Page 2 of Coiled By the Naga

My rut was days out when they brought her up the water. By the time she stands up in the bow it is on me, full.

I read her from the top of the stair before I tell myself to. The pits don’t wait for permission. They take her off the wind and hand me a body, warm, the warmth of a woman a few days short of fertile, and laid under it, where she doesn’t know it lives yet, want. She thinks she is only angry. She is angry, and the anger sits on top of the rest the way heat sits on top of a banked fire. I get all of it. I get more than I have a right to and no way to give it back.

Then the pits hand me the thing they were never built to hand me. I have read soldiers and couriers and the omegas Central sends through this post on their way somewhere better. Years of bodies off the air. None came back to me as this. It comes up from under rank and thought and says one word with my whole length behind it. Mine. That if I closed my coils on her they would close on the one body in the world they were shaped to hold.

I have held this post through three winters, two surges of the rot, and the burial of half the soldiers I started with. I have never once wanted a thing I could not set back down. I cannot find the place where this sets down. That is the fear on the stair. Not the wanting. Every alpha lives with wanting. The fear is that there is no shelf in me high enough to put her on.

She thinks the scent is a thing I am doing on purpose, a hand I could take off her. It isn’t. In rut it comes off me harder, a flood instead of a seep, and her body drinks it and answers, and the answer is not a choice she made. I stand on my own dock watching a woman go wet for me because my body is ordering hers to, and she knows it is happening, and the knowing does nothing to stop it. I have wanted to be wanted for most of my life. I did not think it would arrive looking like something I am doing to her without her leave.

I take her up, give her a room, and leave before the loops can decide the matter for me.

Then I do the thing a commander does. I take down the intake form and fill in every line. Her name. Her settlement. The debt that bought her. The day she came onto my dock. I leave no blank to handle when my blood cools, and I do not slide it into a drawer to make lawful later what I mean to do tonight. I will not be a thing that takes a woman and then writes the paper to cover it.

On the commander’s line I set down that I have run the match and the match holds, and I sign under it. The courier carries it to Central, and Central does as Central does, and none of it touches what my body settled on the stair. But the page will be true. It is the last clean thing I get to keep.

The bell turns the middle watch and I walk the wall, because the wall is stone and the wind is clean and a quarter of my head is two corridors down behind a door with no bolt. That is the cost of her, and tonight I feel it worse than I want to admit. A commander in rut is a slow commander. My kind run hot and fast, and the rut banks the whole fire one way, and the way is her.

I check the east watch, the drop to the water, the place on the north face where the rot has begun to eat the cliff from the land, and every read takes me a beat longer than it should. On this coast a beat is the room between holding the line and digging graves.

We are a forward post. The rot is at our front and the sea is at our back, and the sea is the quiet side, quiet the way a thing is quiet only because no one has yet chosen to come across it. I have always watched the land. Tonight my eyes keep going to the water, and it has been too long since anyone on this wall gave it a hard look.

I tell myself I will see to it tomorrow. It is a lie before I finish thinking it. I come down off the wall and my length carries me toward her door and I do not pretend I am going anywhere else. Her scent is under the gap at the floor, hers now, not just mine handed back, the two of them braided in a way that empties my skull. She is awake on the other side of the stone. The pits read her through it, warm and climbing.

I could leave her be. I have the choice she does not. I am not going to use it. I am going to open that door. I am going to fill that small stone room with my scent until she cannot tell her own wanting from the wanting I put in her. I am going to take her apart and listen to her beg for it. And I am going to do all of it knowing every breath of it is mine to answer for.

I open the door.

AUDE

The door opens with no knock and I am off the bed and on my feet before I decide to move, because my body knew he was on the stairs before my ears did. That is the first thing he has taken from me tonight. The warning my own skin used to give only me, it gives him now too.

“Get out,” I tell him.

He comes in. The coils pour through the door behind the man’s half of him and keep coming, more of him than the room should hold, and he shuts the door with the last of his length and leans the bulk of himself against it. The small stone room fills with the wet violet weight of him. He doesn’t say anything. He looks at me the way I look at water I am about to work, reading the set of it, and the pits down the side of his face burn up bright.

Then he opens the scent up, and I learn he was holding it closed.

What hit me on the dock was the seep of him. This is the flood. It fills the room and there is no arch wide enough to carry it out, and it goes into me through everything that breathes, and my body lights from the inside like a lamp someone else is turning up.

The wet that opened in me on the dock comes back tenfold and runs down the inside of my thigh. My nipples draw up so hard it aches. The wanting climbs out of my belly into my chest and up my throat until I can taste it, and none of it, not one degree, did I light. He is doing it. I can feel him doing it, and knowing the hand on the dial is his does not cool me by a breath. It makes it worse. It makes me clench on nothing and want to weep.

“Stop,” I say, and my voice has gone wrecked already, low and thick, begging for the opposite of the word it’s saying. “Stop doing it. I can feel you doing it.”

“I know you can.” He comes off the door. “That’s the point of it.”

A coil takes my ankle, cool and slick, the wet of him sliding onto my skin, and where it touches the wanting doubles, because the scent is thickest on him and now it is on me. The loop climbs my calf, my knee, and another comes around my waist and lifts, and the floor leaves my feet. I get one hand flat on the scaled chest to push and the push moves nothing, and that does something to me I will be ashamed of for the rest of my life.

He has me off the ground in a cage of muscle that could close and end me, and my body reads being unable to run as the safest thing it has felt since before the debt. It goes soft for him. I hate that it does, and I tip my head back to give him my throat anyway.

“There she is,” he says, low, against my jaw. Not cruel. Worse than cruel. Pleased. “Fight me all you want. Your body already answered.”

“Because you’re making it.”

“Yes.” His tongue drags up the side of my throat, split, the two tips moving apart over my skin, and I make a sound I have never made. “And you’ll beg me anyway. Not because I made you. Because you can’t help it.”

He doesn’t fuck me. I brace for it, and some part of me wants it, the wanting has gone that far, and he doesn’t. He holds me spread in the coils, off the ground, my legs drawn open by two loops under my knees so I could not close them if my life hung on it, and he puts his mouth on me instead.

The man’s mouth at my breast first, the split tongue working one nipple while a scaled thumb rolls the other, the coils holding me dead still so every touch lands with nowhere to flinch to. I am a held thing being learned. He takes his time. The pits read what each touch does to me and he follows it back, mouth and hands returning to whatever made me jerk hardest in the loops, and I am giving him every secret I have without a word, because my body cannot keep one from a creature that reads heat.