Page 59 of Orc’s Bones

He closed the door.

I stood in the middle of the room and let that settle. There was only the room, and the fire, and him.

He crossed to the hearth and waited, the way he’d been waiting since the authority chamber. I walked to him and put my hands against his chest.

His hands came to my shoulders. Unhurried.

“Four years,” I said. “I thought this place had taken everything from me it was going to take.”

“It gave some of it back.” His voice was low — the private register, not the authority chamber voice. Not the command voice. This one.

“Not everything it took.”

“No.”

His hand came up and traced the line of my jaw. I turned my face into his hand. His palm was sure against my face. His heartbeat was steady under my hands.

He kissed me.

Slower than before, with a different weight — both of us with nowhere to be and nothing waiting, the city outside finally quiet in its right register, the fire low in the hearth. He kissed me the way you kissed someone when the case was closed and the room was yours, and I kissed him back with the full picture of those weeks in it.

He pulled me in. His hands were certain on my waist and my back and my braids, finding what they wanted without hesitation. His mouth moved to my jaw, my throat, the curve where my neck met my shoulder, and his breath against my skin was a different kind of reading than anything I’d done in the stacks or the Crypt levels — intimate, specific, learning the particular geography of me.

I worked his coat off his shoulders and down his arms. I traced the channel along his forearm with my thumb and watched his breath change.

“Does that⁠—“

“Yes.” The word came out low. “Keep going.”

I kept going.

He stripped the coat from me in turn, and then the rest of it, efficiently and without fumbling — and then his hands were on bare skin and I stopped being analytical about any of it. He learned me the way I’d have learned a new bone structure: thoroughly, without rushing, interested in every detail and what it connected to.

I bit his shoulder. He laughed — a low, surprised sound that I felt through my teeth — and pulled me closer and turned us both toward the bed.

We landed on it in a tangle of limbs and his weight came down on me. His tusks grazed my collarbone and I registered that as real, physical, good — the specificity of him against me rather than the general idea of him.

“Xya.”

“Don’t stop.”

He didn’t stop.

The fire burned in the hearth. There was only the room and his hands learning me and mine learning him — the bone-ink and the old scars and the places where the muscle ran thick from twenty years of a man who’d built himself the same way he built everything else: for function, for endurance, for the long work.

He was attentive and sustained, doing a thing well and thoroughly and not rushing past the parts that mattered. He found what he was looking for and held there, and I turned my face into his neck and said things that weren’t words.

Afterward he lay with his arm across my ribs, heavy and present. I pressed my palm flat to his chest and felt his heartbeat under my hand.

Not bone. Not signal. Just a man’s heart, beating.

That was the detail I hadn’t catalogued. The thing that finally landed was this. Simple. His pulse against my palm in a room with a fire in it.

For the first time since the gateways, the Dominion wasn’t asking anything of me. Nothing required my attention. Nothing was wrong.

I hadn’t understood how much of me had been braced until the bracing released.

He pulled me closer without waking. A reflex.