by Maria Vale
“Please, Elijah,” she babbles. “It’s just a friend. It was an emergency. He needed help.”
“What did he want with it?”
“A friend needed help,” she repeats, emphasizing the last word. Even with my back to the hall, I can tell by the scents of pepperoni and steak frites and hops and vodka that the humans have returned from their carrion-and-alcohol lunches and are gathering behind me. It makes Janine bolder. “Anyway, what do you care who I’m seeing?”
“How much did he give you?”
“Elijah, what’s going on here?” I recognize in the faint fragrance of sandalwood on papery skin that someone has gotten Max.
I bend over her head. “Spread your legs for whoever you want,” I whisper, “but betray the Great North, and I will make sure you regret it.”
“Get away from me,” she yells, pushing her purse against my chest as Max makes his way to the front of the crowd.
“Elijah, that’s enough. Janine, I’m so sorry.” He puts his arm on my arm, trying to pull me away. “Are you all right? Why don’t you take the day off.”
“Who did you see, Janine?”
“A friend! I told you he’s been weird, Mr. Trianoff. I went to see a friend who was in trouble—”
“Don’t lie, Janine. I can smell him on you.”
Maxim yells for Lori to find out what’s taking them so long. Just then, three security guards rush out of the elevators. “Took you long enough,” Maxim says, patting Janine’s hand with a kind of awkward paternalism. “I’m sorry about this, Janine. You should take some time off. HST will—”
“Make me whole?” she says with the sly smile of someone who’s spent her life around lawyers.
Maxim’s only answer is a strained smile.
“Jesus Christ, Elijah,” he says as soon as the door to my office closes. “‘Make me whole.’ Wil is going to make sure this costs us a fucking fortune. Costs you. I begged you to keep your hands off the office staff. I’m calling Ms. Katana—”
“It’s Kitwana, Max.”
He slides back between the two remaining guards. “I’m calling her now. Telling her you need time off. Real time. So just pick up your stuff—”
“Does this mean I can skip L-Cubed?”
I can see Maxim’s mind running through some sordid calculation of reputation and clients and competitors. He doesn’t want me there, but he wants the gossip and speculation even less. HST already lost one partner in sad circumstances, and he can’t afford to lose another.
“No,” he says. “But then take off. Get a—”
“Don’t say ‘get a fucking boat.’”
“Get a fucking boat.”
• • •
On a green metal bench surrounded by rows of palm trees, the sky held back by glass and steel, the earth covered by patterned marble, there is a homeless man sitting with everything he owns in a bag at his feet.
One bench over, my garment bag slung over one arm, the pink bag with my seax, two degrees, the trust, and that fisher skull held tightly between my feet, I call Tiberius.
“Who is this?” he asks over the cacophony of hammering and sawing wolves pushing to get the Great Hall finished before the rains start in earnest.
“Elijah Sorensson.”
“Who?”
“Elijah Sorensson. Alpha of the 9th.”
The homeless man looks at me warily before moving himself and his belongings far away.
“Hold on. Let me go somewhere quieter. Sil, just leave the top ones for me. I’ll be right back.”
I can’t hear her answer.
“Wildfire. Please.”
He takes the stairs down two at a time. There must be walls now, because there are doors. I know there are doors because they close with a solid thud behind him.
“Elijah?”
“I think you were right. My assistant saw something when I was printing out the signature addendum for the trust.”
“You did it with her?”
“I did not do it with her. She came in early. It doesn’t matter. I’m pretty sure she took one copy.”
“It had our names?”
“Of course. But, Tiberius, she left a few hours later, and when she came back from lunch, she smelled like that stuff, the industrial smoke remover, that you said Shifters… Tiberius?”
“Tiberius?”
• • •
Lifting my head, I shave the vulnerable column of my throat. Left side. Right side. Rinse, warm water, then cool. Suck in my upper lip, feel the ticklish scrape along it. Quick rinse. Lower lip and chin. Quick rinse. Left cheek. Quick rinse. Right cheek. Thorough rinse. After combing my hair, I muss it in just the right way.
