The Alpha Hunts the Exiles, So I Let Him Catch Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Seventeen Steps

Unai comes down alone, re-wraps her scar and she pulls him to his knees on the stairs; overhead his uncle talks of the full moon and the Hollow.

The cellar under the Mendiboure tower had worn stone steps curving into the dark.

The tower had held cheese for six hundred years.

The wheels sat on oak shelves along three walls, and the whole room smelled of wet stone and ewe's milk.

Someone had put a straw pallet in the far corner and a bucket by the drain.

The door at the top of the stairs was iron-banded, and the key had turned in it with a sound I felt in my teeth.

I sat on the pallet with my back to the wall and held my wrists.

I had lied before two hundred people.

I had done it to keep my brother out of the elm's shadow and my people out of a sweep.

I had no plan for the night.

The lock turned again after dark.

A lamp came down the steps first, and then the boots, one at a time.

I did not have to look to know which man it was.

Unai stopped on the last stair.

He had a loaf under his arm and a wedge of ewe's cheese, and a roll of clean linen and a stoneware pot.

He had Txomin's bell hooked on two fingers.

"You were hungry on the road," he said.

"I was."

"Eat."

He set the food on the flagstones and the lamp on the shelf.

Then he put the bell beside the lamp, where I could see it.

He did not say my name, the one I had given or the one I owned.

I tore the bread and ate it with my back to him.

It was the first food I had been handed in this valley in five years, and I did not taste it.

"You've a burn that's wet," he said.

"It's healing."

"It's wet."

He came across the cellar and knelt, and his knees cracked on the stone.

Up close he had not changed.

He had the same black hair cut too short by his own hand and the same mouth held flat.

There were lines at his eyes that had not been there, and I had not been there to put them there.

"May I," he said.

"It's your tower."

"That is not what I asked."

I turned my head and showed him my cheek.

He smelled of woodsmoke and lanolin and the cold on his coat, and of the black wolf under it.

My own wolf rolled over and showed her throat.

I hated her for that.

He opened the pot with his thumb.

It was a salve of beeswax and arnica, and he warmed it between his fingers and laid them against the scar.

His touch was so light it hardly counted as touch.

He followed the burn from my cheekbone to the corner of my jaw.

He followed it down the side of my neck, and he stopped at my collar.

"Further?" he said.

"Further."

I undid the top three buttons of my shirt myself.

The scar ran down over my collarbone and onto the top of my breast, and he followed it there, and I stopped breathing.

His breath caught.

He bent his head and began to count under his breath, very low, as he must have done every night of his life.

"Bat. Bi. Hiru."

"What are you counting?" I asked.

"The places that hurt you," he said.

"You can't count those."

He did not look up.

"I'll try."

I looked at his bent head and his big careful shepherd's hands.

I had hated him for five years and the hating had not once got as far as this.

He had a hundred ewes to look after and one trespasser.

He was kneeling on a cellar floor putting salve on a woman he had been told was a raider's kin.

He knew who I was.

I knew that he knew.

Neither of us was going to say it, and it was going to kill us both.

"Unai," I said.

He went completely still.

I had not said his name in five years.

"You can ask me what I want," I said.

"What do you want?" he asked.

I took his wrist and pulled his hand off my skin and held it, and he let me.

"I want you to stop being kind," I said. "I want you to put your mouth on me."

His eyes shut.

"Tell me to stop," he said, hoarse. "Say it any time and I will."

"I'm not saying it," I said.

"Then I'm yours to use," he said.

"On the stairs," I said. "I'm not doing it on that pallet."

He got up and held out his hand.

I took it, and we went to the foot of the stairs.

I sat down on the third stair with my back against the cold wall.

He knelt on the flags between my boots and put his hands on my knees.

I unbuttoned my trousers and lifted my hips.

He drew them down my legs and tossed them behind him.

He set my boots on his shoulders.

The air was cold on my thighs.

He looked at me for a long moment, at the dark hair and the swollen lips.

He looked at the slick already shining on me, and made a sound in his throat.

"Look at you," he said. "You're wet for the man who locked you up."

"You didn't lock the door from my side," I said.

"No," he said.

"Use your mouth."

He put it on me.

The first long lick went from my entrance to my clit, flat and slow, and my head hit the stone behind me.

He groaned against me, long and low, and the sound went through my clit.

His tongue was hot and he was not gentle with it, and he was not rough either.

He found the place that made my thighs jump and stayed there, circling, then flicking, then sucking it between his lips.

I fisted my hand in his hair.

It was too short to hold, and I held it anyway.

"Unai," I said.

"Again," he said, against me.

"Don't stop."

"I won't," he said.

He pushed two fingers into me, slow, and crooked them up against the front wall, and the cellar went white at the edges.

He worked me with his hand and his mouth together, steady and patient, never losing the place.

The pleasure came up my spine in waves, and each one was bigger than the last.

I was talking, and I could not hear what I said.

I heard him say, against my clit, "Come for me."

I came with a cry that echoed up the stone steps.

My whole body bowed off the stone.

He held me through it, licking me gently now, and slid his fingers out and set his mouth on the inside of my thigh.

"Bat," he said, against my skin.

I laughed, shaky.

"You counted," I said.

"I count everything."

"Count again, then," I said.

He lifted his head, and his mouth was wet, and the look on his face was a thing I had forgotten a man could have.

He took me again with his tongue until I shook and swore and came a second time, harder, my heels digging into his back.

"Bi," he said, hoarse.

He rested his forehead against my knee, breathing hard.

I stroked the back of his neck.

I could feel how hard he was, through his trousers, against my calf.

"Come here," I said.

"No," he said.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because you're a prisoner in my house."

His voice cracked.

"I want you to be able to say no tomorrow and have it mean something."

"I'll say what I like tomorrow," I said.

"I know," he said. "That is what I'm afraid of."

He stood, and tidied me with a gentleness that undid me more than the mouth had.

He pulled my trousers up my legs.

He kissed the scar once, at the hinge of my jaw, and went up the stairs.

At the top he stopped and said, without turning, "My uncle's men are in the yard tonight. The door has to be locked."

"And tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow we find out what you want from me besides this."

He went out and the iron door shut behind him.

I sat on the third step with my body still singing.

Then I heard voices overhead, through the flagstones, in the kitchen above my head.

I knew the warm one.

"The sweep," Beñat said. "Full moon, nephew, as the Batzar voted. Sunday week. We take the Hollow once and for all."

I stopped breathing.

I had never once heard that word in his mouth, and it meant my people.

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