Chapter 2 · Trapped

I didn't answer.

The iron was still ringing. Water bit my ankles, and Torin did not give me the inch. His hand stayed a breath off my coat. The flood hit the outside of the door harder than either of us.

"He's lying," I said.

"Kaelen doesn't guess." The quiet voice. The worse one. "Four miles of river. My truck is under it. I didn't walk that to hear a lie from both of you."

"Then hear this. There is no heir on the other side of that door. There is a rejected mate, a flood, and a man who should have stayed on the ridge."

"You broke the words." He didn't blink. "The door is a different thing. It stays shut."

I twisted my wrist down into the weak spot under his thumb and pulled. His grip broke. Not because I am stronger. Because it still had not occurred to him I would fight him with the river in the room. The bond scar under my ribs flared and went thin. Not the vows. Those were already said, in the rain, in front of forty wolves. The other part. The thread. It tugged once, ugly, and I stepped back before it could pull me into his coat.

He felt it. His palm hit his own chest like I had left a knife there.

"Briar."

"Don't." Both hands flat on the coat. Over nothing. Six weeks of nothing you can see. "It's done. You don't finish a claim in a hole in the ground."

He looked at my hands. He did not understand them. Good. I needed the herb to keep holding.

I slid down the iron until I was sitting in two inches of water. The paper in my pocket was not the clinic slip. I burned that in the truck four days ago. This was the page I tore out of the treaty binder on his desk. Article Nine. Severance releases the body. It says nothing about a child of the blood.

I did not need to unfold it. The nurse had said six weeks like a weather report, four days before the rite, and the ink had gone soft in the rain. Six weeks, his council, his line, all of it under my palm like a lit match.

If I told him, he would not pick me. He never had. He would pick the child so fast the territory would hear it, and I would be the woman in the corner while they carried it up and called it a blessing.

So no. Not from my mouth.

He crouched. Water climbed his boots. He did not touch my stomach. He touched the corner of the page where it stuck out of my fist, and he took it the way you take a weapon off someone smaller. I lunged. His knee pinned my thigh to the iron, and the page went up, out of the flood, into the one bulb.

"Article Nine," he read. His voice didn't change. "Severance releases the body." He turned it. Rain had eaten the next line into a gray smear, and he held it closer anyway. "It stops there. It doesn't say child."

"It doesn't have to."

"Then why is this the page you saved." He folded it once and put it in his own coat. I heard the pocket close. The only line I had that the law was finished with me was now on his side of the wool. "You don't get it back by asking."

"Give it here."

"No."

The bulb buzzed. Somewhere under us a pump missed and caught, and the miss went through the water into my spine. I could see the bolt past his hip. I could not see a second door. I had already looked. The room had not grown one.

"You made a mistake bringing that page into a flood," he said. "Paper dies. I don't. And I am between you and the only hinge."

"Then drown with your law."

"I didn't come here to drown." He stayed on the knee that had me pinned. Pine and cold rain and the heat he never spent in a bed. "I came because you said my name in front of forty wolves and ran before I could spend an answer. You don't get a second altar. You get this room."

"Then take the room and let me have the hinge."

"No."

"I'll give you the rest of the night. I'll stand where you can see me. Open the bolt one inch and I stay on this side of it."

"You already had a night you didn't use." His hand came up, not to my stomach, to the side of my throat, two fingers on the pulse the herb had not been able to flatten. The bond scar answered, hot and stupid. I hated it. I hated that he felt the answer and did not look pleased about it. "That is not a bargain. That is you asking me to be the door again. I'm not."

"Torin."

"Don't spend my name unless you're keeping it." The fingers stayed. The bolt stayed. "You want out, you tell me what Kaelen thinks he can use. Until then the iron holds, and so do I."

I got my feet under me. Standing put my throat at his mouth, and the herb tasted like pennies and failure. I went for his pocket and for the bolt in the same motion. He let my fingers find the bolt. He did not let them find the paper. His hand covered mine on the iron, and the bolt did not move, and my knuckles were pinned under his palm.

"Feel that," he said. "That is the only exit. It is not opening. Not for him. Not for you. The next thing that moves is my hand or your mouth."

"I pick the river."

"The river is already on the wrong side of this iron." He did not lift his hand. I felt his pulse in the back of mine. "Try again."

The knock came. Once. A man knocking on a door he thought he owned.

Torin's head came up. Not at me. At the iron.

"Say heir again," he told the door, "and I come through it."

The knocking stopped. The quiet was worse.

He looked back at my hands. He threw the inner bolt the rest of the way. The sound was small and final.

His hand left the iron. It came to the coat, and this time it did not stop in the air. His fingers took a fold of wet wool over my stomach and held it.

"Say he's lying," he said. "A full sentence. Or I open this and ask it myself."

The wool started to lift.