Chapter 173 – Salt the Knife, Feed the Flame
Eli
The collar clicks shut with that quiet little sound that always turns my bones to steam.
Ronan does it like he ties off a promise. Two fingers between leather and skin to check, the slow tug that settles it where it belongs. He doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t have to. The room is listening.
The runes scrawled across the boards wait under the rug patiently. The hearth throws up a restless breath and laps it back down as if even fire shows deference here.
“We leave for Silvercrest at first light,” he says.
“Then fill up.” My voice comes out steadier than the way my hands shake. “I want you walking into their gilded halls so charged you hum.”
He studies me from under his lashes, eyes catching in the low light like a predator’s in the brush. “You’re pale when we do this, little pet. I can smell the edges of your limit.”
“Then I’ll find a new edge,” I answer, because I’m not letting him walk in there weaker than he needs to be. “Take more. I’ll hold.”
His jaw flexes. “We’ll see. Assume the position.”
I feel the words slide into me and lock. Chin up. Hands where he puts them. Eyes on him unless told otherwise. The collar warms against my pulse like it approves.
He reaches behind the chair for the coil of rope. The special rope he ordered so it doesn’t injure me unnecessarily.
The sight of it is a fuse burning down my spine. I toe off my boots, shrug my shirt to the floor, and reach for the drawer where I hid the little belt of bone beads I strung from the workshop scraps. Smooth as river stones, each etched with the smallest, clumsiest version of the runes that I could manage.
Ronan’s brows lift. “What’s that.”
“Hopefully a bit of extra power.” My mouth goes dry as I loop it low and snug, between hip and thigh, where every breath will tease, and pull the string to knot tighter. A shiver runs through me. “It’ll keep me wired even when I’m not moving.”
He makes a sound of deep approval, his eyes burning on my skin. I have a feeling he’ll be having some fun with my beads soon. “Turn.”
Rope circles my wrists and the knot bites and holds. He draws my arms up to the beam, tying them with steady, unshowy competence.
The world narrows and the little sway I always get when the blindfold comes down is a relief. Like someone finally found the volume knob on the noise in my head and turned it blessedly low.
Darkness soft, leather warm, the faint charcoal-smell of last time still staining the boards beneath the rug. The collar presses. The rope sings around my wrists. My whole body is a lesson in wanting.
He moves in that slow circle of his. I can hear the creak of his boots as he hunts in the drawer for the ritual knife. I can sense it when he lines up the jar of oil and the little square of cotton he always keeps for after. I can feel him decide where to begin.
“On your knees,” he says.
My body answers without hesitation. The beads tug against me as I kneel in the circle, the knot in the rope tugging me taller by the wrists. Breath in. Breath out. The bond begins that low, dangerous hum like a grizzly waking.
He comes to stand in front of me. “Open.”
I open my mouth and he presses two fingers in, not for the filth of it this time, but because ritual likes repetition and the body recognizes its instructions better when it can taste them. I suck him down, slow and grateful, tasting the salt of skin and the faint bitterness of soap.
His breath goes rough on one exhale and I file it away like a trophy. When he pulls free, he drags his thumb across my lower lip to wipe away the mess and murmurs, satisfied, “Good.”
His hand grips the back of my neck and I forget what air is for until he squeezes the muscle there and the reminder drops into my lungs.
His thumb finds the notch at my throat and cold follows a heartbeat later. The flat of the ritual knife, pressed against my skin. He skims it down until I feel it rest over where he inked a rune last time, the one that sits like a small sun over bone and heart.
He doesn’t cut me immediately.
Ronan leans forward, lifts my bound hands just enough that the rope takes more of me, then tucks the knife away and takes up the charcoal. I feel its dusty scrape as he redraws what I smudged with my eager sweat.
Curve, bar, spiral. His knuckles graze as he works and each accidental touch sparks like steel on flint. The beads drag and pull with every breath. I bite the inside of my cheek and try not to start moaning and begging already. We’ve barely gotten started.
When the charcoal is traced properly again, the knife returns. “Breathe,” he reminds me, and then he presses the tip to the center of the mark and opens me.
The slice isn’t deep, only deliberate, heat rushing up behind it like liquid light. I jerk and the rope holds, wrists singing, shoulders strung. Before the burn can find its teeth, his mouth is there, sealing, sucking, tasting me like he’s reading from a book written in my blood.
The bond flares, a bright white-out. I have the wicked, hushed thought that I’m an altar now and Ronan is sacrificing himself to me.
“More,” I whisper, before he can give me mercy dressed as caution. “You’re not even close.”
His laugh isn’t kind. I know he hates the idea of taking from me to empower himself.
“Hungry little pet,” he taunts, trying to hide his discomfort and enjoyment.
The knife moves to my shoulder next. A crescent cut where he traced one before, and that same heated bloom, that same mouth to follow, slow and possessive. The noise that leaves me is raw and grateful. I make no attempt to muffle it.
He drags the tip along the inside of my arm in a shallow rake that leaves a prickle and a gasp and a second later the slow, devastating stripe of tongue. The beads answer every twitch with their own private flickers. I can’t keep still. I try. I fail. The rope creaks every time I shiver, which is basically non-stop.
Ronan works me like a cartographer mapping known coasts and fresh reefs. The notch by my lowest rib. The tender cut of thigh above the knee. The hollow just under my collarbone, the breath-snatched edge where pain curls into want and stays. Each time, the same sequence. Mark, and then mouth, and the room leaning in as if to listen.
“Say red if you need me to stop,” he demands when my head goes light.
I grit out, “Green.”
“How green.”
“Forest,” I manage. “Midnight. Hunter.” Words stick and tumble.
He palms my jaw and turns my face up, blindfold tight, the leather of my collar warming in the heat that rises between us. “How much do you think you can give,” he asks, voice rasping now at the edges, “Without doing injury to yourself?”
“As much as you can take.”
He makes a sound that is all wolf and danger. “We’ll see.”