möbius.

[Danicka Musil] It's very late when Lukas's phone rings, or chimes, or buzzes, or trembles in his pocket -- whatever it does when he receives a text message. 'Very late' is relative, though; the man was not intending to go to bed until dawn the second time she saw him in Chicago, and so Danicka is not terribly concerned about the message waking him. Hell, she may even be hoping it disturbs him.

An address. There's no hint of who even sent the message, unless somewhere along the line he stored her number. Just an address.

At the address is a bar, and it isn't pretty. It's a black box of a building, the brick face painted over but chipping here and there, revealing rocky smears of red, of gray, of mortar that was once white. There are windows but they're covered with posters and flyers, layers upon layers of the things. The sign over the door isn't neon, it's just painted white. It would be invisible if it weren't for the fact that the streetlights -- which flutter but don't ever quite flicker -- weren't reflecting off of the paint. This is Mr. C's. It has a narrow alley on one side, and a lane that leads to parking in the back.

Inside the music is low; most of the noise comes from people talking. For a Monday night it's relatively full; this isn't a place meant for dancing. People drink here, meet their dealer in the parking lot, play darts because there's not enough room for pool tables. There's a jukebox near the bar, and like every other damn dive bar in the country tonight, the jukebox is playing 'Free Bird'.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The number is not stored, but let's be honest: Lukas recognizes it. There's no message, just an address, and for a second there's a part of him that wants to text her back, call her back, demand what the fuck she wanted and why she thought she could summon a fullblooded Lord to her at her whim.

Then he snaps his phone shut and, with a groan that hints at displeasure, vaults up off his bed. It's warm enough that he doesn't have to dress in his overcoat and scarf and gloves. He throws on a light jacket and is out the door.

Twenty minutes later, the unassuming Ford pulls up in the parking lot. The man that gets out of it is a lot less unassuming and nondescript. The moon is blisteringly full, and addicts smoking their cigarettes around back eye him askance as he walks in. He doesn't bother looking around for her: he just hits redial on his phone and calls her.

"Is there a reason I'm here?" -- that, as soon as she picks up.

[Danicka Musil] The building is too small for there to be very many people here at a given time, but it's also incredibly dark. There's lights around the bar and a few sconces in between the dartboards, and the jukebox is lit up, but other than that, it's dark enough to hide just how much of a dive this place is. Guitars are going insane from the speakers and there's still five minutes left in the song.

Lukas did not call Danicka back, text her back, to school her -- not for the first time -- in the fact that she has no right to be summoning a trueborn anywhere, much less an Ahroun of her own Tribe. He did not remain lying on his bed and ignore it, and somewhere along the line he must have been taught that effective discipline and dismissal is so much better achieved in person.

As for Danicka, she wouldn't have been hard to pick out if he were looking. She's sitting at a table with a group of three, humans he wouldn't know and won't remember, when her phone vibrates in her pocket. She doesn't bother looking at it as she pulls it out and answers; her eyes are on the front wall, the door, the man who just walked in, while one of her three companions faceplants on the table.

"Obviously," is all she says. Or you wouldn't be.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "Care to tell me why?" He's watching the room as he dials, and when she picks up, he sees her by her motion. A predator's eye is attracted to that: motion. "And what the hell happened to your friend there?"

The faceplanter, of course.

[Danicka Musil] Her hair is down, in the loose waves it falls into naturally. The light on her phone is on when she first picks up, illuminating her fair skin momentarily before it shuts off once more now that the call is in progress. From what he can see of her, she's wearing something long-sleeved, dark, the V-neck low enough that he can see there are no telltale marks on her collarbone as there were on the first of the month. Not tonight.

He sees her eyes flick to the drinker who just went down facefirst onto the sticky, gouged-top table, then back to Lukas. "I sent you an address; you showed up. Could say that I invited you, and you came. Might be a bit too simple to surmise that I just wanted to see you, and for whatever reasons of your own you wanted to come, but I'd say it's distinctly possible that's all there is to it."

Beat. "And I have no idea, I just got here."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's a strange disconnect -- seeing her across the room, hearing her voice in his ear. At this distance, in this light, they are indistinct at best. She can see him only a little better than he can see her. In the light of the single lamp over the door, he's an impression of strength and shadows, his jeans dark, his jacket dark.

He considers her for a moment. Then: "Come here." And he clicks the phone shut, puts it away.

Lukas steps away from the door to find his own table. He picks one in the corner. There's another guy there, but when Lukas asks -- politely -- if he could sit here to wait for his friend, the other fellow takes the hint and gets the fuck lost. The Shadow Lord unzips his jacket, takes it off, tosses it over the back of his chair.

It's a longsleeved pullover underneath with a short, zippered collar, the material finewoven and thin, but heavy, with a measure of stretch, a definite drape. Lukas seems to prefer these fabrics, casual, but with a certain elegance. He sits down at his table, flicks someone's chewed-clean chicken wing bone off the table, and then raises his eyes to wait.

[Danicka Musil] There is a six-foot semicircle of empty space around the front door, radiating out from the point where he stands. It's bad enough on a full moon, still full enough to the human eye. People are liable to do crazy things under its influence. Even were she not aware of the nature of the world as it truly is, Danicka would believe wholeheartedly in the concept of lunacy: children, in her experience, are always more difficult when the moon is full than they are the rest of the month. And why not? The moon pulls the tides. The human body is mostly water.

There's that. And the fact that every single monster she's ever met has been that much more likely to snap when the Earth's shy satellite is this bold in the sky. That much more likely to pull a building down around their very ears. That much more likely to break her in half.

In the corner, Lukas is underneath a speaker, the music turning now to the opening bars of AC/DC's secret theme song for the Shadow Lords, but it sails over his head and into the center of the room. Danicka hears the order and kills the call, sliding her phone away again. She gets her coat off the back of her seat and pushes back with her legs, standing up. The two other people at the table who are still conscious look up as she moves to leave them, but don't stall her. When she gets closer, it's clear she's in jeans, her sweater a rich, deep blue.

She sets her coat over the back of the chair facing his and sits down. Her forearms fold on top of the table, which is surely disgusting even though in the dark they can't see it, and leans forward slightly, head easily falling slightly to one side. Her posture could be called challening. It could be called petulant. The expression on her face is neither. If anything, it could be called: Okay. I'm here.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] He watches her approach. It's possible he can see the exact second she passes out of free space and into the radius of his rage. It's like a fell sort of gravity, that rage: terrifying, compelling, deadly enough in certain scenarios. Lukas watches the woman sit, and then, faintly impatient, his fingers tap on the sticky tabletop.

"Why did you call me here," he asks again, but this is really a different question, "of all places?"

[Danicka Musil] That question has an even easier answer -- and, in her estimation, the first answer was plenty easy -- so Danicka just shrugs her shoulders slightly. "Well, here's the thing." She lifts one hand, elbow on the table and digits counting off in midair, starting with her thumb: "I go to nightclubs, and I see your packmates. I go to coffee shops, and I see your packmates...with rather odd regularity." Her brows pull together at this, a wry little mockery of a frown that passes quickly before she goes on: "I go to the Brotherhood, and I'm damn sure going to see your packmates. I go to a pizza parlor on the way home and..."

She doesn't even need to say you see where this is going.

Danicka lowers her arm again. "Now this isn't exactly empirical data by any means, but I've been here a full fifteen minutes and haven't seen any of your packmates but the one I specifically asked to come here, so I'd say it was a good choice."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas does not laugh. He does not chuckle. He does not grin. He doesn't even smile.

The moon is full; that could be his excuse, but that's not all of it. She saw him last night, and he was -- shall we say -- not happy. It's not so bad tonight; but even so, he is not the level, lazy creature he was at the club that first night, nor the quiet reader that second. She could flatter herself that it's her presence that disquiets him so, but then, Danicka doesn't seem the type to fool herself.

Still. There's a restlessness to him tonight, something about the way he sits. Something about the way he keeps shifting his weight as if he couldn't quite get comfortable. Something about the way he watches her, unfriendly, and the way his eyes keep flickering to the cut of her neckline, the slice of skin exposed there until at last he realizes he's doing it, and simply looks at her, boldly, critically, for half a minute or more.

Then he raises his eyes back to hers, steady on hers now. "This place is a shithole," he says. And then, without missing a beat, "Did you want an apology for last night?"

[Danicka Musil] It could be said that Danicka is the only person that Danicka doesn't lie to. And that would be in the category so few things go into: absolute truth. He'd snapped at Sam that from the beginning he's had nothing but the cold, hard truth, and that had twisted a knife she somehow shoved under her own ribs with an earlier, unspoken epiphany. That had been an odd night...a difficult night. Last night doesn't even compare.

She knows damn well what he is, and what the moon means. She also knows her limits better than most people under the age of twenty-five. Better than most people under the age of fifty. The fact that he's here is one thing, the fact that his eyes keep going to her skin is one thing, but the overall tension? The anger? The bullshit at the pizza parlor? Danicka knows better, or at least enough to know: It's not me.

Cold, hard truth.

As usual, she meets his eyes for a spare two seconds before they drop to his cheekbones. Danicka just gives a single nod when he proclaims Mr. C's to be a shithole. Yes. But his question of whether or not she wants an apology or not gets her eyebrows lifting, her nod stopping mid-shake. The corner of her mouth twitches, and then she decides not to restrain it from curling into a bemused smirk. "For what?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "How should I know?" he volleys it back to her immediately. "I couldn't figure out why else you'd keep seeking me out when my pack and I so obviously despise you."

[Mrena Armstrong] The Wednesday forecast predicted rain and scattered thunderstorms for the area.

Mrena was counting down the days.

But, for the time being, Ms. Armstrong was at a seedy bar that she had no purpose being in. She was under-aged. She had been under-aged for some time; as long as Lukas had known her, Mrena Armstrong had been armed with a fake ID and a too-sweet smile. Thus far, in her life, it had served her well. She had a face that was difficult to say no to.

Places like this? No one cared if she had ID or not, whether it was real or not. Her money was as good as anyone else's.

Places like this had a different sort of clientele than the others she'd visited in town. A pub, an upscale club with thumping music and expensive drinks. The same risks lived here than anywhere else- GHB, drunken assholes, and people who needed to be shown that no really did mean no. That was, however, not the point. Mrena had come to the bar to grab a beer, watch people, and then get back on the streets. There were things in this city that she needed to see; the city was different at night than it was during the day.

She slipped through the front, and for a moment she was very much the girl from Boston she used to be. Jeans were worn and comfortable, shirt was just another long-sleeved, dark grey number coupled with a fleece pullover. There wasn't much indication to Mrena's form, little to show that she had curves and a vague idea of how to use them. Her hair was pulled back out of her face in half-assed french braid. It had probably been nice int he morning, but by now Mrena had lived in it for awhile.

By and large, it was all a choice of downplaying features. Of not drawing attention to herself. And, for the most part, it seemed to work.

[Danicka Musil] It might be notable that neither Lukas nor Danicka have their back to the open areas of the miniscule box of a bar. They are across from one another in the corner, her left shoulder to one wall and his right to the one that meets it. Both of them have but to turn their head to see the door. Neither of them are turning their heads.

The first four words out of Lukas's mouth get nothing but a lifted eyebrow, the sort of Look one could easily imagine her giving a snotty teenager. It lowers as he goes on, her affect softening slightly as though he said something completely different from an profession of collective loathing.

"You know the answer to that question."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] He's quiet for a beat, his eyebrows low over his cold eyes, as though he'd said something completely different from despise and loathe and abhor. Then his eyes drop again, follow the fine tendons of her neck to the juncture of collarbones; down. Danicka is not the type to wear flaunting, revealing clothing, but there's skin there, nonetheless, and the skin is flawless, and white, and her body moves as she breathes, gently.

He doesn't even bother hiding that he looks. Has he looked before? He must have; and he did not hide it then, likely. Lukas does not hide these things. He digs out what another man would hide and conceal and bury; he rips it out of him like a sacrifice and he strews it out on the table for all to see, as if by dissecting the bloody contents of his heart and viscera he might rid himself of some weight, or taint, or flaw.

"Want has nothing to do with like, Danička," he says, quieter now. "Or with trust."

He looks her in the eye again, their eyes meeting across a scarred and sticky table, an expanse of dark and beer-stinking air. He gives every impression of confidence, of relaxation: his back against the chair, his balance low and sprawled, his left wrist propped over the back of an empty, nearby chair.

"Why were you with Martin last night?" Another shift of subject, like trains switching tracks; and he's careless again, restless to the point of reckless. "Fucking him too?"

[Mrena Armstrong] They weren't turning their heads and Mrena, for her part, seemed more than content to give them their space. The bar was small- a hole-in-the-wall joint whose sound system consisted of a jukebox. Truth be told, she kind of liked it. But the sound system or the size of the establishment was hardly the point; Lukas' attention was on Danicka. Danicka's attention was on Lukas. And White Eyes, for her part, was more content to blend into the scenery.

