Content Warnings & Reader Safety

  This book contains occasional and sometimes graphic sexual content, including sexual assault, coercion, and other dark themes. That includes this chapter.

  If these topics are upsetting or harmful for you, please take care of yourself first. It’s always okay to stop reading or step away.

  From this point forward, I will not be adding individual trigger warnings to chapter notes. Please assume that any chapter may contain intense or disturbing material related to the above.

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  The room was narrower than Lain expected. The cot, the small stove, the neat rows of tools and vials, everything bore the mark of a man who arranged his surroundings carefully. Morgan crossed to the stove and knelt to coax the fire awake. The faint glow cast his wings in uneven shadow along the wall. She could feel the discomfort of carrying them, muscles he’d never used for such things now activated and ringing with pain.

  Lain stayed near the door. She hadn’t realized how hard her heart was beating until the sound of his movements made the silence between them more apparent.

  “You can sit,” he said quietly.

  She didn’t move.

  He braced one hand on the side of the stove and stood. His eyes found her again, and something in him tensed. The Tuning delivered the feeling straight to her, the strain of something pulling at him from inside.

  “You left me,” he said. “In Ivath. You made your choice.”

  “I made the choice that would save the wyrm,” she replied. “You almost killed it. And you almost killed me.”

  The memory rose before either of them had time to brace.

  Lain saw the vaulted hallway. She saw a woman’s silhouette caught in the lamplight – a Veinwright, hair unbound, wings lifted, hands raised in a gesture that carried both love and warning. Siobhan. Then the small figures behind her, two children, one lifting a wooden toy as though it were a shield. Lain felt Morgan’s heart pull toward them, and then the wrenching moment when the world in the memory broke open and the light went out.

  The grief that rushed through him filled her lungs until she had to gasp.

  “She loved you,” Lain whispered.

  Morgan straightened. “Don’t speak of her.”

  “You carry all of it. It’s eating you alive.”

  “Enough.” His voice shook. The tremor moved along the bond, raw and unguarded, and without meaning to, she pressed further into the memory. It had nowhere else to go.

  “You couldn’t save them,” she said.

  “Shut your mouth.”

  She felt it then, his grasping reach into the Veinbond. For an instant his grip on her jaw through her blood was firm and solid, her teeth clenching shut.

  But that other force within her, the thing that was both like and unlike the Tuning, shoved him aside, and he gasped as if she’d struck him.

  “You couldn’t stop it, any of it,” she carried on. “You can’t keep running from –”

  Morgan reached her in a single stride and the slap landed before she could react. The heat of it strobed across her cheek. Her hand flew to her face, trembling as she felt the skin, already swelling.

  The regret inside him broke through a moment later, disordered and brief, like a spark kicked into ash.

  “I warned you,” he said, nearly gasping. “I told you to stop.”

  His hand closed around her arm. The strength in it startled her; he carried her across the room with no effort at all. The cot met the back of her legs and she went down, catching herself on her palms as the frame creaked under her weight.

  Morgan let go and turned his face away, as if the act of holding still might force something dangerous out of him. He paced, boots striking the floor in a measured beat that did nothing to disguise the turmoil vibrating along the bond.

  Lain pressed her sleeve to her cheek. Her heart thudded painfully against her ribs.

  “I know you’re scared,” she said.

  He stopped, back still turned. “You don’t know anything.”

  “You’re terrified,” she went on. “The city is gone. The wyrm is gone. All your planning, all the power you thought belonged to you has vanished. You don’t know what you are without it.”

  He turned, eyes bright in the fire’s low glow.

  “You should be careful what you say to me,” he said.

  “You want me to lie?”

  “I want you to understand what you’re provoking.” He straightened again. “I pulled you from the Spire. I saved you while everything else burned.”

  “Only after you couldn’t kill me.”

  He stiffened. The feathers along his neck and chest rippled like a heaving breath beneath what was left of his torn shirt.

  “You failed,” she said. She didn’t know why she was doing this, but she couldn’t stop. The exhaustion, the heartbreak, his memories flooding her, it all came pouring out. “You failed in ways you don’t know how to face. It’s tearing you apart.”

  He crossed the space between them and braced his hands on either side of her, the cot dipping under his weight. The nearness of him made her breath unsteady; the strength in his arms, the heat of his body, the intensity of his gaze all carried a momentum she could not break.

  “Say that again,” he murmured.

  Lain shook her head. “Morgan, we have to go back.”

  He threw an angry finger in her face. “I’m not going back. You’re mine now. They’ll never take you away from me. I have a plan. I have a mission.”