Then I unzip the garment bag and begin the intricate mummery of evening wear. Formal shirt (Royal Oxford, forward point). Shirt studs (mother-of-pearl). Pants (tapered, grosgrain ribbon). Waistcoat (never cummerbund; black, three-button). I raise my chin, staring down at the reflection of my fingers flying over my tie (textured silk, semi-butterfly). I carefully fold the collar back in place.
Pulling my sleeves into place, I pick up first one platinum-chain cuff link from the silver Tiffany tray (With Gratitude from Americans for Progressive Packaging). Then I shrug into my jacket (ventless, single-button, grosgrain facing, peaked collar). Socks (silk, black). Shoes (cap-toe Balmorals, high shine but not patent). Pocket square (silk, square fold, the red of human blood).
• • •
“Hello, Elijah,” says the bone-thin woman in the tweed pencil skirt and dark-gray silk shirt. She kisses the air near my right cheek and then near my left. Victoria Cideley has handled PR for L-Cubed for the past six years. “I’m afraid there may be a mistake. We have you down”—she looks up quizzically from the guest list on her iPad—“as one?”
“No mistake.” I slip the card with my table number into my waistcoat pocket. “I am”—and for some reason, I say the last word with a grin and a note of triumph—“alone.”
She raises her eyebrows and smiles too. Her dark hair and pale skin and dark-red lips all look the same as when I first met her and told her gray was her color and that she should never wear anything but silk. But her smile has changed, the way human women’s smiles do as they move from the confidence of youth, when every man wants their untried bodies and untried souls, to the more tentative smile of someone who hopes to be forgiven for the crime of creeping toward middle age.
I move out of the way of a pretty, little arm candy whose bright eyes devour the cards with recognizable names—Michael Bloomberg, Derek Jeter, Matt Damon!—while she waits for Daniel Tillmann, the Speaker’s chief of staff, to claim his table and prance her around, thereby advertising both his success and the potency of his member.
There’s something so freeing. I’m not showing off, worrying about where I fit in the hierarchy. I am proving nothing. I make no introductions. Suffer no invidious comparisons. I have no reservations at boutique hotels. I have no names to remember. No notes to write. No gray silk bathrobes to gift.
I am Elijah Sorensson. That’s all, and for the first time since I left home, that’s enough.
Some of the men hold their dates a little tighter when I approach, showing the visceral mistrust of a lone wolf, but aside from a polite smile at our introduction, I don’t notice a single one, because the Goddess of the City of Wolves is waiting for me.
“Sorensson,” says Dean Latham (international commerce, Sarnath & Keene). “I’d like you to meet Monique.”
Monique turns so that her hips are angled at best advantage. She shifts her shoulder back, revealing breasts that are large and oddly round and I suspect feel like ziplock bags crammed with pudding. She shakes her hair and lowers her chin, looking up at me from under her hooded eyes. Her sex is all surface irritant, like a red cape that the bull charges just to get it to stop.
He doesn’t
introduce me to her. “And you’re with…?”
“Nobody,” I say with a half nod toward Monique. “And it’s a pleasure.”
He frowns a little, worrying about what game I’m playing.
Maxim, seeing me with a confused and concerned Latham, decides it is a politic moment to pretend that all is well between the partners at HST, so that no one will think we are getting slack and sloppy and it’s a good time to try to take us down. He pats me congenially on the back and introduces me to his brother-in-law.
“Elijah is interested in buying a boat,” he says with a bright fake smile before separating me from Latham and leading him away. He will have replaced me on the Jaxed contract by the end of the night.
It takes me a beat to return my attention to Max’s brother-in-law, a man wearing suspenders but neither cummerbund nor waistcoat. “No offense to your hobby, but I’ve got no interest in getting a boat.”
His eyes slide over my hands, and he shrugs.