And to go order a beer. Which she did.

[Danicka Musil] It's true that Lukas has never seen Danicka in clothes meant to reveal more than they cover. Then again, it's winter. Then again, he has only ever seen her in rather specific situations. He's never caught her off guard, somewhere she's not supposed to be or isn't expecting to be found. Even being here is rather outside of what one might assume is her 'type' of place, and she looks like she doesn't belong here regardless of how calm she seems about inhabiting a 'shithole' like this. But she's here because it's someplace she hasn't seen any of his packmates.

So far, she still hasn't seen the one that just walked in. She hasn't taken her eyes off Lukas since she sat down. Her eyes haven't been wandering along his jaw or his shoulders, haven't watched his hands. She knows he's looked. The sweater she's wearing, in another environment, should have been paired with a camisole underneath, something with a hint of lace or maybe just a seamless band of fabric. As it is, if she were to lean forward much farther she would indeed be revealing more than just the pale skin over her sternum.

Danicka is pale; she doesn't come from a terribly sunny part of the country and it's only just now starting to regularly be above freezing outside. Of course she's pale, though there's a healthy color in her cheeks and warmth to her eyes. He keeps looking down. She either does not care or is acting like she doesn't, and with Danicka it's damn near impossible to tell the difference.

And then he looks up. Her eyebrow quirks but words like 'want' and -- her mouth twitches again with restrained amusement -- 'trust' pass through the air between them without comment from the blonde woman. Why was she with Martin last night? "We were going to get a pizza after Ms. Malikoff's little shindig," she says, graciously ignoring the rest, whether it was a true question or meant to straight-arm her away from him or something else entirely. "You know what I find strange?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "The fact that your head is still on your shoulders when you dodge so many of my questions?" And Lukas bares his teeth, something like a grin.

[Danicka Musil] In this form his sense of smell isn't quite as impressive as it is in any other; his hearing is no sharper than any other human's. He might be able to hear her heart in her chest, if that were the case. His teeth being bared is worse than just sitting across from him tonight; she weathers it.

"The fact that you know why I'm here, you 'despise' me, and you. Haven't. Left yet."

[Mrena Armstrong] "Whadayawant, kid?"

The sound was familiar. Rang true of being sixteen and drinking with her cousin- the girl whose eyes were too dark, whose smile was too sharp, whose rage was too thick to be that pretty. They'd never been close, but being a bad influence, the least the Ahroun could do was buy her a beer. before she had met her pack, Elena "Lainey" Voropoeva had been her drinking buddy, her confedante, her meat shield and partner in youthful debauchery. Mrena, in turn, served as Lainey's pseudo best friend and, as a result, her punching bag as well.

Not the point. Point being that the bartender was asking Mrena what she wanted to drink and she was momentarily lost on a moment of thought. She blinked, then looked at him for a long moment before her reply. "Got michelobe ultra?... Bottle, not draft."

Because, on some level, she didn't trust anyone here to give her an opened container. Need me to give you two a moment? and that was the herald to her arrival. That one statement across the totem link, uninflected and unaffected as ever. Once she got her bottle and opened it? She took a drink.

From that point? Mrena never once looked in their direction.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There's a pause. It's dark in here, or he might see her fear on her face. Then again, maybe not. Danicka is nothing if not a liar; her and her sins of omission.

"What do you think pointing it out will accomplish?" he replies then, coolly. "You know I want you. I know I want you. What do more do you expect?"

And, "Answer my question."

And, I don't know.

[Danicka Musil] He'd see it in her eyes, if she would meet his. Other than the glancing seconds of eye contact that she gives, her eyes are hooded enough and downcast enough that he would have to force her to look straight at him if he wanted to try and glean anything out of those supposed portals. If he were in another form he could probably sense it more easily, with senses more honed. As it is, he has body language to go off of, and she is in control of that to the point of flat-out deception. Danicka isn't trembling, her voice doesn't quaver, but her breathing is...more noticable.

"I'm far less task-oriented than you are, Lukáš," she says, to answer the first. Her eyes flick up then, at the first I want you. Her lashes flash downward and then up again at the second. Her gaze stays there on his for a moment, and then slide away again, this time to one of his earlobes. She has no idea that Mrena is there, that she's seen them, that she's speaking to him. Her attention, all of it for now, is on Lukas.

"And no, I am not 'fucking' Martin," she says levelly. "Like I said: we were getting a pizza." Beat. "Or trying to."

Her feet press against the floor, pushing her chair back an inch or two, and Danicka gets to her feet, picking up her coat from the back of the chair. She doesn't turn on her heel to go; her very standing comes out of nowhere. Then she does what no one in this room other than his own pack-sister should find tolerable tonight, and skirts the small table, coming to his side.

[Danicka Musil] Any other man, any other night, and she might lean over at this point. She might even touch him. Danicka and Lukas haven't had much in the way of physical contact since meeting. A handshake one night. His hand on the back of her neck a week later. And that's all. Both times, he has moved to initiate it. Danicka doesn't touch him now, or try to. Her hands don't twitch longingly towards him.

She stands perhaps three inches from his chair, well within arm's reach, and looks down at him, keying her voice low. The speaker over their heads carries Poison into the rest of the bar but doesn't quite let the music invade this space. She doesn't need to speak up.

"I'll be very blunt," Danicka says, meeting his eyes for more than two seconds. For more than five. "I will fuck your brains out in any hotel in this city until neither of us can walk. I will make you come so hard you see eternity. I will be as loyal as you are. ...I will make you your favorite koláče sometimes. I'll do this until we're tired of each other. And if you ask me why, then you're a moron."
to Lukas Wyrmbreaker

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] She stands. For a second he thinks she might be leaving -- it's past before he can decide if he welcomes the news or mourns it, or both.

But she's not leaving. She's coming closer. And Lukas straightens imperceptibly, which is not to say he sits up. He doesn't. He remains as he is, sprawled with his wrist over the neighboring chair, at repose. But something about him stills, though he hadn't moved at all.

He watches her like a wolf watches prey -- like a caged animal watches freedom.

When she's closer, she can see his jaw is stubbled as if he hasn't shaved for a day or three. She can see the way the light, what little there is, sheens in his pale eyes -- the blue of them lost to the dark, leaving nothing but the icy pale. When she's close enough that she will either brush his arm or he will move it, he drops his hand from the empty chair, lets it swing down to his side, fingers open. She comes to his side and he looks away from her rather than up at her, stares moodily into the middle distance as she stops right beside him, three inches away.

Neither of them reach toward each other. She does not bend to speak in his ear. She just stands there, and she speaks, and he listens, and at one point

(fuck your brains out)

his lashes flicker, nearly a blink; and at another

(as you are)

his head turns, a fast, raptorlike gesture, crisp at the edges. "I don't believe you," he says, flatly, sparing her nothing. And again, "I don't trust you." A beat. "You've no one but yourself to blame for that."

[Danicka Musil] She's used to being looked at. In a thousand different ways. Garou. Kin. Mortals. She's used to being watched, and perhaps that's why she's such a consummate actress. Maybe it's all about control, ultimately: she cannot stop anyone from staring at her, or watching her, or scrutinizing her, and so she maintains a firm grip on what can and cannot be seen. She ducks her eyes when she looks at werewolves and the vast majority of this interpret it as deference, as fear, and for all they know their assumption is as true as anything else they see on her that they want to see. Danicka does not correct them.

They don't touch, and her eyes stay on him the entire time she's speaking even though he refuses to look at her until the very -- bitter -- end. Danicka doesn't flinch at the swift turn of his head. Her lips slowly close after she speaks; she licks them, but this isn't seduction. The moon is full and she's in arm's reach of someone who for various reasons has her heart slamming inside of her chest. Her breathing is faster than normal; her mouth and lips are dry and she doesn't have a beer or a bottle of water with her.

If his words have any effect on her, it is about as smoothly accepted as water flowing over rocks that have had water flowing over them for centuries. She doesn't argue for his trust, or ask him what she's done, for evidence that she is not as trustworthy as damn near every person who knew her name in New York City would call her. She just looks back at him, maintaining eye contact for longer than she ever has before.

And Danicka addresses not his trust, not her blame, but his belief: "Try me."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] This cannot be easy -- holding the Ahroun's eyes. On this moon. In his mood. With lust and anger hanging between them like a two-edged blade. But she does. And for what it's worth, he holds the stare too -- her eyes no longer green here, nor blue, nor any color at all but what seeps from the bar's cloudy lamps and rattling lights.

They are close enough that even without the heightened senses of another form, he can see her pulse hammering at her throat. He can almost smell her

(fear. desire.)

perfume, if she wears any, or her moisturizers, or her skin, though the three inches yawn between like a chasm. His hand does not move toward her. He curls his fingers into a slow fist, and then, suddenly, he gets to his feet.

Perhaps she jumps back. If she doesn't, his chair does -- pushed back by the momentum of his rising, cracking against the wall. The weave of his shirt is fine enough, heavy enough, that the shadows of his body delineate his musculature. He is strong enough to throw a chair against a wall, casually, and break it; strong enough to tear an enemy to shreds. He snags his coat off the back of his chair, shakes it out, puts it on without looking at her, takes his keys out. He is clearly leaving, and perhaps for a second, she thinks he'll simply walk out like this, without so much as a goodbye.

But he doesn't. He looks at her, coolly. There's no inflection in his tone -- nothing but a calmness, a steadiness that verges on carelessness.

"Well, are you coming or not?"

[Danicka Musil] He's never smelled perfume on her. Shampoo, yes, but it just smells like the expensive stuff it is, lightly fragranced but not 'strawberries and cream' or 'vanilla sugar' or 'lilacs and periwinkle moonlight'. Soap, something creamy but ultimately not a scent that lingers or overpowers. Danicka smells like Danicka, at least on the occasions he's been around her. The time she sat next to him in the Brotherhood, she smelled a little like the pastries she'd just brought in.

As for fear, or desire, he doesn't have to look far. She is letting him see both, because she hasn't yet dropped his eyes. And no, it's not easy, and so this may be his first real indication that her lack of eye contact has never been completely about fear. Not totally. Danicka keeps her stare on his for long enough that he doesn't need to put his hand on her chest to feel her heart beating, he wouldn't need to hear her whimper to sense her lust: she gives him her gaze, and so she gives him that much insight without hesitation.

She decided long before she got here, long before they sat down together, to say what she did. That is why she doesn't jump back, or drop her eyes, or tremble. That is why she doesn't blush. That is why she stands quite still as he gets up, watching him as though she is just waiting for him to...what?

Catch up.

Yet he gets his coat on before she unfolds hers, his keys jangle, and then he looks at her again. Danicka tips her head. She regards him patiently. "Well, if you'll tell me where we're going."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "There's a motel down the street."

He fits the zipper to its shuttle; whisks it up to mid-chest in a single pull. He faces her directly. A man should look on a woman with love, or desire, or at least kindness, if he's about to take her to bed for the first time. Lukas' face is cold and hard, jaw set.

"You don't mind, do you?" And he holds his hand out for hers, palm down.

[Mrena Armstrong] She took a moment and finished off her beer. Her eyes went back to her packmate ever so briefly. She had been quiet for the longest time, and hadn't responded across the line. White Eyes had simply finished the beer she wasn't supposed to have and turned around.

She stood up just in time to see Lukas and Danicka far too close. To hear the chair hit the wall with a crack and to watch him leave. The theurge didn't turn around just yet, nor did she make any sort of indication that she was going to. Impending storm was all but forgotten in favor of a different one. Tell me if you need anything, I'll be on this side of town for awhile, she said. Something out of obligation and duty at that moment.

She sat her bottle down, a little harder than she had originally anticipated, not enough to reverberate in the air but enough that it made the bartender look back. Made him wonder if there was a little more muscle under that fleece pullover than he had originally anticipated. The way silvery eyes seemed to take the pair in did not suit her body. It was too hard. She looked at the two of them in the same way that she looked at a painting.

With a degree of disconcerting scrutiny.

And she took her opportunity to leave out the front, the exact same way she came in, and in an almost uncharacteristic fashion, the ethereal young lady didn't make a wave. And she blended into the crowd.

[Danicka Musil] No one but Danicka, apparently, has been let in on Katherine's little preference for her to stay the hell away from the members of the Unbroken Circle. Well, those weren't Ms. Bellamonte's exact words. She requested that Danicka refrain from getting involved romantically with her packmates. There doesn't seem to be a great deal of romance in the air at the moment. Rage, yes. Quickened heartbeats, indeed. This is not a fine restaurant, however, no drinks have passed either of their lips, and he's not in a tie and she's not wearing a dress.

He looks at her like he hates her; she looks at him like a child who doesn't know how to listen. "What did I say?" she asks him, as a patient reminder.