  “You failed,” she said, quietly. “The wyrm is gone. This is going to kill us both if we don’t do something. We’re too weak –”

  “I am not weak!” He shoved her and she dropped onto her back, her antlers scraping the wall behind her. He clambered onto her, bearing her down with his weight, and at the same time he pushed back against her truth, finding instead a thread of rageful power with which to snare her. When he took her wrists in his, a thread of desire wove itself into his snare. Holding her like made him feel powerful. It was a path for his need to be in control.

  She pushed at him. “Let me up.”

  “No.”

  She brought her knee up and tried to roll, but he parted her legs with his own and bore down. He fostered his desire until it became the wire holding his anger taut within him. He dragged a hand up her leg, his nails digging into her wool as he lifted her robes.

  “Morgan, please don’t.” She tried to steer his feeling, seeking the base of that rope where his fear and sorrow lay, so that he might face it and pace from his wanting.

  “I’ll do as I please, Bellborn.” He shoved against her with his hips. It was painful and he knew it and he reveled in it. His coiling rope of anger and wanting held her fast. She resisted the emotion even as she was gripped by its force.

  Morgan grappled into her robes until his hand met the soft fabric of her underclothes. He tore them down. She shoved him back, lifting his chest off her.

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  “Morgan, you don’t have to do this –”

  “Of course I don’t have to,” he snarled. “I want to.”

  “You don’t.” She pulled up her disgust at the feeling of him pressed against her, her disappointment, and flung it at him. “You don’t.”

  He roared in a fury, huffing as he fought the disgust, his hand up her skirt gripping fast to her wool. She sent him that pain, too, and he growled in frustration. He tore her hand from his chest to pin it above her.

  “Just give in,” he said. He fumbled at his belt, freeing himself.

  “Don’t do this.” Lain fought to maintain some control over his emotions. When his bare skin pressed between her legs, panic burned in her lungs. It was too soon. It was all too soon, after Mallow. “Please, Morgan –”

  He silenced her with his hand, palm covering her mouth, enough to still her voice and hold the shape of the moment exactly where he wanted it.

  “You’ll listen,” he said. “For once.”

  He plunged inside her.

  She didn’t want this, and she wasn’t ready. His hand muffled her painful cry.

  He lifted his hand from her mouth and she gasped. He pressed her wrist to the mattress. She brought out that disgust again, but each time it came forward he moved harder into her, punishing her for her disobedience.

  “You won’t stop me. Not with that. Don’t you understand, Bellborn? Aren’t you listening?”

  She turned her head aside, closed her eyes, and tried to detach herself from him. She imagined herself floating above the world he was in –

  But he persisted. He took her by the antler to turn her face to him. “Look at me. I want you to see me.”

  She clenched her eyes tight. He shoved inside her and she bit down on a cry of pain. He felt it anyway.

  “Open your eyes,” he commanded.

  She did.

  “Do you see me, Bellborn?”

  “Yes,” she cried. “I see you.”

  “Good.”

  His expression shifted, opening in a way that made something inside her twist. The Tuning flooded her again, drawing her deeper into the heavy burden of his broken spirit. Fear, grief, fury, the need to dominate something, anything, to avoid collapsing into the void that had taken the wyrm and the city and every future he had imagined. It emerged as he buried himself inside her, as he buried his teeth into her shoulder. She recalled him telling her to bite him – telling her to draw blood, giving her the satisfaction of choosing to give him control. How different this was, that he would take when she so clearly did not want to give.

  And suddenly she knew the emotions he couldn’t bear. She knew that guilt, the shame, the grief like drowning. He’d suspended himself over it with rage and desire as if such things could save him from the hungry sea below.

  She reached for the only thing she could find in him that wasn’t sharpened to hurt.

  She fumbled for the sensation of his desire, a softer thing threaded against his hatred and want for control. If she could not stop him, she could at least steer the shape of what he took. So she unspooled the desire, brought some of it into herself, to ease the pain, to work her body into a more comfortable space.

  He carried on as if not realizing that her body was relaxing into it, making way for him. As if he didn’t recognize the way he had gentled into something with more care.

  Underneath his need for power over her was a true sensation of pleasure. She massaged this, brought some of it into herself, reflected it back to him.

  He softened further still. He found a rhythm that pleased her and he leaned into it. When something came close to pain he felt that, too, and adjusted away from it. She let her pleasure build as he sought to please her.

  “You see? All you had to do was listen to me.”

  She ignored him that time, leaning elsewhere. She worked down the rope of his anger next, rubbing the threads between her fingers, unwinding them to find the thing they were coiled so harshly about.

  It was grief.

  Grief like a graveyard.

  Grief like a psalm for the dead.

  Inside the heart of every monstrous thing was a graveyard. And once in a while, even monsters must kneel there to pray.

  She eased into the sensation of dew-laden grass, of a stone with a name carved upon it. They did not bury their dead in Ivath; they burned them. But this place in Morgan’s mind was its own sort of lasting beauty, a sorrow reminding.

