Dear, God! NO!

Not a Monster

The camp settled into its nighttime rhythms. Tomas curled beside Rorik's wolf near the inner fire pit, Mariae took the first watch on the southern wall, and Rorik's snoring drifted through the keep like a low tide. I sat on the stone ledge with Sterling's note still pressed between my fingers, reading and rereading the word patience as though it might rearrange itself into something more satisfying.

Victor stood at the entrance to the main hall, one shoulder against the doorframe, watching the dark. He had barely spoken during the meal. Not unusual, but his silence tonight had a different texture, heavier, turned inward.

"You should sleep," I said.

"I don't sleep much."

"I've noticed." I folded Sterling's note and tucked it into my belt. "You stand at that doorway like you expect the forest to swallow us whole."

"It might."

I stood and crossed the hall toward him. The firelight from the inner pit barely reached this far, and his features were reduced to edges, the sharp jaw, the heavy brow, the faint luminous glow of his eyes. He didn't move as I approached, but I felt the shift in him, the tension coiling through his shoulders like rope being wound too tight.

"Earlier," I said. "You told me you hadn't shown me everything."

His jaw worked. "I shouldn't have said that."

"But you did. And now I want to know."

He turned his head to look at me directly, and in the low light his pupils were wide, nearly round, swallowing the amber. "Why?"

"Because you think whatever it is disqualifies you from being touched. And I'd like to decide that for myself."

The silence stretched. Outside, an owl called. Mariae's footsteps traced a slow circuit on the wall.

Victor pushed off the doorframe and walked past me, deeper into the keep, toward the small chamber at the rear that served as his quarters. It had been a storage room once, stone walls, a narrow window choked with ivy, a pallet of furs and hides on the floor. I had never entered it. He stopped at the threshold and waited.

I followed.

Inside, moonlight fell through the ivy in thin silver threads. Victor stood in the center of the room with his back to me. His shoulders rose and fell with a breath that seemed to cost him something.

Then he pulled his shirt over his head.

I had seen him without a shirt once, briefly, after the training session when I tore the fabric. But that had been daylight and distance and my own overwhelmed retreat. This was close. This was deliberate.

His back was a map of survival. Scars I had glimpsed before, long pale lines where blades had caught him, the puckered round mark of a crossbow bolt beneath his left shoulder blade. But what he was showing me, what he had hidden, was the sheer scale of him. His torso was dense with muscle that looked carved from the same granite as the keep's walls, layered and heavy, built not from vanity but from years of running, hunting, and fighting alone. His arms were thick as young trees, his shoulders so broad they seemed to fill the small chamber.

He turned slowly.

His chest bore the worst of the scarring, three long parallel lines raking from his collarbone to his hip where claws or blades had torn through him. Beneath them, more muscle, hard and defined, his stomach ridged, his waist narrower than his frame suggested. He was enormous and sculpted and utterly, completely human.

"This is what eleven years in the forest makes," he said, low and rough. "I am twice the size of any man in Carlin's court. My hands..." He held them up, the thick fingers, the sharp nails that looked like claws. "People see me and they see something wrong. Something feral. My own mother called me cursed."

I looked at him. At every scar, every ridge of muscle, every inch of skin that firelight and moonlight fought over. I saw a man who had been shaped by loneliness into something powerful and then taught to be ashamed of the shape.

"Victor."

"You don't have to—"

"Shut up."

I closed the distance between us. My hands found his chest, palms flat against the three long scars, and he flinched as though I had pressed a blade there instead of skin. His breath hitched audibly. Beneath my hands his heart hammered, hard, fast, terrified.

"There is nothing wrong with you," I said.

His eyes searched mine. The amber was liquid, unguarded, and for the first time since I had known him, Victor looked young. Not the ageless predator of the deep pines. A man who had been alone so long he had forgotten what it felt like to be seen without flinching.

"Lila." His voice broke on my name. His hands came up and hovered at my waist, not touching, trembling with the effort of restraint. "I don't know how to be gentle. I am afraid I will—"

"Then don't be gentle."

