Chapter 79 – I Keep You
Ronan
He calls me a liar and I want to bare my throat and bite his all at once.
I should step away. Button my shirt. Pick up the maps and put the world back into lines. Instead I crowd him into the table again and run a hand down the curve of his back. Slow, possessive, not gentle.
“You acted like an imbecile when you went to the quarry alone,” I say, and the sentence is a growl. It’s also a confession. I cannot let go of the image of him vanishing into a hole in the earth with Loran behind him.
“I came back,” he shoots over his shoulder.
“And if you hadn’t?”
“Then that would’ve proved me right.”
It’s insane. It’s Eli. The part of me that rules with teeth wants to cage him. The part of me that doesn’t have a name wants to lay down and let him crawl under my ribs and live there.
Neither part wins. The Alpha does.
“On the bed,” I tell him.
He moves like a challenge. Eyes not leaving mine, deliberate, slow, the kind of beautiful that ruins kingdoms. I follow, shedding the rest of my restraint with my clothes. He sprawls back, eyes hot and defiant.
“Is this the part where you teach me a lesson?” he asks.
“Yes.” I hook his knee over my shoulder and push inside again, deeper this time, dragging a curse from him that makes my vision go dark at the edges. “Here’s your lesson. I keep you. That’s the only constant.”
His fingers claw at my forearm. He doesn’t look away. “You keep me quiet. That’s what you mean.”
“I keep you safe.”
He laughs, wrecked and mean. “With your cock? Revolutionary.”
“Effective,” I say, and pick up the pace until speech is a broken thing between us and only sound remains. His gasps and my curses. The slap and drag of skin, the creak of wood as the bed’s frame struggles to hold us up under the avalanche of movement.
I watch his face because I’m a greedy man and I want proof of everything I can’t ask him to say. Want and fury and that shimmer of relief he pretends doesn’t exist when I pin him to anything solid. He hates feeling safer under my hand. I hate that I need him to feel it. Hate that I need it, too.
“Ronan,” he warns, voice torn, and I answer by bending over him, by caging him with my body, by taking his mouth until he swears into it. His teeth catch my lower lip. I like the sting. I want more of it.
He cups my jaw, nails digging, and the gesture is both fight and offering. I take it as both. My hand slides up to his throat again, pressure measured, watching his eyes until they darken and his breath hitches. Not panicked, not gone. Just there. Under my thumb. With me.
“You hear me now?” I ask against his mouth.
“I hear you,” he grinds out. “I still don’t agree.”
“It’s still not required,” I echo, because he needs the rhythm as much as the words.
He comes first this time, swearing like he’s furious about it, body tightening around me until the world whites out. I follow a heartbeat later, thrusting deep, claiming in every way I can without saying what would burn us both.
I stay buried inside him until my cock stops spurting out long ropes of cum into his ass. His release is splattered over my chest, his stomach, even the bed.
The rut feels closer when I know he’s in danger. Right now it’s sleeping, but the tiniest event can bring it back to roaring life.
When I pull out, he rolls to his side, back to me. That’s the closest either of us gets to admission.
I drag a cloth from the nightstand and clean him with hands that don’t know how to be gentle and try anyway, then toss it aside and lie on my back, breathing under the weight of everything I won’t say.
“You have to trust me,” he says into the pillow, flat as a verdict.
“I trust you to be you,” I answer.
He snorts. “That’s not trust. That’s acceptance.”
“It’s survival,” I say, because I don’t lie to him even when I should. “You want the other kind? Bring me something the council can’t ignore.”
He goes quiet. The quiet is sharp. I know he hates me being like this. Cold, measured, the man who won’t burn the house to kill one rat. He doesn’t understand that the house is wolves who will tear each other apart if I name one of them traitor without a body on the floor and a knife in his hand.
“Fine,” he says at last. “I’ll bring you a throat to cut.”
My throat closes up at the thought of him out there hunting Loran. He would. He will. He’s a stubborn little fucker with no care for his safety or my sanity.
“No,” I say. “You’ll leave this in my hands. You won’t go after Loran on your own again. That’s an order.”
He shifts, like he might get up. I throw an arm across his waist and hold him there. He tenses, then melts by degrees, bone after bone conceding to gravity, to me. I tuck my face into the back of his neck and breathe him in. Smoke, sex, the faint tang of quarry rock I want washed off his skin and out of his shadow.
“You want to keep me safe,” he says after a while. His voice is soft, but there’s violence in the softness.
“I keep you, period.” I say into his skin, and that’s the closest I can get.
We don’t say the rest. It beats between us anyway, loud as a second heart.
Outside, the wind rustles the leaves. The fire sighs. Inside, the maps can wait. The council can wait. The wolves can chew on their bones until later.
For now, I hold what is mine.
And if it steadies me more than strategy ever has, no one needs to know.