  “Can you feel this?” he asked, as if he knew what she was doing. “Can you feel me?”

  “Yes.” She brought one hand to the back of his head, and unspooled the grief she’d found within him. “I feel you, Morgan. I feel you.”

  His breath faltered. The muscles in his jaw clenched, then loosened, then clenched again as if the words had struck a place he had not prepared to defend.

  Lain tried to follow the grief beneath the rage, reaching along the bond for the memory of Siobhan’s voice, the shadows of two children, the sound the roost made when it collapsed.

  She placed a hand against a wound he’d spent years refusing to acknowledge.

  “Don’t,” he said, the word rasping out of him. He met her eye as if he’d missed something vital, some change he hadn’t tracked.

  “I see you,” she said. It was nearly a whisper. She held his head in her hands, and nodded when he met her eye, and stroked his thick black hair, so gently. She gave her gentleness to him.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I see you,” she insisted. He panted, sped up, wanting to be angry, wanting to hurt her, but she carried on. “You want me to see you. I see what’s really there. Please, Morgan, I see —”

  He clamped a hand over her mouth.

  “Quiet,” he huffed. “Shut your mouth.”

  But it lacked the force he’d shown before.

  He didn’t stop the taking of her, didn’t slow. He continued his pursuit of her pleasure and his own. He was deeply avoidant, but now there was curiosity mixed in with it all.

  The curiosity was enough. He reached down to the place where she held space for him.

  She brought him to kneel there beside her, in the graveyard where he needed to pray.

  He released her mouth, bringing both hands to her face, and when he met her eyes with those silver ones his brow exposed an emotion she’d never seen before.

  “What is this?” Morgan huffed, more desperately now.

  “I feel you,” she repeated, and nodded when his eyes welled. “I feel you. Of course I do. I am you.”

  He shook his head, trying to come to that place of rage again. He brought a hand to her mouth once more, and she thought he would grasp her, silence her. Instead, he ran two fingers gently across her lips, as if pleading for her to kiss him. Those fingers trembled, a shudder of yearning in his heart. When she finally did purse her lips for the skin of his hand, he grasped for that rope of anger once more only to find it unable to bear his weight.

  He was guided instead to Lain’s growing pleasure, and his own.

  Soon she would take him to his grief. But not now.

  She let the pleasure rise. She let him find his own joy there, let him disrobe of his confusion, and this time when his hands found her they were soft, loving on her body, seeking to please her. She nodded.

  “Yes.” She brought her hands to the back of his neck and brought her thighs about him. To open for him. “Yes. Like that.”

  Her tail coiled about his leg.

  He conjured no more words. He pressed his sweat-slicked forehead to her own and whimpered and she kept nodding, kept encouraging him to find some joy in this. To find anything that wasn’t the thirst for dominance.

  They rose together. He angled for her pleasure first. Her climax was mottled by concentration. She held fast to him as her back curved and the heat at her core expanded, pulsed, then began its gentle descent around Morgan.

  In a few hurried thrusts, he finally emptied himself inside her. He said her name, once, softly, as if the act had surprised him, as if he’d never known it before now. Lain.

  She nodded. She held him, and Morgan collapsed upon her.

  He caught his breath in a feeling akin to shock. Lain drew her hands gently down the back of his shirt until he rolled away from her.

  She thought that would be the end of their connection, but instead of leaving he lay his head against her chest and coiled an arm around her middle in the waning heat. In a spurt of confused affection he kissed the scales of her collarbone, once, then twice, more slowly, an apology. He pressed his nose to the fabric of her dress, wanting for the first time to know her smell. To identify it. To remember it.

  He didn’t say anything. But she knew what he was feeling.

  After a time he stood and pulled off what remained of his sweat-soaked shirt, finally choosing to tear it to free it from where his wings had emerged through it. He crossed the room in the growing darkness. When he returned, it was to bring her water.

  “You’re thirsty,” he said.

  She drank several deep and satisfying swallows. When her thirst was slaked, he brushed a trickle of water from her mouth with a thumb. She reached up, and held his hand there, and met his eye until he glanced aside in shame.

  After a moment, he took her skirt gingerly and pulled the fabric down. To cover her.

  She nodded. That was the right direction. She put a hand out for him. He climbed into the bed and lay in her arms once more.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  It came through the bond with embarrassed surprise, a strange loosening in him.

  She wondered if he’d ever thanked anyone in his life.

  Her body ached in ways she did not have words for. Later, she would have to find them. For now, she held him anyway. She stroked Morgan’s hair and they fell into wordlessness. As she drifted off to sleep, sharing his muddled emotions, she wondered how she might use this. If with the opening of his center she might conjure a way to make him a different kind of monster.