The Hidden Route Picked the Friend novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Latch
He climbs in through her window to decide what to do with the witness, and ends on his knees between her thighs. At dawn: "Tonight. The scullery. Bring the tray."
The window swung open, and a hand with a bandaged palm caught the water jug before it hit the floor.
He set it down on the sill without a sound.
Then he came in over the sill, long and dark against the stars, and straightened up in her tiny room.
Briony sat up in bed with the blanket in both fists.
"I latched it," she said.
"You did.
Twice."
He glanced at the jug.
"That was clever."
"It was a jug."
"It was clever," he said.
"Sevrin Dray.
You'll want a name for what you're about to scream at me."
"I haven't screamed yet."
"You will."
Briony had known his name for ninety hours of her old life.
Hearing it in his own mouth was another thing.
He crossed the room in three steps and stopped at the foot of her bed.
Moonlight lay across the scar in his eyebrow.
"I came to see what you'd do," he said.
"I'm doing nothing.
I'm sitting in a bed.
I won't tell anyone, if that's what you came to hear."
"Everyone says that."
"Then everyone's been lying to you, and I'm not.
I'm very bad at lying.
I told a guard it was flour paste."
"You did that well."
"I panicked well."
He almost smiled again.
Briony watched it fail, and for some reason that made her chest hurt more than the knife had.
She was in her nightgown with her braids down, alone with a man who killed for a living.
She was twenty-two years old.
She should have been scared.
She had been scared in the scullery, a little.
Now she looked at his bound hand and the dried blood on the strip she'd torn.
What she felt was a hot, stupid, slow-building want.
"Sit," she said.
His eyebrows rose.
"On the bed.
I want to see the hand."
He sat on the edge of her mattress.
It dipped under his weight, and his thigh came to rest against her knee through the blanket.
She unwound the apron strip.
The cut was clean and had stopped bleeding.
She turned the hand over in both of hers and ran a thumb along the edge of the wound.
He drew a breath.
"That doesn't hurt," he said, and sounded surprised.
"Nobody touches that hand.
Nobody touches me," he said, "without wanting something."
She looked up.
He was very close, and in the dark his eyes were nearly silver.
"I want something," Briony said.
She said it before she had decided to.
The room went completely still.
Sevrin's good hand came up and took her chin, and his thumb brushed the corner of her mouth.
"Say it plainly."
"I want you to kiss me," she said.
"And then I want a lot more than that, and I think you know it."
"I think that's why you came through my window and not the door."
His thumb stopped.
"Tell me to leave," he said, low.
"No."
"Briony."
"I said no."
He kissed her.
It was not a gentle kiss.
His mouth was warm and hard and slow, and the hand on her chin slid back into her loose hair and closed.
She made a sound against his lips that she had never made in her life, and he swallowed it.
She grabbed the front of his black coat and pulled him down on top of her.
He came, braced on his good hand, with his bandaged one held away so he wouldn't hurt it.
"Careful," she whispered.
"I'm fine."
"I'm not talking about the hand."
His laugh was a breath against her throat.
He kissed down her neck, over the lace of her nightgown, to the swell of her breast.
His mouth closed over her nipple through the cotton.
She arched off the mattress and put her hand over her own mouth.
"Quiet," he said, into her skin.
"There's a guard in the laundry yard."
"Then stop," she hissed, "making me want to scream."
He did it again, harder, with his teeth, and she bit the heel of her hand.
He pushed the gown up her thighs.
His hand was big and rough and warm on her bare skin.
It went up the inside of her leg with all the time in the world.
"You're shaking," he said.
"I want it."
"I know."
His fingers found her through her drawers and he went very still.
"You're soaked."
"I told you," Briony said, between her teeth.
"I want it."
Something in him gave.
He sat back on his heels, hooked both thumbs in her drawers, and slid them down her legs and off.
She lay there with her gown rucked to her waist and her legs open.
It should have been the most embarrassing moment of two lifetimes.
It wasn't.
