“What do you need?” he whispered.

She said tiredly, “I could use a hug. And you’re the only person around who can give me one. So put out, will you?”

It shocked him immensely, that she would be so open and frank enough to say it. It shocked him even further to discover he could really use a hug too.

He rolled back and reached for her, and she came into his arms, hugging him back. “I’m sorry about the bad timing,” he whispered. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Shut up,” she said. “I’m so mad at you I can hardly think straight.”

“Of course you are.” He sighed. Even their conversations were twisted. “You’re not crippled. You’re just not healed yet.”

Her chest convulsed silently. He never would have known if he hadn’t been holding her. “The joint is crushed. I felt it.”

“You’re going to fly again.” He pushed all the conviction he had into the words. “You will, Aryal. Healers can do miraculous things with joint repair these days. If all else fails, there’s joint replacement. You’re going to fly again. I swear it.”

He knew he might not be right, but she didn’t need that kind of honesty right now. She needed optimism and belief, and he put everything he had into giving it to her.

Her chest convulsed again. He kissed her temple. She didn’t cry easily and wouldn’t let go. It felt like it was wrenched out of her, and she fought it every step of the way. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.”

Funny how while he was comforting her, for some reason, the burning pain in his chest had eased.

“I can’t believe what a drama queen you are,” she told him.

“Me?” He was genuinely astonished.

“You made a mistake. Sure, it was a bad mistake, but nobody died except the bad guys. What are you going to do, cry ‘mea culpa’ and beat your chest for the next ten years? Everybody’s over what happened but you. I am not saying this because you wanted somebody to. I’m saying it because it’s true. Move the f**k on already.”

Her words were rough, but they were sincere. He went from burning to lightness. It might have gone to his head a bit, because he rolled her over onto her back, and he came up over her to kiss her.

She made a muffled noise against his lips. She sounded incredibly grumpy. Then she kissed him back.

They were both filthy, blood streaked, and the cold floor was making him nuts. None of it mattered. This wasn’t about sexual passion. Or maybe it was, but it was about something else too, something that was more important.

That made him suspicious. He didn’t know what to call that important, unknown thing, but whatever it was, it felt necessary and right. He teased her lips and she licked at him. Then he deepened the kiss until their tongues met and caressed. She tasted of apple brandy, heady and light.

The sensation went to his head. He eased over her more fully, pressing one leg between hers. The friction of denim cloth from their jeans was a quiet sound interspersed with the sound of their deepening breath. She ran her hands up his back, her touch on the expanse of naked skin sending a shudder through him.

He couldn’t believe he hadn’t been inside of her yet. He needed to know her response to that most basic and primitive joining. Her long lean body was a match for his. It felt amazing to stretch out along her and revel in her feminine strength, like it unlocked a previously unacknowledged part of him.

Somewhere inside of him, that wild, dangerous part that he kept so tightly leashed broke loose and started running unfettered again. He had just enough presence of mind to wonder where the hell it was going, and why it needed to get there so urgently.

Neither one of them was capable of consummating a goddamn thing, yet still they kissed and kissed. He ran his fingers up her torso, underneath her ruined T-shirt to stroke at the graceful swell of one breast. He played with her soft, distended nipple as she cupped the back of his head, holding him down to her mouth.

Finally he pulled away enough to kiss the corner of her lips, and he leaned his forehead against hers. She stroked his hair, and it felt like a miracle.

He sighed. “Okay, when you’re not making me batshit crazy, I guess maybe I like you after all. But if you tell anybody that, I’m going to have to throttle you again.”

A soft explosion came out of her nose. She said, “An hour.”

“What’s an hour?” He fingered a strand of her soft hair.

“I want to renegotiate our bargain, to be consummated at some future date when neither one has had the shit kicked out of us.” A thread of humor laced her words. “Unless that happens for purely recreational purposes, of course.”

He paused to listen inwardly to his own reaction. The loudest part was relief and respect. After admitting to how devastated she was, she had not only mustered humor and genuine emotion, but now she had taken the first step to making plans beyond taking revenge on the witch.

Underneath all of those reactions though, ran a bloodred pulse of hunger, coursing in a subterranean river through his arteries and filling him with greed.

An hour was an eyeblink, a mere moment in time. He had squandered more time than that when deciding where he wanted to go for dinner on a boring day. An hour was woefully inadequate considering all the things he wanted to do to her, and with her.

Considering all the things that she would do to him. Somehow he had gone from enduring that thought to wondering.

And wanting.

He said, “No hour. A night, from dusk to dawn. You get one, and I get one. No stopwatches, no alarms going off, no hourglasses.” The wild part of him ran harder, and his voice deepened. “No rules.”

A shudder ran through her, and the feel of it thrilled him. “You would do that, give up total control for that long.”

“I totally would do that, if you would.” He put his mouth over hers to feel her warm, moist breath. “Do you dare?”

She started to laugh almost silently. The uneven puffs of air against his lips were like bubbles of champagne. He breathed them down and felt them enter his bloodstream, coursing with his greed. She told him, “You know asking a harpy if she dares to do something is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

“I had hoped,” he admitted.

Even as he said the last word, she spoke over him. “Yes.”

Triumph roared through him, and with it came an epiphany.

This thing with Aryal wasn’t aberrant. Those things in his nature that she showed him weren’t aberrant. They were a part of him that he didn’t know existed until Aryal brought a light to shine on them. This wasn’t sexual tourism. It was sexual discovery.

He barely heard over his internal realization what she said next. “You know other people—any other people—would think we were crazy.”

He understood exactly what she meant. Hell, they didn’t even do BDSM in any straightforward fashion, and they certainly didn’t follow the norm or any of the suggested guidelines. He didn’t think there were any subculture groups who would approve of the rampant disregard either he or Aryal gave for safety checks.

