Chapter 3: Paid in Full
His room was not what you'd imagined, and you'd imagined it more than you'd admit.
You'd pictured black leather and red light and something theatrical, a throne maybe, a wall of weapons. Instead it was quiet and lived-in. Books stacked on the floor beside a reading chair. A record player with a sleeve propped against it. A huge bed under a window that ran floor to ceiling, the city glowing beyond the glass. On the nightstand, a half-finished cup of tea, gone cold.
He set the scale down beside the tea like it was nothing, like it wasn't the thing he'd spent years hunting. Then he turned around and looked at you standing in the middle of his room in your borrowed silk with your heels in your hand.
"Second thoughts?" he asked.
"No." You dropped the heels. "I was just thinking you read a lot more than I expected."
"I have a lot of nights." He crossed the room. He took his time about it. "I'm hoping to have fewer."
He kissed you standing up, both hands framing your face, and this time there was no driver, no seat, no city sliding past. There was just him, and the soft sound of the zip at your back going down, and the cool air on your skin as the dress slid off your shoulders and pooled at your feet. He stepped back to look. You let him. His eyes moved over you slowly, and when they came back up to your face they had gone darker, the red burning low and steady.
"I'm going to need a minute," Sylus said, "to commit this to memory."
"You have a crow for that."
"Mephisto is not allowed in this room," he said gravely. "Ever."
You laughed, and then you stopped laughing, because you'd reached for his coat and he'd let you take it, and then the shirt, and you'd found the scars. They ran in faint pale lines across his ribs and over one shoulder, and on his left side, just under the heart, there was a patch of skin that wasn't quite skin. It was smooth and dark and patterned like scales that had healed over, with one ragged gap in the pattern, exactly the size of your palm.
You touched it. He went very still.
"That's where it goes," you said.
"That's where it went," he corrected softly. "Duvall's father took it. A long time ago. Before I learned to be careful." His hand came up and covered yours, pressing your palm flat against the gap. His heart beat hard and slow beneath it. "It doesn't hurt anymore. It just feels like something's missing."
You didn't know what to say to that, so you didn't say anything. You leaned in and put your mouth where your hand had been.
The breath went out of him. His fingers slid into your hair and held, not pulling, just holding, and when you looked up at him his face was open in a way you hadn't seen it yet. No lazy amusement. No control. Just want, plain and enormous.
He picked you up. You wrapped your legs around his waist and he carried you the three steps to the bed and laid you down on it like he had all the time in the world, and then proved that he did.
He undressed the rest of the way while you watched, unhurried, letting you look. He was beautiful in a way that should have been unfair, long and lean and hard-muscled, all of it scored with old marks that told stories you wanted to hear later. He knelt between your knees on the bed and ran his palms up the insides of your thighs, and kissed his way up after them, and by the time his mouth was where you wanted it you were already arching off the sheets.
He was thorough. Of course he was. He learned you the way you'd learned the lock in Duvall's vault: patiently, attentively, with a craftsman's pleasure in every small give. His mouth was hot and slow and devastating, his hands spread wide on your hips to hold you where he wanted you, and every time you got close he eased off and looked up at you over the length of your body with those burning eyes until you swore at him. "Language, sweetie," he murmured against your thigh, sounding enormously pleased, and then he didn't ease off, and you came apart with your hands fisted in his hair and his name breaking in your throat.
When he moved up your body, he was smiling. You pulled him down and kissed it off his face.
"Still yes?" he said against your mouth. His voice had gone to gravel.
"If you ask me that one more time—"
"I'll ask you every time," Sylus said. "Get used to it."
Then he pushed into you, slow, and you stopped being able to argue.
He went deep and stayed there, his forehead against yours, both of you breathing hard, his whole body trembling with the effort of holding still. You'd thought he'd be overwhelming. He was. But not the way you'd imagined. He was overwhelming the way the ocean is: steady, patient, inescapable. He moved like he'd decided to take you apart one long stroke at a time and had nowhere else to be. You wrapped your legs around him and dug your heels into the small of his back and told him to stop being so careful, and he laughed low in his chest and said, "Make me," and so you did, rolling your hips up to meet him until the careful rhythm broke and he was gripping the headboard with one hand and your hip with the other, and the city outside the window blurred into streaks of red and gold.
At the end, he said your name. Not sweetie. Your real name, which you'd never told him, which he must have known since the crow first saw you. He said it like it was something he'd been holding in his mouth for days, and when he came, he held you so tightly you could feel his heart pounding against your chest, right where the scale should be.
Afterward, he didn't let go.
You woke up to alarms.
Not loud ones. A low, pulsing tone from somewhere in the walls, and red light washing faintly across the ceiling. Sylus was already out of bed, already half-dressed, pulling his shirt on over the scars with a calm that frightened you more than panic would have.
"Duvall," he said, before you could ask. "He found the feather. He's brought friends." He glanced at the window. Down in the plaza, you could see headlights, at least a dozen vehicles, figures spilling out. "Hired Evolvers. Some of them are good."
You were out of bed and pulling his discarded shirt over your head before he finished. "What do you need?"
He paused in buttoning his cuffs and looked at you. Something passed across his face that you couldn't name.
"I need you to stay in this room," he said. "Lock the door. Luke will come for you if—"
"No."
"Sweetie."
"No," you said again, and went to the nightstand, and picked up the scale. It was warm. It pulsed in your hand, slow and deep, in time with something. In time with him, you realized. "This is what he wants back, right? This is what makes you vulnerable. A missing piece." You held it out. "So put it back."
Sylus stared at you.
"I can't," he said. "Not on my own. It has to be given. That's the rule. It's always been the rule. The one who took it, or the one who brought it back, has to put it in place." His voice dropped. "That's why I needed a thief, sweetie. Not for the vault. I could have torn the vault open with my bare hands. I needed someone who'd carry it out of there of their own will, and then choose to give it to me."
The alarms pulsed. Somewhere downstairs, glass broke. You heard Kieran's voice raised, cheerful and furious.
"Then I choose," you said.
You stepped forward, pulled his half-buttoned shirt open, and pressed the scale into the gap over his heart.
It went in like a key into a lock. The light flared, red-black and blinding, and Sylus made a sound you'd never heard from a man, low and ancient and not quite human, and for one long moment, in the glass of the window behind him, you saw the shadow of something vast, winged, crowned, coiling up against the night sky.
Then it was just him again. Breathing hard. Eyes blazing so bright they lit your face.
He looked down at you. He put his hand over yours, still flat against his chest, against the smooth unbroken scales.
"Your debt," he said hoarsely, "is paid. In full. All of it. You can walk out of here and never see me again."
"Is that what you want?"
"No," Sylus said. "What I want is for you to wait right here while I go downstairs and teach Duvall a lesson about other people's property, and then come back up and spend the rest of the night, and the next one, and the one after that, trying to deserve you." His jaw worked. "I'm in love with you. I think I have been since you saluted the crow. That's inconvenient for both of us, and I don't care."
Your heart did something complicated and enormous.
"There's a workshop," you said. "With a window. You owe me that."
He laughed. It cracked in the middle.
"Second floor, east side," he said. "I had it built the day after Luke brought you in. I was going to show you after the gala." He leaned in and kissed you, quick and fierce. "Lock the door. I'll be back in ten minutes."
"Five," you said.
He grinned, all teeth, and for the first time you saw the dragon in it.
"Five," he agreed, and walked out to meet the war in his shirt sleeves, with his heart whole and his crow screeching gleefully overhead.
You locked the door. Then you went to the window to watch.
Below, Duvall's army had just begun to realize their mistake.