“You married?”
“No.”
“Then why would you bother?” He smiles brightly at his wife, Tatiana, Maxim’s sister. “The only reason to have one is if you need a place to store a girlfriend.”
“Darling,” he sings out as Tatiana comes closer. “I presume you know Elijah Sorensson?”
“My brother’s partner? I should hope so. How are you, Elijah?”
“Well. We were just talking about boats.”
“Really?” says Tatiana. Her husband kisses her lightly on the cheek before shuffling off to greet the deputy mayor.
“I don’t know why he bothers with the boat,” she says, her smile hardening. “The insurance on that thing is ridiculous. If he needs a place for his whores, why doesn’t he just get a fucking apartment?”
I drink only water and eat only salad. Several men look at the untouched pâté and steak, but I am done eating carrion so that humans will think I’m a real man.
As soon as the raspberry cocotte is served and the last of the awards for hard work or money are given, I drink two cups of coffee and run for my car.
I nod toward Maxim, who, with a single tight wave of his hand, mouths the word Boat.
Chapter 28
Four hours and something later, I squeeze the latch on the cabin door. Once inside, I close it, giving the little extra push until it clicks. Then I sag heavily on the side of Thea’s bed.
She turns over, her fingers feeling the fine black wool of my tuxedo. I look over my shoulder.
She must have showered not long ago. Her hair is still damp, fusing together in sharp, black flames that lick against her naked skin. Silently, she pulls her legs from under the covers and kneels in front of me. She unties my laces and tosses my shoes (cap-toe Balmorals, high shine, not patent) to the side. Her hands slide up my calf until she touches skin, then she rolls down my socks (black, silk) and throws them to the side too. Leaning between my knees, she unbuttons my jacket (single-button, no vents, grosgrain facing, peaked collar). She pushes it from my shoulders. I shrug once, and it falls first to the bed, then slithers to the floor.
With a twist, her long, strong fingers open one button on my waistcoat (three-button, black). Then another. Then one more.
She feels around for the end of my tie (textured silk, semi-butterfly) and pulls. Inserting a finger in the loosened knot, she drags it down until the ends hang around the collar of my shirt (Royal Oxford, forward point). Without a second thought, I tilt my head back, my eyes closed, giving her free access to my neck. The cool air hits my skin as she works each shirt stud (mother-of-pearl) free. She disentangles the platinum chains from my cuffs, setting them on her table next to the studs. Then she pulls off my waistcoat, my shirt.
She unbuttons my pants (tapered, grosgrain ribbon).
“Up?” she says.
Holding on to the finial of her footboard, I lift my hips, allowing her to slide everything off to join the rest of my kit puddled on the floor.
Thea wedges between my legs, pushing them wider. She leans forward, inhaling my most secret scent, and, with each breath, leaves a whorled caress that makes me whimper. Her hands trace the outline of my shoulders and the sloping curves of my arms and my chest and continue down, taking my already heavy cock. My hand touches her hair, spreading it over her shoulders and my thighs until I feel her kiss, warm and fierce.
She kisses it, not lasciviously or like it’s a tool. She kisses it tenderly, like it is not an “it” at all. Like “it” is me.
I jerk when she takes me deep and long, exciting me with her mouth and gentling me with her hand along the tightening seam below, using a restrained rhythm that builds slowly until each new stroke makes me ache to come home inside this woman who has reminded me how to be untamed and immoderate. How to be real.
My hands slide and explore, reveling in each centimeter of her skin, the furrows of her ribs, the soft curve of her breasts with their taut tips. The slope to her belly and further until I twine one hand around her waist and cup her sex with the other and pull her up, feeling the pressure and dampness on my hand and the way her hips undulate against my palm in her need for more. No matter how tightly I hold my hand against her, her body twists against me, looking for more.
When I lift her up, her knees part on either side of my thighs and my thick crown pushes against her. She shudders, her head shaking fiercely as she puts her hands to my chest and pushes me away. “We need to stop,” she says, and straightening one leg, she reaches for her nightstand.