I pulled the linen tunic over my head. The cool air hit my bare skin and I felt his gaze land on me like heat from an open furnace. I wore nothing beneath the tunic except the bandages on my wrists, and those I began to unwrap, slowly, deliberately, letting the linen fall in pale spirals to the stone floor until my wrists were bare, the healing skin pink and tender.

"These are what Carlin gave me," I said. "Chains and cold and a dark room. You broke the chains. You carried me out." I placed my hands back on his chest. "Now stop telling me what you are and show me."

His control shattered.

His hands seized my waist and lifted me off the floor as though I weighed nothing. My legs wrapped around him instinctively, and the sensation of all that warm, hard skin pressed against mine sent a shock through my entire body. His mouth found my throat, not the teasing graze of fangs from the cell but open, desperate, his lips dragging across my pulse point while a sound came from him that was barely human, a low rumbling groan that vibrated through his chest and into mine.

I pulled his head up and kissed him. Not the frantic collision from the cell beneath the willow but something slower, deeper, my fingers threading into the wild tangle of his gold hair while his arms tightened around me. He tasted like pine smoke and something sweeter underneath, and when my tongue slid against his I felt the elongated points of his canines and didn't care, pressing closer, wanting the sharpness, wanting every part of him that the world had called monstrous.

He lowered me onto the pallet of furs and followed me down, his body covering mine the way it had when he pinned me in the hall, but this time there was no restraint, no lesson. His weight settled over me and I arched into it, craving the pressure, the warmth, the undeniable reality of him. His mouth moved from my lips to my jaw, my collarbone, the hollow of my throat, each kiss unhurried and thorough, as though he were memorizing a language he had forgotten.

"Tell me to stop," he murmured against my sternum, his breath ragged. "Tell me and I will."

"Don't you dare."

His hands mapped my body with that same searching deliberation, rough palms sliding up my ribs, thumbs tracing beneath my breasts, and when he finally cupped them I gasped and his pupils blew wide. He lowered his mouth and I stopped thinking entirely.

He buried his gruff, heavily scarred face directly into my core. I gasped as his wet tongue lapped up the heavy cream of my arousal. He devoured me like a starving beast, his mouth applying a furious, agonizing suction to my swollen c**t that made my vision completely white out. His thumb continuously lashed against my hood, grinding against my slick nerves as my hips bucked frantically against his face. I was begging him, sobbing his name, entirely desperate for the massive, rock-hard length of his erection that pressed heavily against his trousers.

What followed was not gentle. It was not rough either. It was something between, desperate and careful by turns, his body moving against mine with a rhythm that felt instinctive, ancient, as though this were the one language he had never lost. I dragged my nails down his scarred back and he growled into my shoulder. He lifted my hips with one hand and I cried out and he went still, checking, always checking, until I pulled him closer and whispered "more."

When he finally pressed inside me I felt the breath leave both of us simultaneously. He held perfectly still for a heartbeat, forehead against mine, eyes open, pupils blazing amber in the dark. Then he moved and the world narrowed to the two of us, to the sound of fur shifting beneath us and the slap of skin and the low broken sounds we made together. I wrapped my arms around his neck and held on while the pleasure built in long, rolling waves, and when it crested I pressed my face into his throat and let it take me.

He followed moments later, a shudder running through his entire massive frame, his arms locked around me as though the forest might try to reclaim him. The sound he made was quiet, almost wounded, and unbearably human.

We lay tangled afterward, his chest heaving, my cheek against the ridge of his collarbone. His hand moved through my hair in slow, clumsy strokes. Neither of us spoke. The moonlight had shifted, the ivy-filtered silver now falling across his arm where it lay across my waist, and I traced one of his scars with my fingertip.

"Not a monster," I whispered.

His arm tightened. He pressed his lips to the crown of my head and said nothing, but I felt his answer in the way he held me, careful, fierce, as though I were the first warm thing he had touched in eleven years and he did not know how to let go.