Danicka's eyes flick to his hand, considering. Then she lifts her left, fingers loosely curled upward, and very, very lightly strokes the tips of her fingernails across his palm. They fall away before they touch his fingers, and she looks up at him again. "I'll follow you."

With that, she drops her leather coat free from where it's folded over her right forearm and puts it on, running her hand over the back of her neck to get her hair free, turning to go for the door.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] What did I say?

-- her hand falls away; only it doesn't. He doesn't quite lunge forward, but the hint of it is there; the intent, the speed. His hand locks around her wrist.

"Everything I wanted you to."

He drops her hand a second later. She puts her coat on and he does not assist her. He flanks her on the way to the door, unless of course she can't bear that, upon which he walks with her, side by side.

Chicago at night in the slums: cool, but no longer cold. There's only a little snow left on the streets, only in the shadows where no sun touches, the nooks and the crannies. It is dirty in this part of down, speckled with grime and debris, stained with unsavory and nameless things. Lukas draws a breath as the shock of the temperature after the close, booze-soaked warmth of the bar -- or perhaps it's the woman that's beside him, the history, if the events of the last three weeks could already be called history; her and sam and the rest of that shit.

She is familiar with this car. Sam drove her to their date in it. Romance and roses. Candlelit dinners, or at least a nice dinner at a nice restaurant that Sam couldn't really afford. This is quite different; Lukas hadn't even bought her a drink. He unlocks the door from his side, the lock on hers springing up with the automatic mechanism.

The car rides a little lower on its springs when the Ahroun gets in. When the doors shut, the air is thick with his Full Moon's full-moon rage. He is angry; he would like to be absolutely callous, cold as ice; he finds he wants her so badly his heart is thundering in his ears and he can barely think. He starts the engine. For all this, he drives steadily, without mistakes.

There is in fact a motel up the street -- some cheap, dingy thing that offers FREE INTERNET!!! and HBO!!!. He wonders if he had noticed it on the way here because all along, from the start, he had known where this night would lead.

[Danicka Musil] She smiles. Softly, non-threateningly, the way you would hope she would smile at the children in her care or the man she loves or at her grandmother. She smiles like the person in the room who -- well. Tells the pretty lies you want to believe. You're safe. That's a big one. That's something she can lie about without even trying, after all this time. Maybe she does lie to herself, too.

Danicka can't argue with that, though. He can feel her pulse thundering in her wrist when he grabs her, can feel her shaking but not trying to yank back her arm. If anything her limb goes limp, relaxed, almost instantly. Her eyes stay on his, though. She said everything he wanted her to say, but Danicka doesn't stop him there and tell him that she meant every word, why won't he believe her, just because it's what he wanted to hear doesn't make it not so. She smiles the smile of the healthy to the dying, and she walks at his side because she might scream if he walks behind her and she feels her breath on the back of her neck.

The car she goes to is not the Ford, but the late-model silver BMW convertible that is lucky it was only in this neighborhood for about twenty or twenty-five minutes total. She turns off the alarm with the press of a button on her keyring; unlocks it with another. She knows his car, has been in it twice. Sam didn't give her any roses and she didn't want any. She damn well meant: I'll follow you. She looks at him before she gets into her own vehicle, notes his spot, waits for his lights before she leaves Mr. C's as well.

So they both have a reprieve from being in such close quarters, from being barely a foot away from the one making their vision all but blur.

Danicka doesn't wonder why he knew there was a hotel, when she gets there. She parks beside him, mere seconds behind, and she smokes a fraction of a cigarette outside the office while he checks in. It's a gorgeous little white stick from a champagne-colored box, and they're as painfully expensive as everything else about her: until, of course, that damn bar and this damn motel. It's so far below the level she seems to live at that it should be a wonder she isn't disgusted, she isn't repelled, she isn't changing her mind. She's walking into the room behind him and dropping her purse on a chair at a table near the door, sliding her jacket off of her shoulders.

Danicka has turned her back on him for the first time all night.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The receptionist is forty-something, though she looks sixty-something. Her hair is stringy, a washed out blonde. Her skin is sallow, a washed out pale. She's wholly washed out, washed up, either bored to mindless or stoned, it didn't really matter which, and she barely even looks at Lukas as he checks in, and Danicka waits outside.

She doesn't ask about that: the man checking in, expensively and casually dressed, but with the presence of a serial killer. The woman smoking outside, pretty, classy. She might wonder if housekeeping'll find the woman's strangled body in room (she glances at the tag) 314 the next morning, but frankly, for this part of town, it's nothing unusual. Might have even happened in this very motel once or twice.

She slaps the key over the counter and tells Lukas it's upstairs on the right. And he leaves, and he and Danicka go up the stairs, and to the right, and room 314 is a cheap, tawdry little room with fraying curtains and threadbare carpet and a lingering stink of old cigarettes, claustrophobic in the glow of incandescent lamps. Lukas looks around, and he knows this is not up to Danicka's standards, or his; he knows it's not what a woman like Danicka deserves, and perhaps counted on it. He says nothing; neither of them have said anything since the bar.

He tosses his car keys atop the ancient TV. A clatter. The room key beside it. The curtains are open and some fucktard left the window-unit AC on and blasting cold air; the room is fucking frigid. He turns it off. It's suddenly very silent. The curtains whisk shut.

Her back is to him. His back is to her. She takes her jacket off her shoulders at the table near the door. He does it at the now-closed drapes, and then tosses it atop the armchair, beside with is a combination table-lamp, a copy of TV guide abandoned on it. Or arranged on it. He can't tell.

He turns the light off as he turns. Now there's only one light in the room, the one at the table.

He comes to the bed -- the single bed in the room, a 'king sized' that looks about the size of a queen -- and he grasps the covers, the blankets, yanks them off in two or three swift tugs that leaves the mattress a little askew. He bumps it back into place with his knee. The sheets beneath are clean enough as long as you don't look too close, blandly white, a little wrinkled now. He lets the covers drop, folding softly onto themselves.

And breaks the silence, quietly: "Look at me."

[Danicka Musil] Everything I wanted you to included I will be as loyal as you are.

That word had not reared its rather unnerving head between them before she said it, but the question was there. He'd wanted to know if she was capable of more. She told him she was capable of caring. And now this. This and your favorite. He never said they were his favorites. He'd also never said aloud why he'd shown up tonight. She knew. Just like she knew in the car on the way back to North Kingsbury that day when dawn still hadn't crested, just like she knew when he demanded she walk with him to the waterfront.

No wonder she smiles the way she does, like she knows how he feels, like she knows what he's thinking, like she knows he doesn't trust her and that this won't end well...like she doesn't care, maybe, about any of that. It's liek the way she stands in the room like she belongs there even though her clothes don't. Her soft eyes and tender smiles don't belong here, her high-class clothes and nice car and expensive cigarettes don't belong here, and yet something about her comfort level in this room should tell him that he has no goddamned clue what kind of woman she is, or what she deserves.

Lukas kills the A/C, shuts the moonlight and neon and parking lot lights out of the room with a snap of his wrist. Danicka, on the other hand, discards her purse and tosses her jacket onto the back of the chair where the bag went. It's rather dim in here. She's facing the wall, right side to the window, left side towards the bed as he suddenly and rather unnecessarily strips it. She's in the process of stepping out of her shoes, which in a matter of seconds brings her down to her natural height, which he's never seen her at: she's five and a half feet tall, and her socks are silent against the beaten-down carpet.

Look at me.

Danicka is very obedient.

She looks at him, but she doesn't say anything, and then she reaches down, grasps the edge of her dark blue sweater, and pulls it up over her head, off her body. It drops, leaving her in jeans that rest beltless and precarious on her hips, leaving her in something made of peach-colored satin and black lace. Her hands go to the button of her jeans; she is not, apparently, giving him a chance to undress her first. Her eyes go to his. For two seconds. And then drop to his jaw.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The second her eyes drop--

"Look at me."

He says it again. Softer this time.

[Danicka Musil] Sam never told him a word about what it was like. He didn't go running around to his packmates, his brothers, boasting about what he'd done or how she felt under his hands. Lukas knows -- because he couldn't help but know, because for reasons he doesn't understand she wanted him to know -- the way she sounds, but he doesn't know that she would never meet Sam's eyes. Not as soon as that door closed behind them, not after the zipper slid down her dress. She wouldn't look at him, not even when the only way to avoid doing so was to close her eyes, turn her face away, or pull him down to her throat and shoulder.

Lukas doesn't know that she preferred to have an Ahroun with his mouth at her neck than looking into her eyes.

So he doesn't know, and can't know, what exactly it is he's waiting for when she closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and opens them again as she lets it out. Danicka blindly draws the zipper of her jeans down, hooks her thumbs in the denim waistband, and pushes them off her thighs. After her knees they fall, and she steps out, and she keeps her eyes on his the way she would have in the bar as she spoke those devastating words to him...if he had looked at her.

Peach-colored satin. Black lace. And skin: smooth as the undergarments, pale in contrast to the lace, untouched. Unscarred. Pristine.

Danicka is very obedient.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] All this time, besides dropping his coat, Lukas has not made a single move toward undressing himself. He watches her every last move instead: her back to the single light in the room, the incandescent glow soft at the edges of her body.

The light throws her shadow onto the wall behind him. Across him too, now and again. The light is on his face, and she can see every last nuance of his expression. She can see how he stands with his balance distributed between his feet, as though this were some sort of battle, and he needed to be prepared. She can see how his hands close slowly, and open, and close as she draws down the zipper. The clench of his jaw as she pushes down her jeans. The way his eyes lower over her body, after, glittering in the low light.

A car passes on the street outside. They can hear it. It is that quiet. She can hear him breathing too, slow and even, deliberately so, but deep -- every breath to the bottom of his lungs, as if the air is slowly turning molten, becoming unbreathable; as if there isn't enough oxygen in the room for him.

He has nothing further to say, or request, or command. His eyes come back to hers, and hold. Whatever else there is -- dislike or hate or fascination or -- it's all subsumed now, consumed; all that remains to him is want, raw in his eyes, fierce on his face.

[Danicka Musil] No further commands leave Lukas's mouth, so she keeps his gaze in return, even when she rather deftly, even gracefully, slips her feet from the ankle socks still left on her body. The lingerie stays where it is; Danicka doesn't. Many a mortal woman would run.

That's what is easy to forget: Danicka is not quite mortal. Among Kinfolk her age she seems weak, frail, easy to startle and quick to heart-thumping terror at those she should be comfortable around by now. Among human beings she is incredibly strong-willed by comparison, and it is among human beings that so much of her life has been spent. That doesn't mean that she's comfortable around Lukas, that there isn't something about her that makes her wish he wouldn't say Look at me, makes her wish she was not even here.

For all that, though: Lukas is completely clothed still, and Danicka nearly naked, and yet she doesn't seem as though she feels exposed, vulnerable, because of this. She walks forward, bare now but for slips of fabric he can either assume were chosen because she knew how this night was going to end or because she really is of a class of woman that wears this sort of thing every day.

That class of woman is imaginary, but no matter.

She has no words for him as she walks, though, no requests, no commands, no inquiries. No lies except the ones he might want to tell himself in the privacy of his own mind, none that her body can't tell much better than her voice could. Danicka comes to stop in front of him, and for the first time since ordered to look at him -- twice -- she drops her eyes and runs them from his face down to his chest and then his stomach and then his hips, the fronts of his thighs, the ends of his shoes. As slow as it is, as close, it may as well be the caress she's not giving him.

Her gaze is slow to drag back up, and she won't fucking touch him. "Please take off your shoes, Lukáš. And sit?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There's an agonizing restraint to this. A slowness to her gaze, which may as well be a touch, except, of course, that it's not. That it doesn't come close. A deliberation in the way she will not touch him, and he does not undress.

She asks him to take his shoes off. His shoes. And some distant corner of his mind wants to know: what the fuck is this game? -- and no, he does not take off his shoes. Or sit.

He puts his hands on her instead. His hands on her waist, a matched set, his skin swarthy against her white, the span of his fingers curving 'round the sides, the thumbs pressed gently to the bottommost arch of her ribcage. She can see -- and hear -- him draw a long breath, swift, at the touch of her skin. It occurs to him he has touched her three times in his entire life.

Only that wasn't true. But that is neither here nor there.

The point is: he touches her now. He takes her by the waist; perhaps, the way he glared at her, distrusted her, hated her fucking guts at the bar, she thought he might abuse her now; but he doesn't. He touches her gently, and his hands trace up her sides, and now he takes a step closer, and he looks at her body, the way the shadows change as she breathes.

Then his grip firms. He pulls her to him until her feet are between his, their legs brushing, his heat palpable through his clothes. He reaches around under her arms and undoes the clasp of the bra, deftly. If she were not so perceptive a woman, she might think this the indifference of experience; but it's not; it's nothing close to indifference. It's control, which is a different beast altogether, and not so very reliable.

