A Reason to Hold Back

Mature content · Reader discretion advised

The room held no light of its own. Only a faint blue light made it past the curtains, just enough to outline the shape of her at the vanity and catch the pale line of her shoulder where the strap of her nightgown had slipped.

She did not hear him. There was nothing to hear. Dom moved the way the dark moved, without sound, without disturbance, a thickening of shadow near the door and then, a moment later, closer than shadow had any right to be.

Elise's hand stilled on the brush. She told herself it was the draft from the window, the old house settling, anything with a name that wasn't him. But her skin knew before her mind allowed it. Gooseflesh climbed the back of her neck and down both arms, and beneath the thin silk of her nightgown her body answered him in a language she had never chosen and could not unlearn, her breath catching, her nipples drawing tight against the fabric as though he had already touched her.

He hadn't. Not yet.

Dom stopped a foot behind her, close enough to feel the warmth she gave off like a hearth in winter, and let himself simply take her in. The scent of her reached him first, warm skin and rosewater and beneath it the low copper thread of her pulse, and he breathed it in slow, the way a man starved for decades might finally lift a glass of something old and rare to his lips, not drinking yet, just letting the aroma undo him. It had been so long since anything had smelled like this to him, like a memory of being alive.

"You're doing that thing again," Elise said, to the mirror rather than to him, her voice not quite steady. "Standing there like you're deciding something."

"I already decided," he said, low, close enough now that his voice moved the hair at her temple. "A long time ago."

She turned on the little bench to face him, and for a moment neither of them closed the last of the distance between them, both of them balanced on the same knife's edge, wanting and afraid of wanting, the way they always were.

Elise rose from the bench, and the small distance she'd kept between them closed on its own, as if the room itself had decided they'd waited long enough. She reached up and laid her palm flat against his chest, over the place where a heart no longer beat but some old habit of his body still tightened at her touch.

"Say it again..." she whispered. "What you decided."

"That I'd have this," Dom said, voice rough now, stripped of its earlier control. "Whatever it costs me. Whatever it costs you."

He kissed her slowly at first, testing himself against the urge to take too much too fast, one hand rising to cradle the back of her head, the cool weight of the Velmarq signet he never removed brushing briefly against her scalp, the other finding the curve of her waist through thin silk. Elise answered him with a hunger of her own, rising onto her toes, fisting a hand in the front of his shirt to keep him there, and when he finally let himself sink into it fully, the last of his restraint went with it. He walked her backward toward the bed without breaking the kiss, and every step drew a small, helpless sound from her that he felt more than heard, vibrating against his own mouth.

He undressed her the way he did everything now, unhurried, deliberate, as though rushing would somehow cheapen it. The strap he'd noticed slip earlier finally gave way beneath his fingers, and the silk pooled at her waist, baring her to the thin blue light from the window. He paused there just to look at her, and the way his gaze moved over her, reverent, unguarded, hungrier than any look he'd given her throat all night, made her flush warmer than his mouth had.

"You're staring," she said, breathless.

"I've had two hundred years to learn patience," he murmured, lowering his head to press his lips to her collarbone, then lower, tracing the same path his eyes had just taken. "I intend to use every second of it on you."

He made good on it. His mouth found her skin everywhere by turns, unhurried and thorough, drawing her higher before he'd given her anything close to what she was aching for, until she was arching up against him and dragging her nails down his back in a silent demand he was more than willing to answer. When he finally undressed himself and settled his weight over her, skin against skin at last, she wrapped her legs around him like she meant to keep him there permanently, and he laughed low against her throat, the sound rare enough from him that she felt it as much as heard it.

"Dom." His name came out half plea, half warning.

"I know," he said, and finally, finally, gave them both what they'd been circling all night, joining his body to hers slow enough that she felt every inch of it, deliberate enough that her breath caught and held before breaking apart entirely. He kept that same unhurried rhythm even as her nails bit deeper and her hips rose to meet his, patient even now, savoring her the way he'd promised himself he would, until patience finally burned away into something neither of them controlled anymore, her voice breaking on his name, his own control fraying at the edges as he followed her over. When it was done he stayed buried close against her, forehead to forehead, both of them breathing like they'd run the length of the city, and for those minutes the Dominion, the Serathe, every debt and duty waiting outside that room, ceased to exist at all.

