Chapter 20: Marks

The key to my bakery was still under the third flour tub.

Nobody had looked there, because nobody but me knew it was there.

I let us in through the back, in the dark.

The smell of yeast and burnt sugar hit me so hard that my knees nearly gave.

The shop was cold.

A week of dust lay on the steel counters.

The notice Silas's men had left on the door said the owner was away for family reasons.

I locked the door behind us, and then I unlocked it again, and put the key in Darius's hand.

He closed his fingers around it.

His knuckles were split, and his shirt was black with the sea and with Eli's blood.

He stood in the middle of my kitchen with his shoulders hanging, and he looked at the floor.

"I let them take him," he said.

"I pulled you out."

"I let them." His voice cracked. "I stood there, and I let them."

"Darius."

"I've been standing there my whole life."

I crossed the floor and took his face in both hands and made him look at me.

"We get him back tomorrow," I said. "Tonight there's nothing to do but this."

"Mara..."

"I want you to forget it. Just for a few hours. I want you in me, and I want to be so loud that neither of us can hear a thing."

His eyes shut.

When they opened again, they were black, and they were bright.

"Take it off," he said roughly. "Everything."

I stripped in the cold, between the ovens and the long steel table.

He watched every inch of me come bare.

Then he picked me up by the waist and set me on the table, and the steel was icy under my thighs.

I gasped.

"Cold?"

"Don't stop."

He tore his own shirt off, and the gauze with it, and dropped both on the floor.

He pushed my knees wide and stepped between them.

For a moment he only looked, at my breasts and my parted thighs.

The wetness shone on the inside of my legs, and his hands shook.

"Look how little you are," he said, low. "I can hold you with one hand."

"Then hold me."

He did.

He fisted one hand in my hair and tilted my head back, and he bit down on my shoulder.