Lukas draws the bra off her arms. She can see how he draws the next breath between his teeth, very carefully and slowly, before he drops the piece of lingerie on the floor.

The panties after that, peeling the scrap of fabric from her hips, pushing it down over her thighs. It drops to the floor.

Then she's naked, and so near that her body brushes his, through his clothes. And finally he reaches over and back, grabs his pullover by the fistful, tugs it over his head.

His torso still carries some of the leanness of youth. There's no waste to him, and his bones are heavy, an impressive scaffold on which his musculature is hung and cut and defined. There's a fresh scar across his stomach. She wouldn't know it was fresh, but it is, and it's there.

He finds her hands, and he puts them to his belt. Then he drops his to his sides and watches, his nostrils flaring with every inhale, his heart triphammering in his chest, all while he wrestles for some semblance of calm and control.

[Danicka Musil] It should not come as a surprise that when Lukas's palms come to rest on the sides of her waist that she takes in a breath. It isn't the shock of two temperatures meeting -- his heat is like the fire, hers like the heartstones around it -- but the fact that tonight they have broken their record. He has touched her twice, once with his hand locking on her wrist and now.

And now his hands move, and her spine elongates, arches slightly, to move both with and into the touch. She knows what he does not, remembers what he can't, and does not choose this as the time to tell him any stories beginning with When we were children, the entirety of the story encapsulated by the second word alone. Instead she keeps silent except for her breathing, which has been quickened since before she ever stood up and moved around the table to tell him over and over again: I will.

Maybe she expected brutality. Maybe that's what she wanted when she followed him to this slightly more private shithole. Maybe she knew...

...or maybe it just didn't matter.

Still, she tenses when he pulls at her, when his hands tighten on her half-bared body to get her closer to him. The flinch is only half-done, the flash of rigidity for a split second before she forces herself to calm again. When it comes, when she relaxes again, he is flicking clasps out of his way and she shivers. The room is still cold, and for that and other reasons her skin is raised in goosebumps. Satin slides away from her, drops to the floor, and Danicka doesn't move out of the way or take her body out of his reach. She lets him undress her to completion, finishing what she started, because on some level she has to know that there is a limit to his control, that this is part of it.

Danicka is no more shy or uncertain of herself naked than she is when pinning a diamond into her earlobe, high heels strapped to her ankles and coat over one arm. She does not duck her head or curl up against his chest or crawl into bed to hide herself. She lets him look at her, she watches him look at her, and then she watches him.

All this time -- all this time being just a matter of weeks -- she has said what he has embodied, and not once has she reached for him. She hasn't tried to slide their feet together under a table or snuggled against him on the couch in the common room of the Brotherhood. But the things she has said to him -- at the waterfront, at the public house, in the bar -- he has had to take on faith, he has had to believe have some match in her body for the desire she voices aloud. That is, if he believes what she's told him twice now.

Chci tě.

Try me.

Her hands are on him before the pullover is off his arms. Fingernails first, manicured but not terribly long, the smooth backs of them running up from his waist to his navel, where they turn on either side. Now her fingertips, smoothing over the scar like a speedbump to check her progress, til her hands are flattening over his ribs. He thinks he has touched her -- what? -- three, four times in his entire life? She has never touched him in all his memory, has never reached for him, as she does now. The shirt he wore tonight falls, and her hands run over his pectoral muscles to his broad shoulders. He catches them there, and Danicka looks up at him while he pulls them downward.

She looks at him, her hands motionless as he drops his arms to his sides, and though she knows -- god, she has to know -- how very close to the edge he's becoming, she does not obediently and quickly get the rest of his clothes off. She looks into his eyes, though, and rubs the pad of her thumb gently over the span of skin over his waistband. There are reasons why she does not want to stand there naked, undressing this Ahroun with her mouth on his chest and her hands slipping into his pants. She will not tell him what they are.

But the moment of hesitance could be read so many ways. So she doesn't let it last very long.

Danicka moves her hands off his belt, runs them back up his torso, and stretches until she is on her toes to slide her arms around his neck and shoulders. With a push off the floor, she lifts herself up using his strength and solidity, and within a moment her long legs are enfolding him just as her arms do, wrapping around his waist. Within a moment, her mouth is humid and yearning on his, and if she makes a noise right then -- an almost pained, broken sound -- well.

That is neither here nor there.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] What he can control, Lukas does. In everyday life he's carefully polite, carefully thoughtful, carefully planning, carefully executing. Here, in the bedroom, he makes a fine art of it -- a mad science of it -- grasping at what control he can find while the edges slip away from him, while it all slips away from him like silk through his hands, sand through his fingers.

He controls his breathing, that he does not gasp or pant. He controls his hands, that he does not grope her like a schoolboy, like an animal. He controls his voice, keeps his damn mouth shut.

He cannot control the sip of air when she first touches him. He cannot control the way his abdomen jumps when she spreads her hands on his body and finds a sensitive spot. He cannot control the way his skin draws taut --

but he can catch her hands, and move them. And hold them still for a second, no longer looking at her but at her hands on his body, on his belt; no longer looking at all, closing his eyes and clenching his teeth.

There's a twisting, compressing tension in him. A sense of a beast straining at its chains, flinging itself against the bars of its cage.

A breath; two.

Then he lets go her hands, and she runs them back up his torso, she stretches to her tiptoes and she lifts herself, or she would, if he hadn't caught her up first, put his hands under her thighs and lifted her upon him, his back arching to counterbalance.

She does not kiss him. He kisses her first, before he can (control) stop this, before he can think better of it. He opens his mouth to her and what sound she makes he swallows, along with the rush of her exhale, along with the taste of her, and whatever alcoholic beverage she may or may not have consumed.

--

The first time Lukas had a woman (fucked a girl) was before his first change. He cannot remember if he kissed her then. It was too long ago, it was unimportant, those memories -- a life before Rage, a life before Nation and duty and blood and kin and war -- are like the memories of a stranger, a life transplanted onto his like an unwanted appendage, a burden. Throwing up after too many sweets. Ellis Island, 1995 (or was it 1994?). They hardly seem to matter anymore.

To say he has never kissed a woman since would be an exaggeration, plainly untrue, and overdramatic. The truth is he has -- probably several, possibly many. But; and Danicka cannot possibly know this; but:

To kiss a woman, one of his fucks, of his own free will, not because she kissed him first but because he kissed her first, and because he wanted to, and because he could not help it -- that is something else altogether.

That is rare. He cannot remember the last time he did it.

He cannot remember anything of the past; none of it matters.

--

Only the color of her skin, which the incandescent light gives some glow to, which would otherwise be white, white, white. Only the color of her eyes, the pupils widening in the darkness and the heat of the moment. Only the feel of her, slender but not weak, strong enough to climb him like a tree, strong enough to clasp his torso in the grasp of her thighs, her arms.

He opens his eyes when the kiss parts, if only momentarily. She rides upon him, held by her strength and his own, her limbs taut around him, his biceps, his shoulders and chest bunched against her weight. He looks at her for some moments, silent, not silent, breathing hard, audibly, his ribcage expanding with every quick breath, rising and falling. His eyes move over her face, and then his hands shift, they trace up her sides, one opens over her back, the other cups her cheek, the thumb dragging heavily over her parting mouth.

"Kurva," he swears at her, softly; he is finding it harder by the minute to remember. He raises his chin. He kisses her where his thumb had lain, briefly but not softly. Then: "Danička," and he kisses her again, longer now, deeply, his hand moving to her hair instead, tightening for a moment, then cupping the back of her neck.

[Danicka Musil] Any more force in that kiss and they would have hurt each other. He would have hurt her. A dozen metaphors could be drawn out and applied: the tide hitting a breaker wall, hot and cold winds slamming together to create the spirals that become storms, twisters, hurricanes. A man and a woman reaching for each other at once, wanting something they both usually deny completely, withhold, or give only grudgingly, kissing each other with an abandon that makes his world momentarily slip and makes her whimper.

She cannot know what he has been like since the beginning of the new life, the one that matters. He can't know that she kissed Sam, and that was the one thing she did that she did not want to do, that she had to for reasons that will never be explained, never mentioned, never brought up between them. Each of them are the sole keepers of the the truth of the way they kiss each other, her fingers in his hair and his arms around her.

They keep it to themselves. Lies of omission.

Her mouth tastes faintly of mint. And that's all.

There's a line between her brows when he pulls away from kissing her. The fingers of her right hand are buried deep in his hair, left arm still wrapped around his shoulders. She holds herself up on him as much as he holds her there, that little frown on her face as though she doesn't know why he's stopped. All he does is look at her like that for a moment, and that moment is all it takes for her expression to clear. Danicka's eyes close when he touches her cheek, and she turns her face into his palm, breathing out a sigh onto his skin. She's trembling now, wasn't before but by god she's shaking now.

The curse, the insult, means nothing to her. Danicka does not jerk back and slap him across the face, open her eyes in surprise and offense, or look at him with disgust. Kurva, he calls her, then Danička, and she has no time at all to give him any other name, no time to say anything else. He kiss her again. They kiss again, and this time she doesn't whimper: she sighs, slowing down, tightening her thighs around him.

"Dotykový mi," she says when he lets her mouth go again, kissing his stubbled jawline, his cheek, his neck. Danicka's eyes open when she hears herself say that; she seems distracted for a moment, winces, breathes out and goes on: "Chci tě hned."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There was an agonizing restraint to this.

It's gone now, the shattered remnants of it clinging here and there -- when he calls her a whore in a tone that is wholly different from the first time he called her that same, blistering word; when his hand tightens in her hair, and releases.

She kisses his face, his throat, and he presses his mouth to what he can -- her hair tumbling into his face when she lowers her head to him, trailing over his shoulders, catching in the stubble of his thirty-six-hour beard. He pushes it back with one hand, and then both, and then she speaks, and there's a sharp intake of breath, ragged, and his hands drop to her thighs, his fingers bear down, he squeezes her flesh, painfully. All of a sudden his rage is a livid, living thing, twisting out of his grasp. Beneath the clasp of her limbs, his body seems briefly mutable, unstable, changing --

A ripple of black fur runs up his arm like wildfire. Then it's gone.

Then he grasps her by the waist and wrenches her from him, all but throws her back from him, onto the bed, away. He takes three steps back, puts his back to the cold wall, braces his feet, bends his elbows to his thighs and puts his head in his hands. Pushes his hands into his hair and squeezes his skull between his hands as if to physically hold in some force, some savagery that would otherwise spring from him like a bloody athena.

She was trembling a second ago. He could feel it, the shivers running down her spine when he touched her, when he kissed her, rooted in her very bones. He could feel it, and the press of her hot body, the press of her hot cunt, her legs open around him, her flesh and his separated by a layer of cotton and a layer of denim, or nothing at all. He could feel it, and --

He's quivering now, the sort of uncontrollable tremor that comes with a massive adrenaline rush, a cataclysm checked only by will. He doesn't even try to speak, to explain. He shuts his eyes and fights the beast back, inch by unwilling inch.

Seconds go by.
Half a minute or more.

"Promiňte," he says at last; a rasp to his voice that was not there before. "Promiňte."

[Danicka Musil] [Willpower]

[Danicka Musil] The last time they came anywhere close to this -- and even then it was both literal and figurative miles from this -- Lukas had frightened Danicka, too. When he all but lunged for her, nearly kissed her when she wanted anything but his mouth on hers. She'd bitten back a yelp of terror with a level of personal control that would be more impressive if he knew anything about her. Now it's harder for her to stop that rush of panic from boiling over, from shrieking out of her like steam from a kettle.

Whatever he thinks of her, whore or cat in heat or woman who deserves better than this motel room, she has not 'teased' him. There are reasons for wanting him to get his shoes off first, to sit down. There were reasons for the rake of her fingernails over his palm, reasons for everything, though he would not agree with or even necessarily understand a great many of the reasons that Danicka lives her life by. He can think what he likes, he can blame her for anything, and it will be as certain words tonight: water over stones, already so smoothed by time that they are protected.

But Danicka is not protected from the fact that the moon is full. She makes a sharp, protesting noise when his hands grasp too fiercely, when he isn't touching her because he wants to touch her or because she asked him to but because that precious, thin control is slipping, is unraveling, and he is hurting her. She tries to tell him that it isn't good, not like that, and then fur brushes her forearm and she rips her hand from his hair and scalp to clap it quickly over her mouth. He isn't going to notice the stifled scream, because it leaves her as he's shoving her away.

Yes, Danicka hits the bed, and she folds up like a rag doll. He's so far gone he isn't going to see the signs, the little nuances, the hints that some things are not surprises to her. She keeps her hand over her mouth, she does not scream, she does not cry, and yet she curls up to protect what is vital...if it's necessary. Her attention, for the first time since he first said Look at me, is not on Lukas. It is on something far closer, far dearer, far more well known:

survival.