Afterward she lay against his chest, tracing the cool, still plane of it with one finger, and he thought she'd drifted toward sleep until she spoke.

"Take from me tonight."

He went rigid beneath her. "No."

"I'm not asking as a doll asks her master, Dom. I'm asking as a woman asks the man she loves." She pushed herself up on one elbow to look at him, and there was no fear in her face, only that stubborn certainty he'd never managed to talk her out of. "You go to strangers because you're afraid of what it means to take from someone you actually want to keep. I'm done being protected from that."

"You don't understand what it costs me to stop."

"Then don't stop because you're strong enough not to. Stop because you love me enough to."

He was still shaking his head when something in her settled, some last flicker of fear rising and then quietly letting go. She reached to the nightstand and drew the small blade she kept there, the one her grandmother's grandmother had carried, and before he could close his hand over hers she'd already opened a thin line across her own wrist.

The scent of her blood hit him like a wall going down. Every instinct in him surged toward it, the old patient hunger and a newer, wilder one both, the second one only two decades old and still as raw as the night it first split him in two. For one terrible second Elise saw something cross his face that wasn't quite the man she loved.

Then it passed, and what remained was worse in its own way, because it was tenderness.

"You have no idea what you just did," he said, voice gone dark and low, and he lifted her wrist to his mouth like he'd lifted her body to his an hour before, with that same unbearable slowness. He held her gaze as his lips closed over the wound. The first pull of her blood into his mouth made them both shudder, him from the taste of her, rich and warm, nothing like the strangers he usually settled for, her from a sensation that had nothing to do with pain at all. Her breath caught, then broke into something closer to the sounds she'd made beneath him minutes before, and she curled her free hand into his hair and held him there, not to keep him from stopping, but because her body no longer answered to anything but him.

He fed the way he'd loved her, deliberate, savoring. Every pull was measured against some inner accounting only he could see. Even lost in it he watched her the whole time, reading her pulse, her color, the flutter of her lashes, the way another man might read a lover's face for permission. She felt herself grow light, warm, weightless, her thoughts sliding loose from their moorings, and still some part of him held the line, counting what he could take against what he refused to, until the moment she felt herself truly start to slip, he was already pulling back.

"Dom." Her voice came thin, distant even to her own ears.

"I have you," he murmured against her skin, and pressed his mouth to the wound one final time, longer now, tender rather than hungry, and where his lips had been the torn skin knit itself closed, smooth and whole, as if the blade had never touched her at all. He gathered her against him as her breathing steadied. He brushed damp hair back from her face and watched color climb into her cheeks with the same fierce attention he'd have given a wound of his own.

"I didn't know you could do that..." Elise breathed, staring at her healed wrist, then at him.

"I've never done it for anyone before," Dom said quietly. "I've never had a reason strong enough to hold back for."

He rose after a while and crossed to the window out of nothing more than old habit, the same habit that made him check a street every night whether there was reason to or not. There rarely was. The city didn't allow for much else.

Below, a lone figure moved along the far sidewalk in a long dark cloak, unhurried, hood raised against a night that held no real wind. A watcher, one of dozens who walked those same streets after dark, cataloguing who came and went from which house, which windows stayed lit and which went dark and when. Dom had stopped finding it strange decades ago. There was no such thing as unwatched in this city, no house too quiet or too far from the center of things to escape notice, his own included. The watcher didn't slow as it passed beneath his window, didn't look up, simply continued on toward whatever house came next on its rounds, one more name added to whatever ledger these things were kept in.

Elise's voice came soft behind him. "Dom? What is it?"

"Nothing," he said, and meant it more than usual this time. "Just the city, doing what it always does."

He let the curtain fall and came back to her, and if some part of him still wondered, idly, whose name had just been written down alongside his own tonight, he kept that thought to himself and let her pull him back down into the warmth of the bed.