“You took me already, Thea.” I pull her back to me, kissing her lips and tasting the trace of salty muskiness there. She took me already.
“That’s because I believed you when you said you were very careful,” she says, pressing her forehead against mine. “No man with that many condoms and an apartment that OCD is going to play fast and loose with his body. But it doesn’t mean I can’t get pregnant.”
She starts to reach for her nightstand again, but I hold her one second longer. “Supposing it did. Supposing I told you that’s exactly what it meant. That I can’t get you pregnant. What then?”
That stops her.
She hesitates for a moment and then settles back on my lap, her legs wrapped around my hips, her arm crossed in front of her chest. “You’re…?”
“Sterile.” Which isn’t true, but it might as well be.
She looks me over carefully, as if she’s trying to gauge how the end of my bloodline makes me feel.
The answer is…elated. I can’t tell her how overwhelmingly grateful I am that she will never have to suffer through a lying-in—that I will never have to suffer through her lying-in—but she must see it in my eyes.
“And you’re okay with it?”
“Me? Absolutely. But the reason I told you has nothing to do with me and nothing to do with whether we use a condom tonight. It’s about the next night and the next and a whole lifetime of days and nights. It’s about a future with you. I need to be with you, but there are things I can’t give you. Not just children. I have…obligations, so while you would always have my heart and soul, you wouldn’t always have my bod… I mean, nobody else would have my body, because it doesn’t even work with anyone else anymore, but I couldn’t live here—”
“You’re rambling,” she says, putting her fingers to my lips. “I was seeing a guy before—”
“Doug?”
She frowns a little, trying, I suppose, to figure out how I know.
“He tried to warn me off. After Liebling died. Told me I wouldn’t be able to domesticate you.”
She offers a half smile and reaches behind her for a blanket. Of course she’s cold. She’s human. They get cold. I help her pull it over her back. I’ll have to get used to this.
“I’m not sure he was clear on what ‘domesticating’ meant. For him, it meant getting a television, a ‘real’ refrigerator, a sofa, and a couple of chi
ldren. He always said it in the same sentence as though children and refrigerator and television and sofa were all part of a set. Like patio furniture.”
She pushes my hair back from my forehead. “He didn’t understand that I didn’t need any of it. I like children when they come on field trips. They ask strange questions with no answers and questions so simple that I’ve never thought to ask. But I’ve never wanted to have a child. Like I could own another human being.”
I pull her hand to my lips and kiss her palm. I don’t want to have her either. I don’t want to mold her or domesticate her or change her, because she is my compass, and if she lost her way, I would be lost too.
Then she kisses my palm and presses our hands together. Our bodies together. Our mouths together.
She isn’t saying no.
Then she moves her hips in gentle waves over my erection, making me jerk uncontrollably.
She isn’t saying no.
I hold tight to her calves, keeping them spread wide. She lowers herself on me, slowly surrounding me with every soft, tough, liquid part of her until we are fully joined. I push her hips down, reveling in the fierce grip of her body and the teasing rhythm that mirrors the tiny pulsing of her finger that first day I met her, but now it is playing out on my cracking cock that can’t help twitching inside her. Carefully, so that I will not lose this connection, I turn her over, and only then, when she is splayed in front of me, do I pull myself most of the way out. Her hands push down on my lower back, right where my spine is going soft and spongy, and I slam home.
Home. Again and again and again, until it is impossible to be any deeper. And having tightened so far, there’s nothing left for it but to release everything I have into her body.
In the end, she falls asleep in my arms, swollen and saturated with me.
And I am home.
As the fire dies down, cool air is sucked into the chimney, bringing with it the faintest whiff of creosote. I hold Thea tighter. At the end of this moon, I will do whatever needs to be done to make sure the 9th is secure. When I leave, Celia will be Alpha, and I will be just another low-ranked Offlander.