She wanted him, a second ago. He knew it. Maybe he even believed in the way she kissed him, not murmuring his name as he purred hers, but all the same wanting him, like she kept saying she did, whether his mouth tasted of oranges or anything else. Just a few moments ago, Danicka was warm and fierce and somehow simultaneously even tender with him...and she wanted him.

And when he rasps out his apology, repeats it, Danicka is still lying on the bed on her left side, her legs drawn up and her right hand over her mouth, her eyes closed and her head ducked. So that. So that if he hit her head she might not immediately lose consciousness. Her belly and ribs guarded by the fold of her arms and legs, her thin back exposed, any shrieks she might be tempted to release kept silent and secret behind her palm. He's sorry. He has to say it twice, and she doesn't open her eyes.

Til another half a minute goes by, and her body starts to relax by faint degrees, unfurling but not completely. Danicka's hand slides away from her lips, and she takes a deep breath, her eyes finally returning to him from across the room, one wall to another. She takes another deep breath. And a third. She does not rush herself to calm for the sake of his heart, as he had to do for sake of her very life. Danicka takes her time, and it is nearly a minute before she has enough in her to say:

"Should I go?"

It is not a weak question, or a plaintive one. It is simply, if gently: pragmatic.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Should she go?

And Lukas, whose head is still in his hands, whose fingers are clenched in his hair, gives a low, unsteady sound that may or may not be a laugh.

He straightens his back and bends his knees -- slides down the wall to sit on his ass. He gives his face a hard scrub with the palms of his hands, baring his teeth with the effort of it, as if he might scrub his state of mind into a different space. Drops them, his hands slapping lightly against his thighs.

His head thumps lightly against the wall as he tips it back. He watches her across a distance of some two or three yards. Perhaps that's meant to make her feel safe, as if he couldn't leap across it in the blink of an eye and stain the bed red with her blood.

"Ano."

A beat. Then a faint exhale of a laugh.

"Ne."

She can see his chest expand with a sudden, hissing inhale. "Nechci, abyste odešli."

[Danicka Musil] There are some Kinfolk who feel relentlessly, self-sacrificially protective of their Garou. Their Garou: parents, children, siblings, mates. They see the curse as just that: a condemnation at birth. The proximity of a frenzied or near-frenzied, near-murderous werewolf arouses in them terror and even panic, but it passes, and if they survive to see the aftermath, they reach out to pull the shaking cousin into their arms, murmuring lies far more blatant than anything Danicka's ever said: it'll be all right...it'll be all right.

There are some who feel an almost perverse fascination with the likelihood of their own maiming and death. The Change is beautiful, the Rage is tantalizing, the nearness of that much savagery makes their hearts beat faster and so then they reach out, slide up against the one that came so close to snapping their necks, and they worship or they make love or they try to tell even more sickly-sweet lies: you're amazing.

The posture Danicka holds on top of the hastily unmade bed is oddly similar to a sculpture in Copenhagen, the way her legs are folded and one arm leaning, one arm draped. She unfurled when he apologized the first time, lifted her head at the second, and she deos not try to meet his eyes. God damn him if he hates her for that right now; she doesn't care.

Perhaps the reason she looks at the side of his nose instead is the same reason she does not answer him in the language he is speaking, the odd little thing they share even outside of other Shadow Lords in the city: "I know," she murmurs, and though she isn't on her knees beside him cradling his head or attempting to kiss away his wrath and bloodlust or some nonsense...there is a little bit of gentleness in the way she says it. "But should I?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] And another exhale. He's starkly aware of everything, every last thing in this room. He can feel every molecule of air as it tumbles out of his lungs. He can see the fine hairs of her eyebrows. He could count her eyelashes. She's naked still, and he can see the very texture of her skin.

Rage is not the same as anger; it is not merely the consequence of anger. It sharpens all things, all sensations, all emotions. It takes a knife's edge to the world. It carves starkness out of blandness, makes the very flesh of reality bleed raw intensity.

Very plainly, and very quietly:

"Absolutely."

[Danicka Musil] She should leave. There it is. It's pretty simple, enough for an idiot to know what to do. She should slide to the edge of the bed, slip back into her lingerie, her jeans, her sweater, and put bare feet back into shoes. Her socks can go into her purse. She can just carry her jacket out the door, move quickly, refuse to leave her back to him for longer than absolutely necessary before there's a wall between him and her and the rest of the world. The rest of the world, right now, is not very comfortable. The inhabitants of the room underneath theirs and the rooms to the side are making up complaints to leave at the office, making up excuses to get out of the rooms. A door slams; one of the walls shudders.

Danicka sits on the bed, watches him for a moment, then looks up at the ceiling. She takes a deep breath, scanning the pebbly, water-stained expanse above her for a moment before she lowers her head and looks at him again. Looks at him this time, not the bridge of his nose or his cheek or his hairline. She stays where she is.

"Nechci odejít," she confesses, with a slight shake of her head that sends a few locks of hair sliding down one shoulder. The words are almost a verbal shrug. Almost helpless.

Almost is a bit of a lie. At least a half of one, depending on one's use of the word 'helpless'.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The room has a surreal clarity to it, like a daybreak after a sleepless night. The aftereffects of near-frenzy as still thrumming through his blood, making his stomach feel clenched, his muscles tense, unsteady. He draws his hands into fists as she speaks, popping the knuckles softly.

He should order her out the door. He should put his shirt back on, pick his keys up, leave her in this tawdry, shabby little room.

But he only looks at her. And she looks at him, or she looks away, or ...

Moments pass. The walls here are thin, just like the walls at the brotherhood. Thinner, perhaps. He can hear the neighbors arguing, and they don't even know what they're arguing about. The people downstairs turn on the TV and crank it up loud. Front desk is getting a slew of calls from 315, 313, 413, 414, 214 -- they all want to change rooms because the toilet is leaky, the ceiling is stained, the wallpaper stinks.

And Lukas looks at Danicka, as if time has stopped.

Eventually he straightens his knees. He'd dragged comforter and blankets off the bed. They're rumpled on the floor. When he extends his feet he pushes them aside. He opens his hands over his thighs, rubs his palms over his jeans though they felt hot and dry, as if rage had seared away every bit of moisture in his body and filled his veins with fire.

Eventually: "You've been beaten before." A pause. "I saw it that night with Sam. And again tonight."

[Danicka Musil] All he gets in answer to that is a single, brief shrug, as if to say So? or And? or maybe just Yeah, well.

She doesn't move, and there is none of that eye-glazing, internal retreat that he'd likely be able to feel. The shrug is not an affectation. It is what it is, and she does not attempt to deny it, though considering how much else she denies and hides it's something of a wonder.

Danicka stares at him for a moment after that, then slides down to lay on her right side, legs crossed at the ankles and head propped up, leaning on her elbow.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] He closes his eyes when she moves -- as if that alone made her too much to look at.

When the rustling of her body on the sheets has stopped they open again, a blue as cold as ice, wild as the sky.

"Tell me about it."

[Danicka Musil] For all he knows, she's ignorant of what this is doing to him. She may not know why he nearly snapped, why he threw her to the bed and had to retreat to the opposite wall to give himself even a moment to calm down. If she knows she's playing it off. It would be laughable to think that she's just stupid, that she's trying to provoke some sort of violent, uncontrollable reaction in him. So she's stupid, or she doesn't care, or she simply does not know that moving from one position to another and leaving herself uncovered like this might have any impact on him whatsoever.

There's a pause there, and she shakes her head. "No."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "Why?"

[Danicka Musil] At the bar she'd informed him that if he were to ask her why she was willing to do all those things she claimed to be willing to do, he was a moron. He hadn't asked why then, preferring instead to slap her in the face with his disbelief and distrust, which apparently had even less of an effect on her than Sam's hand bruising her jaw.

With a deep breath and sigh, she lifts her eyebrows at him. "A dozen reasons. Because it doesn't matter? Because it's my affair? Because, forgive me, but it doesn't seem like conversation likely to help you stay calm?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Paradoxically, the roaring tide of his rage seems to have drowned out these small insults to his temper. Her refusal is only a pebble in the flood, buried beneath all the rest. He accepts it with a flick of the eyebrows.

"Whoever it was," he replies instead, as if he really thought her refusal to discuss it did not equate a dislike for the subject at large, "knew what he was about. Or she, I suppose." A pause; and he lets himself look at her then, his eyes sliding slow over her body. "Look at you. Not a mark on you." To her face again. "Perfektní."

And then silence again.

And, at length: "Do you remember what you asked me that night at the Brotherhood?" He doesn't bother to remind her. "The answer is: because you hold back. You keep a part of yourself, and a large part I think, wholly guarded within yourself. Walled off, like a stone egg.

"Completely inviolate.

"I can understand what that's like, I think." She can see the shadows on his throat move when he swallows quietly. "I find that utterly disquieting and utterly intriguing."

[Danicka Musil] Why, she'd asked, and he'd insisted that it wasn't important.
Why, he asks, and she says that it doesn't matter.

Really, most of the time, Danicka doesn't need to lie. All she has to do is keep silent, and everyone around her makes up their own stories, rests on their own assumptions. He or she but he doesn't stop and think they. Mostly all she has to do is listen, and listen she does -- with great skill, with attentiveness that has made more than a few people feel love that isn't there or feel immense comfort in nothing but a squeeze of her hand and the right smile at the right moment with just enough eye contact to convey comraderie, or understanding, or a plea for them to stop, just stop, and shut their mouths again.

Of course she remembers what she asked him at the Brotherhood, and she follows the train of thought. From beatings, to Sam, to that night, to the question she had asked. And she remembered that night what he'd said by the waterfront, and she remembers all these tiny little things about the flick of his eyebrows or how he kept the car stalled at a green light for too long when he was driving her home.

She listens, her head tilted so that he is slanted in her vision but not completely sideways, as he gives something that could be a compliment to whomever may have thrown her around in the past. No scars. No burns in places easily concealed by clothing. No torn skin. The air is finally starting to level out in the room, as though heated by arousal or Rage or both, but it's still cool enough that one has to wonder why she's not pulling the sheets back around herself. Danicka just rests, her body lying for her and telling him that she is at ease.

He receives no confirmation on whether or not he's right. She just watches him for a moment after he admits that this trait he sees in her disturbs and fascinates him, both. Danicka blinks once, slowly, and opens her eyes again. "Why do you still have your pants on?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] A beat.

"Because I hadn't made up my mind yet," he says then, levelly, "on whether to obey my intellect or my instinct."

Past tense.

A second or two passes. He gets to his feet them, slowly and smoothly, his hand touching the carpet only once for leverage. Nothing in him pops or creaks or strains or trembles; every joint, every muscle, every tendon fits perfectly. They are fine physical specimens, the garou, with bodies born for and honed for war: like sacrificial bulls, strong and beautiful and doomed.

He comes to the side of the bed, wading through a tangle of blankets and clothes on the way. One of the articles is his, a shirt. The rest are hers. He doesn't look at them. He holds his hand out for hers, his eyes on her face. If she flinches when she touches his skin, he will see it.

His fingers are hot when they close around her wrist. He pulls her upright, and then up to kneel on the mattress. They are nearly eye to eye now; the bed and its frame give her some additional inches more than the length of her shin-bone.

"Řekni mi, chceš mě," he says. "Udělej mi věřit.

[Danicka Musil] The look in her eyes says it, if he wants to see it: Yes you had. But that isn't an argument she's going to voice aloud. She lets it dwell in her eyes for a moment, and then it's gone, and he's standing up.

Danicka moves, a step after he does, planting her right hand on the mattress and shifting back into the position she was sitting in just before lying down. Her eyes go up, as they must. That's just a simple fact of the reality they are, for the moment, keeping in common: he is much taller than she is, and has a hundred pounds or so on her. It doesn't seem to bother her, to be tilting her head to look up at at man.

She gives him her hand, this being the second time he has not just reached out and grabbed her, or laid his hands on her whether welcomed or surprising. His hand closes around her wrist, and a bit oddly, her fingers wrap around his as well. It's right hand to left, more like the way someone would grip the arm of a person about to fall off a cliff than a clasp of friends. And Danicka does not flinch. She is pulled, and she moves without resistance, her face inscrutable and still -- even kneeling -- having to tip back slightly to meet his eyes.

"Chci tě," she murmurs. She's never said it, exactly, in English. Not to Lukas. Her eyes are like an animal's in this lack of light, nearly all black with thin rings of green that verges on hazel. Her free hand all but floats to rest on his waist, fingertip touching his navel, and then sliding down. There's a perhaps unsurprising deftness and speed to the way she undoes his belt, unbuttons and unzips his jeans, and a surety to her hand slipping in between the parted metal teeth that completely belies the submission of her posture and her wrist held in his grasp.

Danicka watches his face, and touches him through whatever scrap of cotton there is underneath the denim, whispering: "Let go of me."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Chci tě-- she begins, and he shuts her up after all -- he kisses her mouth like there was no other option, nothing else to do.