He didn’t want a safe word, and she didn’t ask for one. They were both dominant, and he knew for a fact he wouldn’t be a switch—someone who switched the dominant role with the submissive role—for anybody else but her. And he was almost certain she wouldn’t either.

She quieted that internal whip that drove him because she became the whip, her soul as sharp as a knife.

He could cut himself on her, wrap her in his arms and be her buffer. Heal her from herself, bruise himself on her.

Let her heal him. Let her be his buffer.

They were so unapologetic, so kinked.

He said, “We’re perfect.”

SEVENTEEN

After he spoke, they fell silent, as if they had gone more than far enough for one conversation. There were implications everywhere in what had just happened, and Aryal didn’t want to consider any of them, nor did she want to decipher any of the unfamiliar emotions that rioted inside of her. That crowd of strangers, yelling in an incomprehensible language, was back in her head.

Except one of those strangers was perfectly understandable, as it held up a giant spongy finger that pointed to a placard that said, “Total f**king win-win.”

She considered sinking back into despair, because at least she understood that emotion, and it hovered around the edges of all the others, ready to bring down the weakest in the herd.

But she was no longer as shaky and hollowed out as she had been before the nap, the food and the cuddle, and she couldn’t manage to give in to it.

Sometimes being too stubborn for her own good turned out to be the best thing for her.

So she broke things down into words of one syllable, since that was apparently what she could handle at the moment.

Fuck it then. Kill the bitch, have some great sex, go home.

She counted backward. Yep, all one-syllable words. That’d do.

While she deconstructed her life, Quentin eased off of her and stretched out on his back again.

Somehow, something had shifted when she hadn’t been paying attention, and the part of him that was feline no longer bothered her. She simply enjoyed his animal grace.

He tucked one hand behind his head with a sigh. “Are you going to come over here or not?”

She decided that it sounded like a great idea, so she edged close to settle against him, putting her head on his bare shoulder. Fitting herself against his body felt incredible, her leg hooked up over his. She shook out her tablecloth/blanket over both of them and draped her arm across his chest. He put his arm around her and pressed a kiss to her forehead. He seemed to be more demonstrably affectionate than she was. It took her outside of her comfort zone, but she … liked it.

Sleep stalked her, but she fought it off enough to mumble, “I bet you act romantic with every female you’ve ever dated.”

His response was a long time in coming, more of a grunt than a real word. “Yup.”

Not that they were dating, but … “You talk like shit to me.”

He grunted again. “Can’t tell you what a relief that is.”

Tucked in between pockets of decency and a conscience, he was still a bastard.

One corner of her mouth lifted in a smile. She let sleep take her.

The pale light of predawn woke her.

Razor teeth. Crushed.

Adrenaline flooded her system, bringing with it a wash of nervous energy. Her body ached all over. Caerreth had closed her wounds and started them on the right path, but they were still healing. She needed more rest. She needed real rest and recuperation, but she couldn’t relax enough to let sleep claim her again.

She eased her head off of Quentin’s shoulder and looked at him. He was sound asleep, his lean jaw covered with more pale gold beard. His face wore the marks that the last couple of days had put on him. Even asleep, it made him look edgier and more dangerous than he did back in New York, and she had thought he’d looked dangerous then.

Then, he’d looked like a sleek, well-fed predator cruising through a crowd of unsuspecting pu**ycats. Now he looked more like what he really was, a man who would do anything he had to in order to survive.

A man who tried to be good in spite of himself, but who was really bad enough that she wanted him at her back in a tough fight.

She hadn’t told him that she liked him too, when he wasn’t driving her batshit crazy. It wasn’t any of his business how she felt about him.

But in the predawn silence, in the privacy of her own mind, she admitted a truth. Maybe she more than liked him.

The crowd in her head woke up and tried to riot again. She rolled her eyes and eased away from Quentin, trying not to disturb him. He had not been as injured as she had, but he needed more rest too, and he didn’t stir as she sat up.

She tucked the tablecloth around his torso, crawled over to the food they’d left strewn over the floor and ate a weird but filling breakfast. Actually, pickled eel and apple brandy weren’t so bad together. Then she went into “her” cell, where the blood on the floor had dried, used the crude latrine in the corner and splashed her hands off with water from the wineskin. A proper wash and clean clothes were high on her list of needs that day.

Second only to finding weapons and Elven armor.

When she went to peek out of the window, Linwe was keeping watch by the cell block door. She nodded to the young Elf and looked outside. The sky was cloudless, the wide expanse of water calm. It was going to be another scorcher of a day.

She went around to the other side of the cell block, gesturing to Linwe to follow her. The other woman did, her fine-boned face sparking with curiosity. “Let’s wake the other two,” Aryal said to her quietly. “We need to make some plans and act on them.”

“Okay,” said Linwe.

Together they shook Aralorn and Caerreth awake. The males sat up readily enough, wiping at their tired faces. Despite the short night, they all looked miles better than they had before.

Aryal sat back on her heels, testing her thigh wound. It held. The other three were watching her expectantly. She said, “Here’s the plan. You guys are leaving as fast as you can.”

“Wait, what?” Linwe said. The two males looked confused.

Aryal told them, “You need to take enough food to get you through a two-day run, harvest water on the go, and leave Numenlaur. On the other side, one of you needs to hike out of the forest to update Ferion, and make sure that Ferion updates Dragos. The other two will stand watch. Don’t let anybody into Numenlaur. If the witch and her wolves are the first ones out, the news about us won’t be good. If that happens, don’t do anything. Hide and let her pass. But neither Quentin nor I are planning on letting that happen.” She looked at the three sober faces. “Who has magical aptitude aside from Caerreth?”