Chapter 24 025

Chapter 24 025
Chapter Twenty-Five
Xavier

Mari left at nine.

She argued about the escort exactly as Carmen said she would, standing in the front yard with her bag over her shoulder and her chin up, and Bruno handled it exactly as I said he would, which was to agree with everything she said and then get in the vehicle anyway. She looked back once at Carmen and something passed between them that didn't need words, and then the vehicle pulled out and she was gone.

Carmen watched until the gate closed.

Then she turned and walked back inside and I followed her because I had been following her gravity for weeks now and had stopped pretending otherwise.

The house was quieter than it had been in days. The last of the thirty-eight had left yesterday evening. Rosaria had gone to the market with Lucia. Bruno was with Mari's escort and wouldn't be back until afternoon. The pack was running its ordinary rhythms outside, training and border checks and the daily work of a territory in winter, and inside it was just us and the sound of the fire Rosaria had left burning in the main room.

Carmen stood in the middle of the main room and turned to face me.

"It's quiet," she said.

"Yes."

She looked at me steadily. Three weeks of looking at each other across rooms and tables and the careful managed distances we had both maintained, and now there was no distance left that made sense.

"The mark," she said.

Apollo went completely still inside me.

"You said ask you tomorrow," I said. "After Mari left. When it's quiet."

"It's tomorrow," she said. "Mari left. It's quiet."

I crossed the room.

She didn't step back. She looked up at me with those dark eyes and her hands were loose at her sides and she was the most deliberate person I had ever met, every choice made fully, nothing accidental, and I loved that about her with a specificity that was almost painful.

I cupped her face in both hands and she reached up and gripped my wrists and I kissed her.

She kissed me back immediately, no hesitation, her hands tightening on my wrists, and the bond flared between us so hard that Apollo made a sound I felt in my sternum and I pulled her closer and she came without resistance, her body fitting against mine with the particular ease of something that was always supposed to happen.

I kissed her slowly at first because she deserved slowly, because she had spent her whole life being handled carelessly and I was not going to add to that in any direction. She made a small sound against my mouth and her hands moved from my wrists to my chest and then to my shoulders and I felt her grip tighten and I walked her back toward the wall and she went with me.

"Xavier," she said against my mouth.

"Yes."

"Stop being careful."

I pulled back slightly and looked at her. Her face was flushed and her eyes were dark and she was looking at me with an expression that left very little room for interpretation.

"Carmen—"

"I've been handled carefully my whole life," she said. "Not like that. I know the difference. I'm not fragile and I don't want to be treated like I am." Her eyes held mine. "I want you. Not the managed version."

Apollo didn't wait for me to process that. He surged forward and I let him and I kissed her again differently this time and she made a sound that I felt in my spine and her fingers found my hair and pulled and I decided Carmen had been right about most things since I met her and she was right about this too.

I picked her up and she wrapped her legs around me without being asked and I carried her upstairs and she laughed once, a surprised genuine sound, and I thought I would spend a significant portion of my remaining life trying to produce that sound again.

In my room the winter light came gray and soft through the window and I set her down on the edge of the bed and she reached for my shirt and I let her and watched her face while she worked the buttons, focused and unhurried, and I pushed her hair back from her face and she looked up at me briefly and smiled, small and real.

What followed was not careful.

It was honest, which was better. It was two people who had been circling something for weeks finally arriving at the center of it, and Carmen was exactly who she was in it as she was in everything, present and direct and entirely herself, and Apollo was quieter than he had been in years, not subdued but settled, as if he had been making noise about this for so long that its arrival had simply replaced the noise with something else.

Afterward the room was still and warm and Carmen was beside me with her head on my chest and her hand flat against my ribs and I could feel her breathing slow into something easier.

"The mark," I said quietly. My hand was in her hair.

She lifted her head and looked at me.

"Still yes," she said.

I sat up slowly and she moved with me, and I looked at her in the grey winter light, the scars I had traced with my hands an hour ago, the steadiness in her face, and Apollo pressed forward with a reverence I had never felt from him before.

I lowered my head to the curve of her neck and shoulder and felt her hands come up into my hair and hold on and I breathed her in once, cinnamon and woodsmoke and something that was simply Carmen.

Then I marked her.

She made a sound that was partly pain and mostly something else and her hands tightened in my hair and I felt the bond snap into its final shape between us, completed, solid, no longer something tending toward but something arrived, and Apollo went quiet in a way he had never been quiet in his life.

I lifted my head.

She was breathing hard, her eyes bright, her hand still in my hair.

"Okay," she said softly.

"Okay," I said.

Outside the winter light moved slowly across the floor and the fire was still burning downstairs and the house was quiet around us, and we stayed exactly where we were for a long time.