Her hand touches his side, his stomach. His: the one grips her wrist unrelentingly; the other remains where it is, at his side, not touching her. Apart from his mouth, his one hand, he does not touch her at all -- as if he did not quite trust himself yet.

And he doesn't. Trust himself. Or his judgment, or his honor, or his control, or his goddamn ability to think. If he could trust these things, he would not be here at all, right now.

The kiss breaks -- he's trying not to gasp for breath. He watches her as her hand moves, explores; it's not until she unbuckles his belt onehanded that his eyes leave her face. Until then he looks at her, he looks her in the eye, the huge pupils and the rims of green. After, he watches her hand instead, the dexterity and ease she has with the button, the zipper.

She's still watching his face when she reaches her hand in. He shuts his eyes; can't seem to help it. A line of muscle tightens from temple to cheek to jaw, flexing in the light of the single incandescent lamp on the table. His hand tightens on her wrist, and he sucks a susurrant breath in.

Then he lets her go. His eyes blaze open on her face. The color is faintly visible, even in this light: brilliant, pale, touched with blue. Perhaps this is some symptom of his unwavering honesty, too: that he watches her, watching him, not caring if she sees every last scrap and nuance of expression, reaction, sensation as she traces the length and breadth of him through his underclothes.

"Don't stop," it's barely more than a breath given shape.

[Danicka Musil] And for the second time, she kisses him back like she wants to, meeting his mouth in the air even though her forehead furrows with the same sort of strange ache that came over her when he first lifted her into his arms. When she jumped into his arms. When, one way or another, she ended up holding him with her legs and meeting his flesh with as much of hers as they could at once...at least then.

She was asked -- told -- not to get involved with any more of them but that was well after the involvement was already deeper than she could strictly help. It happened fast enough and suddenly enough to nearly give her whiplash, and it could be said that since then she's been in a painkilling, undemanding haze. From which she has said I want you over...and over. Then: I will. Then: I don't want to leave.

If he could trust himself he would have just gone to a club tonight instead of coming out here, and seeing that the bar wasn't burning and there were no minions of the Wyrm threatening his Tribe's Kin, he could have turned around and walked out. There's been chances. Opportunities. Openings. There was another just moments ago and they absolutely both should have taken their shot to get the hell out. Him because he's supposed to be noble, honorable, and a good brother. She because she values her neck.

Not, apparently, as much as this.

Every reaction is watched, every tension witnessed and likely to be remembered. So when he can't stand losing himself any more and he looks at her again, something sparks in her eyes and the corners of her mouth curve slightly in a breathless half-smile. Her hand, freed from his, slides away and joins its partner at his waist. Don't stop, he breathes, and rather than simply obeying, she slips her hand out from his clothes, but her touch doesn't entirely leave him. That would be madness. That would be stupidity, right now.

Danicka hooks her thumbs under two sets of waistbands, thumbnails scraping skin lightly, and kisses the flesh just under his navel as she starts easing away the pants she seemed so annoyed to see still on his body. Her kisses fall, her hair falls, and when she pushes them far enough out of her way, so does the fabric that's been concealing his lower body all this time. She licks him. Her hands travel as her mouth does, til the warmth of one palm us running up his inner thigh and the other around to his lower back. She doesn't stop.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] He's watching her again as she descends. His stomach tenses involuntarily as she presses a kiss below his navel, a reflexive spasm of motion that makes him draw a sip of air. His heartbeat is a thunder in his ears; he's amazed she can't hear it, amazed she can't see it, a livid throb of between his ribs. The edges of reality are overbright, too sharp, glaring out at him -- his control is so very tenuous, and it has failed once already tonight.

No; that's a lie. More than once. Far more than that. Sometimes he's not certain if he has had any control at all in any of this at all, since the night at the club, that first night at that first club when he had looked at her across Gabriella, this cool-eyed, gentle-voiced woman juxtaposed against the vivacious girl in her company, and asked --

You didn't just proposition me, did you?
and she had said
if I did you wouldn't need to ask me that.

and; and, somehow, the next time he saw her, coming up the stairs in his brother's company, now, his bright, naive, gullible brother who thought the kin of the shadow lords were for wining and dining, for romance, for fucking four times in a room down the hall; somehow, by then, though he did not even know it then, he already could not stand the fucking thought.

He shuts his eyes again when she takes him in her hands again, then her mouth. There's a rush of an exhale that's almost a sound, unformed; his back arches and he raises his head, bares his throat, and this is as involuntary as the concaving of his stomach beneath her lips had been. He brings his hands up, his fingers into her hair, their curvature cradling her head; there are tiny jerks in their tips, and in the deep muscles of his thigh, his back beneath her hands, the unavoidable result of nerve impulses sparking reflex arcs up and down his body, running electric down the thoroughfares of his spine.

It's not long, a handful a seconds, a minute at most before he catches her face between his hands and pulls her up -- "Dost. Ustat." -- drags her up and eats at her mouth, unrestrainedly, without even a thought of restraint. She had told him to sit on the bed and take off his damn shoes, but had he listened? -- no. And now when he pushes her back and down on the bed, back down on the bed, his pants are caught on his socks are caught in his shoes, and he shoves and stomps with his feet, kicks the whole mess off at the edge of the bed, moves over her, his mouth finding a path from the lowermost arch of her ribcage to her breast to her throat; presses or pries or urges her thighs apart with his hands, climbs over her.

There's a moment -- a second -- when his hand is at her throat, as if he might fuck her like this, grabbing her by the throat, as if by doing so he might gain control of her, and therefore, over himself. It's a blink of time; then his hand moves, cups behind her neck instead, he lifts her up to meet his mouth as he raises his head to meet hers. It's like this, his mouth open to hers, swallowing what sound she might make, that he drives into her the first time, and

there's a pause, a breathing, gasping pause, his sides heaving, his breath pulled right out of her lungs, a span of endless seconds where Lukas is clearly, clearly trying to regain what little control he can, and must

before his eyes open to hers, and the kiss parts, but not by far, and her face is a blur, her eyes a blur of green and black. He watches her face as he begins to move again, his hand on her face, his weight on his elbows, and then shifting.

[Danicka Musil] Control's funny like that. When you think you've got it, when it's most certain, when your grasp is as hard and tight as you could ever hope for it to be, you lose it. When you want it, when you're looking at the door standing unlocked but not ajar yet and all you want is the right to go over and turn the key under the knob so that no one can get in and you can't...that's oddly when you have control, and just don't exercise it. Control's a funny thing, and because it's so very slippery and nebulous thing -- Danicka might say -- you might as well give up on it.

That doesn't mean she doesn't take the little fractions of control that she has. When she makes eye contact and with whom, for how long. There's been no point tonight when she's had to meet his eyes for longer than absolutely necessary. He knows she can take a beating, can be smacked without flinching and instantly adopts a posture to protect her head and vital organs when the threat of blows raining down more forcefully is at hand. Is that control? Is that just acceptance?

Does it have a name?

He told her to make him believe, and for the span of a few seconds, maybe a minute, the liquid electricity singing in the air between them is right back to what it was when they stood at the foot of the bed, right before he could not stand it any longer. She wants him. She's wanted him since -- well, she never said when. He's wanted her since the first time he saw her, or at least the first time he remembers seeing her. In white. Touching another woman's face so gently he had to have wondered if that was why she gave him only the most sparing attention, if it wasn't his Rage or his attitude but just a simple lack of interest in anything he had to offer but diversion.

Yet there she was crying out in his native language while she fucked a man she called the brother of his soul. He heard her beg Sam not to stop, heard her whimper out Prosím near the beginning, heard her saying yes over and over but never Sam's name. And not his either, tonight, even when she released a heartbroken-sounding cry into his mouth and buried her fingers into his hair. Not his name when she kisses his belly or runs her hands over him. She controls what he hears from her.

Or merely accepts it, when she cannot hold her tongue any longer.

The shift in posture is startling, and sudden, but she doesn't resist it. Danicka nearly bites his tongue when he kisses her, moaning, shuddering in his arms and against his chest, but something changes when he drops her to bed, furiously getting his clothes off while she regains the breath that was slammed out of her lungs when she hit the mattress -- again.

Her eyes go to the ceiling and it tells her absolutely nothing more than his mouth is, riding like a wave up her stomach and all but ignoring her breasts in his hurry to get to her neck, to her face, to get his now-naked body over hers as surely he's imagined it before. Air shoots into her nostrils when he moves her legs apart, and she looks at the sky because his hand is on her neck and her lips are together -- moist, red, going white from the pressure she is exerting to keep them shut as long as his hand is --

He moves it. Danicka exhales, breathes out a held breath as he cups his hand around the back of her neck. She kisses him, going relaxed again, but her eyes fall closed, and then she shudders.

It's utterly different than before. Her hands aren't on him but are at the sides of her hips, clenching into fists as she relays tension that might go into her lower body into her arms, into her hands. He all but gasps for air, trying to regain that stupid slippery fucking fool's game of control and when he finally legs go of her mouth again she is trembling, and she can't help it. She keeps her eyes closed and presses her forehead to his, the way it was on the waterfront when he stopped himself from kissing her, or breaking her neck, or whatever it was he'd wanted at that moment.

"Přestaň. Prosím, Lukášek, přestaň," she says under her breath.

Her left hand lifts, touches the side of his face. The way it would have on the waterfront, if he hadn't pulled away. For a woman who is trembling, who is so much smaller than him, her voice does not indicate any likelihood that she is about to release tears or pleading. She murmurs it, as though she is asking him to be quiet, and go back to sleep.

Danicka's fingertips run through his hair, tucking a loose, short lock over the top curve of his ear.

"Prosím přestaň."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] He is just beginning to rearrange his weight -- to raise himself on his hands and, to put it delicately, fuck her in earnest. She can feel the genesis of that motion in the muscles of his back, his shoulders; or she would, if her hands had been on his back and not on his face as though to gentle a raging beast, which is perhaps not far from the truth; if her hands had been on his back and not twisted into fists.

Stop, she tells him. Stop.

And he stops -- stock still -- the word is short, he's too damn surprised even to sound surprised: "Co?" -- or perhaps he's not fucking surprised at all, because if nothing else, he has been looking for a lie, a sign of unwillingness, fear, pain, whatever, since this began.

For a moment he's staring at her -- a flare of what is undeniably rage in the depths of his eyes, like a gas flame twisting inside the voids of his pupils. Rage, and worse, fury: there and then quickly controlled, shuttered away as he closes his eyes and his jaw clenches tight, and he grinds his teeth. Then, quite abruptly, he pushes his hands into the mattress beneath her and shoves himself back from her, and from the bed, to his feet.

His skin is slick with sweat already. He is a creature that could run five miles without breathing much harder; he is a creature that could run fifty miles in another form and consider it a normal part of life, routine. He is a creature that could perform unimaginable feats of physical prowess, but his skin is slick with sweat already from the touch of her. His cock is slick too, and that from the touch of her too; if he weren't forcing his breath through his nose, nostrils flaring with every inhale, he'd be panting.

Very low: "What kind of game -- "

-- and he stops, there's an image of her curled on the bed to protect her soft underbelly from him, as though this might save her; he turns his face aside, his hands clenching and unclenching. Another handful of seconds. Then, without another word, he picks his pants up off the floor and starts stepping into them.

[Danicka Musil] I wanted her from the moment I saw her.

Danicka does not, as before, curl up into a ball. Yes, if he Changed, if he grew and took on that shape, no self-protective measures would keep him from tearing her apart. She would be dead before he came back down and realized what he'd done. She knows this. It wasn't just instinct, though: almost everything he sees of her is trained in, conditioned, has been a part of her for so long she probably doesn't remember the first time she learned the lessons. The truth is: sometimes even when they don't frenzy, they still lash out. And then --

-- how does she not have any scars? If she's been hurt enough, often enough, or even once badly enough, how in the name of all that survives still underneath the influence of the Weaver and by staving off the Wyrm does she lie there as untouched, as fucking perfect as she is?

As...completely inviolate.

If I knew she wanted me too...

He asks what kind of a game this is that she thinks she's playing, or he almost does. He almost asked her that earlier, just because she wanted him to get undressed and sit down. The thought hadn't occurred to him that she wanted him right then, already, immediately, that she wanted to go onto her knees in front of him or find his body with her own. Well, she had. Standing, pulling herself up and being lifted up at once, she'd found the closeness she'd been looking for, without asking him what kind of game he was playing with his refusal. She'd just reached for him.

Danicka, on the bed as he pulls away from her and starts going for his clothes, does not drag her leg up and turn on her side. She doesn't cry. That shouldn't be surprising by now. She takes a deep breath, and after a few moments, she props herself up on her elbows and watches him, sweat on his back and his flank and his arms, droplets of it on her comparatively dry belly. Looking at him she thinks he could be a man spent and angry anyway if he weren't still hard, if they weren't both completely aware of what did and did not just happen.

