Oberon said: she will find out.
Yes. I have always known this. I built the plan around a woman who finds out everything, because that is what makes her exceptional. When the heat breaks and the spy reassembles herself, she will apply those eyes to everything in this court. She will find every thread. She will pull them.
What I don't know—what I have not been able to calculate in six months of planning—is what she will do then.
I have known, in advance, what every claimed omega would do. I have been able to map it because the dependency runs and the bond warms and the choices narrow in predictable ways. Claire Whitmore saidI have conditionsat thirty-one dayspre-heat with her thighs soaked and her body one step from breaking, and she held it, and that is not a woman whose choices narrow in predictable ways.
She will find out what I did.
I already know what I'm going to do when that happens.
I'm going to let her.
I put both hands in her hair. She shifts closer in her sleep, unconscious and certain. Her heartbeat against my ribs. The bond between us warm and new and already more specific than anything I was prepared for—not just warmth and pull, but her, distinctly her, the particular way she is that I have been watching for six months and am now watching from the inside.
Not long,I thought, looking at her photograph on a Thursday.
Not long at all.
I hold her. I wait for morning.
12
CLAIRE
Iwake up and I'm myself again.
Not gradually—all at once, present and thinking and mine. The heat is gone. I know before I open my eyes because for five days I haven't woken up as myself first and today I do, and the difference is the same as the difference between being underwater and not being underwater. My thoughts are my own. My decisions are mine. I exist again as a person who makes them.
I open my eyes.
His rooms. Morning light through the tall windows, grey and flat. The fire long dead. I'm in his bed—I knew that—and the state of it is something I am going to look at practically: I have been in heat for five days. The evidence is present on the sheets and on my skin and I am a professional intelligence operative who has survived worse field conditions, and I am going to take stock.
What do I know. Where am I. What happened.
What happened is written on my skin.
The claiming marks are at my throat, my collarbone, my shoulders—mist-patterns in silver, shifting slightly when I touch them, like the grounds outside. Permanent. I know what that means. I put my hand down.
There is a warmth in my chest that has a direction. I can feel him in the room without looking. I'm going to have to learn to live with that, apparently.
I have five days I can't fully account for. I have fragments: his hands, the cold of him, his voice at my ear, and my own voice sayingyours—at least four times that I can piece together. Four times of sayingyoursand meaning it with everything I had, and every time I locate another one in the frayed record of the last five days I feel the shame of it fresh.Yours.Into his throat. Through tears. While he was between my thighs and I had forgotten my own name. A professional intelligence operative in the field with a claimed mark on her throat and approximately no memory of deciding any of it.
There is also the memory—vivid, specific, mortifying—of begging him to put his mouth on me again while he had both cocks inside me and I was crying and didn't care. I locate this memory at around day three. I put it with the others.
The professional part of me would like to begin an after-action review. What I have to review is: I asked an enemy lord to go down on me while I was being knotted and cried about it. This is not a review with a satisfactory conclusion.
I look.
He'sat the window with a report he isn't reading.
He turns before I move—truth-sight, or the bond, I'm going to have to work out which. He sets the report on the ledge andlooks at me across the room. Dark brown skin, dozens of silver braids over one shoulder, the particular quality of his stillness I spent thirty-eight days trying to read. Nothing on his face that tells me anything. He's been waiting for me to wake up.
He crosses to the chair on the far side of the room. Not the bed. Not closer. He sits and puts his hands on his knees and does not reach toward me.
He's being careful about distance. He wants me to see him being careful about it.
"The heat broke two hours ago," he says. "You've been sleeping since."