. I know how to move, but you’re teaching me how to be an immovable object.”
Her eyes flashed as she reached down, cupped him, and squeezed. He closed his eyes, his hips moving, thrusting his dick into her hand. “I understand that language, babe, and it doesn’t play like retribution. If you need to spank me…,” he said on a ragged whisper.
She didn’t smile, but her eyes danced. “Don’t tempt me with a good time.”
He closed the distance between them, laughter slipping out, sealing their promise with a kiss that was everything they were, passionate and tender, fierce and gentle, a collision of past and present that somehow felt like the beginning of everything.
Flash held her and the world came back into focus one detail at a time, the soft blanket comfortable under his calf, the cold air on his sweaty back, the small carved birds along the headboard he hadn't noticed before, her weight a living warmth he wanted to keep on his chest for the rest of his natural life. His heart was still going hard, but it was his own heart again, not the house's, not the cosmos beating through him, and he was grateful for that. He was something else, too, something he didn't want tolook at directly, a snag in the smooth fabric of what should have been the best moment of his life.
It had built with discernible pressure. He'd had operators describe to him the half second before a charge goes off, the way the air leans in, and it had been like that. The whole house leaned in, her skin going to gold under his hands like she was turning into the thing she was always meant to be. He'd known, the way Fly knew things, the way his eagle knew the wind before the wind committed, that they had been one breath from the thing they'd come halfway around the world to do. The font in her body cracked open at the edges. Then it had closed, the gold drained out of her, the bright searing point pulled back out of reach. Instead, he was lost in her chasing pleasure with a ferocity that he'd matched because he loved her and following her was the only language he had. They'd both come hard and true, and none of that had been false, and yet the door they'd almost opened had shut, and she had closed it.
He turned his face into her hair and breathed her in, the hot dry note of her and the dark metal under it that he'd never smelled on another living person. He made the choice he always made, which was to move them forward past the snag before it could catch and hold.
"Hey," he said softly, his hand stroking up the line of her spine over the wings inked there. "That was…I don't have a word. There isn't a word."
She huffed something that was almost a laugh against his throat. "You always have a word."
"You broke me. First time for everything." He kissed the top of her head, kept his voice light, kept it moving. "The mountain sang for us, babe. Your old blood woke up. We did something real here. We're closer than we've ever been." He believed it as he said it, mostly, and he needed her to believe it. He sensed she was skeptical, her body going from welded to merely present, thesubtle gathering of a woman reassembling her walls one stone at a time while still in his arms.
She lifted her head and looked at him, and her eyes had gone back to the gold and orange he could fall into, the human fire, the flicker in them he'd never been able to name and had given up trying to. Something moved behind them that she didn't say. He waited for it, gave her the opening, the way he always did. She looked at him for a long count, the way she'd looked at him on the couch when she decided the terms of her surrender, and then she did the thing she did, took the silence back and made it hers.
"You're already managing it," she said. There was no heat in it. She traced the chakana on his ribs with one finger, not quite meeting his eyes now. "It didn't finish, Jae. You felt it. Whatever that was, it started, then stopped, and you're already wrapping it in a bow and telling me we're closer."
"We are closer." He caught her hand and held it flat against his heart. "I'm not wrapping anything. I just don't think we have to solve the whole cosmos in the next thirty seconds while you're still on top of me."
That got the ghost of a smile out of her, and she let him hold her hand against his chest. She'd swallowed that name, what had made her close the door. He didn't ask because asking would have meant requiring her to open it, and that was the one thing he'd never made himself do with anyone, the asking, the standing in front of a person with his own need bare and sayingMeet me here or don't. He gave instead. He gave her warmth, weight, his steady heartbeat under her palm, and his certainty that they'd get the rest of it. He told himself the giving was enough, the way he always told himself, while some quieter part of him that sounded a little like his father asked him whether he was loving her or just refusing to be trapped in the hard part of loving her.
She kissed him once, slow and almost sad, and then she rolled off him, stood, and pulled her robe off the hook by the bed. The moment she cinched the belt, she was Lechuza again, contained, lethal, and watching the room, the lover gone back behind the operator like a knife sliding home.
"They felt it," she said, tying the belt, listening to the house. "All of them. Same as the tower. We need to go down."
He sat up and reached for what was left of his clothes. "Yeah. They felt it."
* * *
By the timehe came down the stone stairs with Lechuza, the energy was banked. Twister sat sideways on the arm of the leather couch with his elbows on his knees, that loose readiness and a glow of solid health and vitality. Easy stood at the cold hearth, his jaw tight, his eyes when they cut to Flash holding a question and an answer at the same time. North had planted himself by the window with the immovability that was his whole gift, and Fly was at the long table with his salvaged maps and his ancestor diagrams. Fly looked up when they came in with his pupils still a little too wide, like a man who'd had his hand on a live wire and let go just in time.
“Now that we’ve all had a really good time,” Easy started. “Tex just called. The Reavers are antsy. He thinks we might have lost the advantage. They’re making noise, and we can’t have them go solo. He, the team, and the Reavers all clocked every part of last night’s…ah…awakening. Tex confirms it, as can we, that the channel is wide open.”
"Give them the Eyrie," Lechuza said, before any of them could say anything, and she crossed to the table and stood over Fly's papers with her arms folded, all business. "What we have to do will have nothing to do with my home base. Not anymore.They can crawl all over it for a couple of days. Won’t give them a damn thing."
“If the Reavers got your location through the conduit?”