He thinks of the way she reacted when he threw her from him because the influence of want and wariness and the full moon was too much. Maybe he thinks of the way she reacted when Sam hit her, eyes deadened (though by god they're so vibrant right now) and quietly asking for permission to sit down.

What good is normalcy when it's a sham?

They aren't normal people. This isn't a date. Never was.

And she doesn't have any angry confessions for him to make him think twice.

What Danicka has is reciprocation for something earlier, nearly forgotten, that had come out of nowhere from his mouth. He answered a question she'd asked days and days ago; she answers a question he's never voiced, though he may not see it as an answer to anything: "I like that you don't try to pretend that I'm safe with you. Or lie and promise that you aren't going to harm me." That's why. "I like...that you're honest." God, the irony.

She takes a breath, slowly sits up. "I want you."

In English.

"But it's kind of challenging to want to fuck you when you're touching me like all you want is a warm hole."

I'll be very blunt.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Danicka is making a list while Lukas is pulling his pants and underpants back on, not looking at her, and for a moment all he can think is: she's talking in complete sentences. Then she says I want you and there's a shadow over his face, a ghost of a wince, and it's impossible to say whether it's her words or the fact that he's pulling boxer briefs up over a hard-on.

It's easier to think of this in those terms: her cunt, her tits, his cock, his hard-on. It's harder to think of it in her terms: honesty, loyalty, pretend, want.

She makes her conclusion. His shirt is in his hands by then, and it's a near thing, he nearly tears it in two, whips it at her, something. She can see his hands clench on the soft black fabric.

Instead he pulls it on over his head, sharply, tugging the hem down into place when the fabric clings to his sweat-damp skin. His hair is mildly disarrayed after having been plowed through, pulled, raked through, and finally -- by her -- combed gently through, tucked back.

Another man might be petulant now: at least you could suck me off if you aren't going to fuck me. Or call her a bitch. Or hit her. Or stomp out without another word. Or worse, wheedle for sex, beg for it. Or -- and perhaps this is even worse in Lukas' mind -- put on a show of affection and tender-fucking-care.

Lukas is merely cool, sharply reined; hard and cold. If she couldn't read a man so well, if she couldn't read him so well, she might think him genuinely indifferent, genuinely impassive. And he finds that, in spite of everything, when he opens his mouth, he's speaking in complete sentences as well. His voice is low and steady: conversational, even.

"What did you expect, exactly, Danička?" He buckles his belt by touch, regarding her now. "Romance and candlelight? Terms of endearment? Your name whispered gently, or maybe just my face planted between your thighs? Look out the window. See where you are. Look at which moon hangs in the sky. You knew what this was. I came here to fuck and you came here to get fucked. I can't offer you anything more than that."

There's a beat of pause.

"Not right now. Because right now, if I don't come inside you or break someone's face within ten minutes, I'll fucking lose my mind. Do you understand that?"

-- just like that, same tone, same blank delivery, fleshrending truths cast carelessly off like so much offal. He's done with his belt, never did take off his watch; he goes to fetch his jacket from where he'd left it, over the armchair by the floor lamp.

[Danicka Musil] Neither of them, really, had any idea what to expect from the other one. Had he expected her to speak to him the way she did at Mr. C's, not in coy poetry or in Czech but in flat, simple English? Is that why he'd come in the first place? She should have known what to expect when he told her Come here and hung up the phone. She's been to bed with an Ahroun before, he's been to bed with Kin of his tribe before, surely they both should have known something of what they were getting into. Except that in the end, what she said at the waterfront holds true: You're not Sam. And he already knows that he doesn't really understand her.

Lukas doesn't trust her. Didn't believe her at the club and could very well now be turning around, throwing that in her face, telling her that Ha! he was right, she was full of shit and he knew it. That's not what she's expecting though, at least not right now, at least not from him. God only knows what the hell she was expecting.

Affection?

Ha.

His first question may as well be rhetorical; he doesn't wait for an answer to it and she doesn't interrupt him to give one. He's looking at her, though, sitting up on the bed with her arms braced behind her and her golden hair wild. Her eyes are placid, carefully so, while his words bring up a whole host of memories and images and sounds she may or may not want right now. They come anyway.

Romance and candlelight and Sam. Terms of endearment like kurva. Her name all but moaned in her ear, in his voice. Maybe just his face planted between her thighs like --

They're looking at each other when he pauses for a step, a half-step, in the middle of telling her what he can and cannot give her, after he's lectured her on whatever it is he thinks she might have expected but will not be receiving, before he tells her that he's going to lose his fucking mind. There's a whole damn world in that beat, a tease, a hint of something she may not want and likely doesn't believe is ever going to truly be there anyway.

The only correction she gives him may very well tell him just how wrong he got most of that, how far off his estimation of the nature of the disconnect between them is. Then again, that's to be expected when you hold as much back as she does. She doesn't respond to everything, reply to all. She twists her head and watches him stalk across the room to grab his coat. And since he seems to have made his own damn decision on which it's going to be -- coming inside of her or breaking someone's face -- she slides off the bed, stands, and starts looking for her lingerie in the mess of sheets on the floor.

"I didn't come here to get fucked," she says, almost drolly, as she finds a slip of satin and crouches. Her hands are hidden by the side of the bed when she bends to pick up her underwear, but they're shaking slightly still. As she stands, lacy undergarment in hand, she continues without much of a pause between the last word and the next: "I came here to fuck you."

The little differences, between I came here to fuck and adding one stupid three-letter word after it. The lack of passivity or in her way of looking at it, equal to the undertone of utter cynicism, the lack of 'romance'.

She looks at her panties, puts it right side out again, and starts to step into them. She isn't looking at him now; her tone is almost bored but he has to know better. He felt her. He can smell her. "There are condoms in my bag and I'm still rather wet, but I won't willingly lay on my back for you and --"

Her voice falters; she forces it. "I don't want your hand on my neck."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There's a fine line between the truth and the lie you tell everyone, yourself included, until you believe it's the truth. It's not certain which it is which it is, really, when he says things to her like

you know what this was
and
I came here to fuck and you came here to get fucked
and
I don't believe you.

He speaks of her as though she held a secret store of truth within herself, an impenetrable stone egg, a fortress within which lay secrets she knew, and he would never know. He speaks of her like this, but the mirror cannot reflect that which is not there. Lukas' brutal honesty runs only so far as his consciousness can reach, and inside himself is another fortress, another stone egg, another wellspring of truths that he cannot reach.

But sometimes, she can.
And that (disquiets him/intrigues him) is fucking terrifying.

There's a world of possibility in that beat of silence. The ones she comes up with in her mind may or may not be the truth; may or may not be the truth he tells himself.

She is pulling her panties on, stepping into them and drawing them up her thighs, when he says:

"Leave it."

He is nearly fully dressed now, except for his jacket and his shoes. If not for the dampness to the hair at his temples, the faint flush beneath his swarthy complexion, he'd look like he was anywhere but here, doing anything but this. When or if she looks at him, his eyes drop for a moment; he considers the rest of her clothes at her feet.

"I would walk out that door right now," he says, "if I had any scrap of wisdom or honor or restraint left, or if I thought I could ever find the courage, the stupidity and the shamelessness to do this again after I've turned my back on it once."

It's a strange night full of interrupts, hard stops, fragmentary confessions.

At length he drops his jacket back over the armchair and comes toward her. Sociologists divide the world into spaces: public, social, personal, intimate. He crosses through each of these boundaries, and it's not until the innermost that he lowers his eyes over her. Lukas stops within a handsbreadth of her. Her back is still to the light, her hair a nimbus of light; her shadow is on him, dark on dark. There's a second of what might almost be hesitation, and then he puts his hand on her, watches his long fingers open over the smooth skin of her stomach, her side.

"I want to fuck you," he tells her, gently, if such words could ever be gentle. "I want you to fuck me."

[Danicka Musil] Call her perverted. Call her sick. Call her a whore. She likes the fact that his pullover is sticking to his back and chest right now because nearly losing all control and awareness of himself barely touched his body but getting on top of her, pressing himself between her legs, made him hot enough to sweat. It isn't about power. She just likes that he wants her. A lot. And she likes that she likes it. That, however, is the troubling part.

He has snapshots of Danicka, and he can't quite be blamed for trying to puzzle-piece together a complete picture from them. The way she dresses. The building where she lives. The car she drives. Where she drinks her coffee, or her chai. So much of what there is to see has turned out to be a facade, and the hints at truth are sometimes so small he misses them, or slipped in so effortlessly amidst the half-truths and white lies that he can't trust them.

Leaving him disquieted. Intrigued. And scared. Leaving her placid, and watching him, and telling him even as she trembles that she doesn't want to leave. That she's wet. That she wants him. And even though he's claimed that he doesn't believe her:

Leave it.

Danicka's hands stop where they are, the lace-edged satin already fitted on her hips, back into place just as they were when she stood in front of him, seems like ages ago. She pauses, and looks over at him, only to see his eyes drop. He doesn't catch the fact that this makes her blink. Her clothes are strewn about: jeans near the table, sweater at the corner, bra somewhere in the fabric cascade of sheets and covers, socks and shoes under a chair, jacket over the back.

He can rely on this, trust it if not her: every time he has done this, where he has opened his mouth and poured out the thoughts inside of his head as he sees them, as he understands them, Danicka has gone silent and just...listened. She just lets him talk, without nodding or shaking her head. Without interrupting. Without smirking. It's been consistent enough, at least in his brief experience with her...more consistent than anything else.

They'd hardly talked, when they came in the room. Snippets of Czech, breathy or half-snarled utterances of desire, before the word now in the language he learned before all others seemed to trigger -- along with yearning, along with rapidly slipping control -- a near-frenzy. They'd hardly talked, when he sat against the wall, and Danicka had been the one to end that, quietly diverting questions and then asking him what he was still doing in his clothes. He asked her to give him belief in her, as though it were something locked away inside of herself that she could choose to give to him, make it easy for him to --

it's not about trust.

He talks now, and she listens, and for a moment her thoughts flicker to the last time that happened, on the first day of February when she first admitted that she wanted him. Wants him. Because he's not snapping at her, as he didn't snap at her then. He's not all but spitting his opinion of her in her face as though this will make him right, make it true. He's not growling the words out in a blinding haze of lust, and yes: they are speaking in complete sentences.

So somehow, after being thrown on the bed twice, after having his hand on her throat and his Rage locked in this room with her, Danicka weathers it all. She is once again standing, half-dressed in front of him. He is once again almost fully clothed in front of her, inches from her, and touches her.

She looks up. There's no fear in her eyes. Now would be the time for a quip, for a command, but there is none. Danicka reaches for the hand that is not set lightly on her waist, and slowly moves his palm to her breast. This could be mechanical, could even feel condescending, but she breathes in when his skin comes into contact with hers again, as though the touch is, indeed, electric. This could be too slow, but she drops her hands from his then and moves them to his waist again.

Faster than before, as though she has to have him before something else happens, before he loses her temper or she loses her patience or somehow, some way they're interrupted, Danicka unfastens his jeans and carefully pushes them away from his hips. Her hands slide almost immediately up his abdomen, under the pullover, palms sliding over sweat-slicked skin in a way they didn't when he was on top of her...in the way they did when he first pulled off his shirt, before she was in his arms.

She shudders, looks up at him: "Pusu mí. Pusu mí znovu."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's the same, and it's not the same.

This time she doesn't wait. She doesn't make him wait. She undoes his jeans and he doesn't merely watch; his hands tangle with hers, they fight with hers before he simply relents and lets her undo the belt, the button, the zipper. She pushes the denim apart and down and he sucks a breath between his teeth, he hooks his thumbs under the waistband of his underwear and pushes that down too, lifts his arms then because her hands have pushed under his shirt, he lifts his arms and ducks his head, and she pulls the shirt off, lets it fall. She pushes her hands over him and he catches them still against his chest; she can feel his heartbeat, fast and heavy, and then she says --

He would have, anyway. He doesn't know how to feel about this; but that's okay. He doesn't think about it, not now. She says: pusu mí znovu and he does, he kisses her with a sudden ferocious abandon, his hands cupping her face, her neck, sliding down past the wings of her collarbones to cradle her breasts, open his fingers and rub his calloused palms over the nipples. There's a madness in this, the touch of her -- he exhales some sound into her mouth, it might have been a word; she'll never know what it was meant to be.

The same, and not the same: he wraps his arms around her then, swiftly, and lifts her bodily, catches her by the waist and then under the thighs, draws her smoothly up. Her hair falls across his face, cool and soft, strands of it across his face that he does not bother to push aside.

When her mouth leaves his he's panting; he opens his eyes to look at her, rims of pale blue around deepest black; glassy with arousal and sensation and the touch and taste of her.