He was looking at her the way he'd looked at the cut: quietly, completely, memorizing.
"Pretty," he said.
"That's a stupid word."
"It's the only one I've got."
He got down off the bed and onto his knees on the floor, and pulled her to the edge by her hips.
She had time to think, he is going to, and then his mouth was on her.
Briony cried out and clapped both hands over her face.
His tongue was hot and slow and exact, one long stroke from her entrance to her clit.
Then he did it again, and her thighs shook on either side of his head.
"Sevrin," she said, through her fingers.
"Again."
"Louder," he said, "and the guard will hear."
"Then don't stop.
Don't you dare stop."
He made a low sound that she felt in her bones.
He closed his lips around her clit and sucked, soft and then not soft.
His tongue flicked over it in tiny hard circles that made her hips come off the bed.
He put a hand on her belly and pressed her down.
"Stay," he said, against her pussy.
"Stay still for me."
"I can't."
"You can.
You're doing so well."
She had her fist in his hair now.
She didn't remember putting it there.
His hair was coarse and short and she held on to it.
He took her hand and pushed it in tighter, to show her he liked it.
Then two fingers of his good hand slid inside her, slow, and curled.
They found the place that made the room go white.
"There," she gasped.
"There, there, there."
He pressed it, and licked her, and pressed it again, and the heat in her belly wound up tight and bright.
She came with her teeth in her own wrist.
It rolled through her in long, hard waves, her pussy clenching on his fingers.
Her back bowed off the mattress, and he didn't stop.
He rode it out with his mouth.
He took her through the end of it.
When she was limp and gasping and trying to push his head away, he licked her once more, deliberately.
She came again, shorter, sharper, with a broken sob.
He lifted his head.
His mouth was wet and his grey eyes were black.
"Two," he said.
"You counted."
"I count everything."
He wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist.
He was still fully dressed, and the front of his trousers was tented hard enough to be obvious.
Briony pushed herself up on her elbows.
Her legs felt like water.
"Come here," she said.
"I should go."
"Sevrin.
Come here."
He came.
She pulled him down beside her on the narrow bed and put her hand on him.
He made a sound.
She undid his trousers one-handed.
His cock came out into her hand, thick and hot and heavy, hard against his stomach, wet at the tip.
She'd been braced for a lot of things.
She was not braced for the way his whole body shook when she closed her fingers around him.
"Briony," he said, and it came out wrecked.
"Look at me."
He looked.
She stroked him, slow, from the root to the head.
She thumbed the slick across the tip and watched his face come apart.
All that stillness.
All that careful control.
It cracked down the middle.
"Nobody does this," he said, hoarse.
"Does what?"
"Looks at me."
"I'm looking," she said.
"I'm going to keep looking.
Come for me."
His hips jerked into her fist.
She stroked him faster, firm and wet, her thumb circling the head on every pass.
He buried his face in her neck and bit down on her shoulder to keep from making noise.
"That's it," she murmured.
"Good.
Just like that."
He shuddered and groaned into her skin.
He came hot and thick across her fingers and her stomach in long pulses, his whole big body locked against hers.
For a long moment, neither of them moved.
His breath was ragged against her collarbone.
His good hand was fisted in her nightgown.
"Nobody has ever told me that," he said at last, rough and very low.
"Told you what?"
"That I did well."
Briony put her arms around his shoulders and held on.
She felt him realize what she was doing, and go rigid, and then slowly, slowly, let her.
They lay like that until the sky outside the window turned grey.
He cleaned her himself, with the corner of the sheet, with the grave attention of a man defusing something.
Then he stood and set his clothes straight and put his hand on the windowsill.
"Tonight," he said.
"The scullery.
Midnight."
"I'm not coming."
"Bring the tray," said Sevrin.
He went out over the sill and was gone.
Briony lay on her back, wet and sore and shaking.
Come was drying on her stomach and her own heartbeat was loud in her ears.
She had one plan.
Stay out of everything.
She was going to be there at midnight, and she knew it, and she hated how much she knew it.
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