Page 20 of The Witch They Crave

"No," I admit. "I don't feel it."

Something flickers across his face, quick and raw. "That's the part I can't stand," he says. "That it was only ever me. That I've spent weeks feeling you get further away and you didn't even know there was a rope."

His head dips. Slow. So slow it's almost a dare, all that held-back speed of him poured into moving toward me an inch at a time, giving me every chance in the world to turn my face away. To duck. To get a hand up between us. To remember the hundred good reasons I have to not do this.

I don't do any of them.

I stand there caged between cold stone and colder body with my heart slamming, and I let him come closer, and I hate how much I want him to. When his mouth finally finds mine it's careful. Just for a heartbeat. A question asked against my lips, gentle, like he can't quite believe I'm letting him ask it.

Then I lean up into him–question answered–and he stops being careful at all.

He kisses like the rest of him moves. All at once. No half measures. A thing that's been chained up too long finally coming off its leash. The hand on the wall stays where it is, but the other one comes up and finds my jaw, my throat, curves around the back of my neck and tips my head exactly where he wants it, and I let him have it, I let him take, because for the first time in two weeks there is a feeling in my body that isn't grief and I am so starved for it I could weep.

Heat pours down through the middle of me, molten, that pull that's lived under my sternum since the day I met him going taut and singing and finally, finally fed. I make a sound against his mouth I will deny with my dying breath. He answers it low in his chest, a rough broken thing, and it lands somewhere deep and old in me and pulls. My fists are knotted in his shirt. I don't remember reaching for him. I don't remember deciding any of this. I'm just here, held up between the wall and the wanting, kissing a dangerous thing in the dark like it's the last warm thing left in the world.

And maybe it is. Maybe that's the whole terrible truth of it. Down here there's stone and grey light and a chip in my neck and a warden I can't forgive, and there's this—his mouth and his hands and the way he's shaking with how much he's holding back—and I don't want it to stop. God help me. I don't want it to stop.

Then his teeth catch my lower lip.

A graze. A warning, not a wound—sharp enough that I gasp, careful enough that he doesn't break the skin, and he holds there a beat with my lip caught between his teeth and I feel how badly he wants to, the whole trembling restraint of it.

"Let me," he breathes against my mouth. Not a question. An order that comes out cracked down the middle. "Take my blood again, Hex. If you won't let me get you out and you won't let me take anything else, then let me have this. Let me feel you on the other end of the rope. One drink. That's all I'm asking. Just—don't make me be the only one holding it."

Heat floods me, stupid and total, and my mouth is already parting, my whole body leaning up into the ask—

Footsteps on the stairs.

Even. Unhurried. Home too soon.

Kage goes still against me. His eyes come open, and for a second they stay on me—reading my face, my parted mouth, the half second I hung on the edge of saying yes.

From the common room, the footsteps stop. A silence. Aamon's found Zeva—crumpled on the stone by the slab where Kage left her—and I feel the exact moment the silence changes, goes sharp, goes dangerous.

Then he's in my doorway.

I don't see him arrive. One breath the doorway's empty and the next it's full of him, and Aamon takes in the room all at once—me caged against the wall with my fists knotted in another man's shirt and my mouth swollen from his, Kage's body pinning mine, Kage's blood a breath from my lips where he already bit his own lip. Something moves across Aamon’s face and then leaves it entirely, wiped clean, and that's worse than any expression could be. The cold that pours off him fills the little room like water.

"Step away from her." His voice is very quiet. "Now."

Kage doesn't move. He doesn't even turn his head. He keeps his eyes on me a heartbeat longer, that storm-blue dare, before he finally rolls his shoulders off the wall and looks toward the doorway with a slow grin that doesn't reach anything.

"Or what, warden?"

Chapter 6

"Or what, warden?" Kage repeats the question.

Kage says it lazy, still half against me, like the thing is of no concern to him at all. He peels off the wall and turns. He never seems to move at the speed a body should—there's a beat of stillness and then he's simply facing a new direction, a half-step in front of me, between me and Aamon without appearing to have crossed the distance.

"Go on," he says. "You've got the speech loaded. Step away, hands where I can see them, respect the parameters." The grin bares too many teeth. "You want to read me the rules, or you want to say the thing that's got your jaw wired that tight?"

"You put your hands on a council prisoner." Aamon hasn't moved at all. That's his tell, the one I learned in a month of training rooms—the stiller he goes, the closer he is to something. His voice drops low and even, which from him is worse than a shout. "You put down a council enforcer. You don’t belong down here. Any one of those ends you."

"That's the rulebook." Kage takes a step closer to Aamon. The air pulls tight. "I want the part you're not reading off the card. You're shaking, warden. Look at your hand." A slow grin. "All this over a prisoner. Must be a hell of a job."

A muscle beneath Aamon’s left eye jumps. I swear he seems to swell in size as he sucks in a sharp breath.

"Both of you knock it off," I say. Neither of them so much as looks at me.