"Otevřeno pro mě." He tips his chin up, catches her mouth, a short kiss but not a soft one. "Otevřeno pro mě, Danička."

[Danicka Musil] [Willpower]

[Danicka Musil] They're undressed, this time -- this whole night is 'this time', though -- within seconds. The silence of resignation is gone from the air, and the Rage is not gone or even necessarily abated but braided up in everything else, rather than some sort of separate, monstrous entity threatening to erupt from Lukas at any second, consume him and destroy her. The only thing tonight that compares to this, to now, is what happened when she put his arms around his neck and he put his arms around her hips, the motion of their bodies together and that kiss the first thing they really shared other than a language.

His clothes and the single scrap of lingerie she'd managed to pull back onto her body are gone, dropped, kicked away...again. And they kiss...again, this time without the whimper from Danicka's throat or the sudden rush of Rage from Lukas's spirit. He's kissed her several times tonight without her kissing him back or him caring if she kissed him back. In less than an hour in this room he knows the difference by now. When his hands run over her face and form this time, when they graze over her neck, she doesn't flinch, though he might have thought she would.

She does moan, though, pressing her body against his in the few seconds she's allowed before he pulls her up to him again. As before, she puts her hands on his shoulders and moves with him, wraps her legs around him as though this is the most natural thing in the world, wraps her arms around him as though she cannot bear not to, rather than as though she is afraid of falling.

Oh, but she is.

Unlike before, they kiss over and over, and she doesn't sound broken this time or hurt. She rolls her hips slightly, unconsciously, gasping for a breath when she needs it and finding him looking at her. What he says to her makes her shoulders round down, makes her stop breathing for a second, and she can't bear to tell him the truth. Not, for once in her goddamn life, because she's afraid that he'll hurt her. She just kisses him again, fiercely, tightens her thighs around him, and then wriggles out of his hands and slips to the floor again. Not to leave, to grab her clothes and leave.

To place her hands his chest and give him the sort of shove that's insistent but will do absolutely no good if he's not interested in moving; Danicka's upper-body strength is hardly the stuff of legend. But she still pushes him, onto the bed or giving up if he won't budge, and a few footsteps and the sound of a zipper later a strip of square foil packets is thrown unceremoniously at him, landing on his chest.

And while she does that, she is pretending she didn't hear what she heard or think what she thought. She is crawling back onto the bed and reaching for him, bending over him or burying her fingers in his hair and kissing him as though the whole time she was apart she was drowning.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It is possible, quite possible, that in the whole of his adult life no woman, no about-to-be lover, has ever dared to shove Lukas quite like that.

Or wriggled out of his grasp when he lifted her like that. Or told him to stop, stop, quite like that. Or kissed him, quite like that.

He stares as she pulls herself free -- there's a second he thinks she's going to put her fucking clothes on and leave now, and he thinks, what the fuck sort of game... and then she shoves him, he falls back half a step. There's a flash of instability in his eyes, temper temper; a split second, and then a decision is made. He sits down on the bed, or rather drops down on it, the headboard whamming against the wall. She throws a strip of condoms at him and he makes a sound that might've been a laugh in a previous life, and whatever else, she'll be glad to see Lukas has been sufficiently steeped in human culture to know the use of these things.

He tears the first open with his teeth and rolls it on. Pushes his hands against the mattress and moves back on the bed so he's no longer at the edge. He's scarcely finished when she's coming at him, crawling over him as he'd crawled over her, and his hands catch her up, his arms wrapping around her waist, he hauls her up onto the bed, her knees pressing into the mattress on either side of his lean hips, his hands wrapping behind her thighs to pull her closer yet until their bodies are pressed together.

Their mouths meet again. It's like a necessity, like breathing, like light.

When she breaks for air his teeth catch at her lower lip, scrape the point of her chin. He reaches between their bodies, and between her thighs, and there's a shudder all down his spine when he feels the wetness of her. His mouth is at her throat as he caresses her, her pulse a rapid flutter in her carotid, at the hollow where neck meets shoulder. His hand leaves a wetness at the juncture of her thigh when he reverses it, uses his thumb instead, lifts his mouth to hers, blindly seeking her mouth. His lips move against hers: "Vezmi mě uvnitř vás."

[Danicka Musil] What's funny is that she wouldn't have, five minutes ago or ten or thirty, have shoved him like that. Danicka's not a particularly courageous woman; she's almost craven, willing to do god-knows-what in order to save her own skin. When she asked him to stop -- all but begged him to stop -- she had not made any attempt to squirm out of his grasp. In fact, she had rested her forehead on his and touched his hair, whispered his name for the first time, apparently the last time, all night. He can't be wondering right now about her bravery or her boldness.

He may have to wonder about the way she kisses him, though, a rush of sensation transferring a whole host of other things not given voice or expression. A whole world in a beat between sentences, though maybe one covered in fog and confusion. A huff, not a laugh, leaves his throat when the condoms smack against him, and Danicka flashes a smile that gets no explanation before she kisses him again. And again.

Then she's in his arms, on his lap, and she's pressing her breasts and her belly against his chest and his abdomen, her hair falling over his face in a curtain on either side, too pale to block out the light but thick enough to diffuse it. Her eyes are closed, though, to the light or the air or his face when their mouths meet. Her eyes are closed when he touches her, this time without her asking him to...this time without the request arousing anything more violent than his continued attention. Danicka shudders against him, no restrained tremble but a hard shiver up her body that matches his own. She tilts her head back as it goes on, unraveling minute after minute after hour after day after week of tension.

It's not smart to bare her throat to him right now but that's what she does, not in a gesture of willing or even knowing submission but because his mouth on her neck paired with his hand between her legs is making her bone structure, her musculature, go limp. Danicka's mouth opens but no sound comes out, her arms around his shoulders and neck tightening, hands curling into fists so that she doesn't dig her fingernails into him, so that she doesn't grab his hair.

His mouth trailing up her neck and chin gets her to lower her head, lets the words he says hit her lips along with his breath. The proliferation of soft, aspirated v sounds make the words almost purr out of him, and Danicka kisses his lower lip with a half-hearted whimper when she lifts her hips and -- this time -- does exactly what he wants. The kiss grows against his mouth as the whimper grows to a moan as the woman giving him both sinks down on his lap.

Hard to tell after that if time slows down, or speeds up, or just stops. Some time ago Lukas had claimed that he had about a ten-minute limit before he lost his mind, and either they manage to surpass it or he does, indeed, lose his mind...just not the way he might have meant originally. For her part, Danicka rides him in a position that many would consider dominant but simultaneously clings to him, touching his hair, his face, his arms, kissing Lukas until she forgets what it was like to not be kissing him. For awhile she's quiet, quieter than he might have thought she'd be, her exclamations wordless gasps and plaintive cries lost into the air or against his flesh.

Then: when her hands finally uncurl and she holds onto him, sweat rolling down the valley of her spine and moistening her brow and making her thighs slick, she struggles still to not rake her nails across his skin. She pulls back from kissing him, almost saying...god knows what she was about to say, before a flood of not-English, not-Czech tumbles out of her mouth, increasing in pitch and intensity along with the pace their hips' flexing together is setting. She bows her head to his and holds him there, one hand in his hair and one hand on his face, her eyes opening to his as a final, helpless cry leaves her throat.

It isn't his name. It's nothing.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] She rides him -- he holds her by the hips. He watches her the whole time, every second that she is not kissing him: her body if not her face, so silent that she might think him unaffected by it all if his pleasure were not writ so plainly on his face; a language of flickers and near-winces, sharp-drawn breaths, rushing exhales.

His eyes are blue as gas flames, blue as the heart of a reactor. His eyes are open to her face and he watches her expression, her eyes, her mouth -- even long after the conscious mind has ceased to function, long after it's merely spikes of pleasure relaying through the thalamus, ricocheting through synapses without leaving a trace -- even then he watches her as though he couldn't get enough of the sight of her, moving on him, fucking him.

At one point, she is kissing him and he twists his face to the side, panting, pulls free, his eyes shut, his hands grip hard at her hips, he holds her down, holds himself buried deep, holds her motionless, holds her still, still, doesn't say a word. Doesn't say stop, or přestaň, or --

simply holds her still, as if he would come apart at the seams if she moved, come asunder.

Seconds go by -- a pulse throbbing at his brow -- and then, slowly, slowly, he turns his face back. He finds her mouth first before anything else, before he opens his eyes, before his hands gentle on her hips, stroke her body in long caresses, before he urges her to move again, and then faster.

At the last he cannot watch her. It's that last, shattered sound that undoes him. She cries out and she's so close to him, her head bowed to his, her hands affixing him there, holding him there as if this were crucial, a part of the plan, a part of her pleasure -- and he sees her in blurred impressions of green and hazel, blonde, and then not at all. He shuts his eyes to her, his hands push up her back and he clasps her to him, turning his face to her shoulder, the side of her neck. The force of his embrace is nearly crushing. She can feel the tremors in the deep muscles of his body, his chest heaving against hers as his climax shudders through him.

No words now, either -- not a sound beside the harsh rasp of his gasping immediately after, uncontrollable. He does not let go of her.

Lukas is far broader than Danicka, nearly twice her weight, inches taller. When he crushes her to him like this, his shoulders, his chest bowing toward her in an arc of flexion, she nearly vanishes into his embrace. She has taken care not to score him with her nails, not to leave a mark; he cannot say the same. His hands have clutched at her back, pulled at her skin, clenched on her hips. They grip her now, fiercely, as if she would simply slip away if he let go -- disappear like a shadow on running water.

It's seconds, perhaps as long as a minute, before he can find it in himself to let go. His arms loosen; he holds her gently by the waist now; he raises his head until his temple is pressed to her cheekbone, and his mouth to her shoulder.

Seconds more -- minutes.

Then he lays back, exhales like a sigh, looks up at her. There's a change in his eyes now; shuttered, cool again even as his breath slows. There's a rivulet of sweat down the center of his torso, following the dip between the musculature of his left and right sides. His hands are warm on her thighs, but motionless now, simply covering her skin with his.

Quietly, "How many more times do I get to fuck you before you leave me here?"

[Danicka Musil] This was what they came here for tonight. Whether they knew it or not.

Mercifully, or just wisely, Danicka does not do anything more than take a moment to catch her breath when Lukas stops her on top of him, her hands shaking and her lips kept carefully safe from his face, his mouth. She does look at him though, when he's turned away from her and baring his profile, fighting for control. Or peace. Or patience. There's no nuzzling, no stroking of his hair. Danicka just breathes, and sighs when he kisses her again, welcoming him as though he were gone and not still inside of her, somewhere else and not in this room.

In the end, she undoes him by being undone, even for a moment, looking into his eyes as if to ask him if he can see what he's doing to her, what he's done, and he drops his head like any penitent, though that isn't it, that isn't it at all. In the quarter of a minute or so that he spends gripping her to him, face buried in her skin and hands clutching at her body, she is still with him, her eyes once again falling closed as that unintelligible noise of pleasure rolls into another, and another, while he does nothing but reach for air afterwards.

She melts completely in his arms and against his chest, sweaty and not so much cradled as clung to. Danicka has flushed skin, red impressions where he pulled at her, and as he continues to hold her she tips her head forward and lays her temple against his own, whispers: "Jsem tady...jsem tady." Not comfortingly, not reassuringly, but almost as a mantra, to herself as much as him.

Their heads slide together, not in nuzzling but just with movement. Her long strands are stuck to the sides of her face, the back of her neck. It's warm in here now, but it will get cold again soon enough. She looks at the headboard and the wall behind the headboard when he relaxes enough to just hold her without trying to crush her into his own body. She blinks once, thinking while she can do so unhidden because he can't see her.

Her fingernails stroke lines over his back, slowly, until he leans back and her hands slip away, caress over to his shoulders. She is still straddling him, a completely different picture of her than he's ever seen, and when he asks that question she doesn't smile, or laugh, or insist that she isn't leaving. Danicka takes a deep breath, and slowly dismounts from him, sighing in exhale at his withdrawal as she moves onto the mattress. She uses her hands on his chest as leverage, knowing quite well it won't matter, it won't be too much pressure...or just not caring if it might be. She picks up the discarded strip of packets as she lies down on her side next to him, looking at it.

Her eyes flick to him, the strip of condoms tossed back aimlessly on top of the sheet. "Up to five," she says, sounding slightly drained, then wry: "but I already told you."

...until neither of us can walk.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There's a jolt of reaction in him as she draws away. Her hand is on his chest -- she'll feel it, the twitch of deep muscles down the axis of his body. Then she lies beside him, facing him, and he closes his eyes as though to rest.

Lukas' hair is short and dark. When he was a boy, his parents cut it a little longer than it is now, and it curled noticeably. His sister's was the same: a cascading mass of loose, thick ringlets and wavelets, black as night. These days, Lukas cuts his hair too short for much curl to show, though when it is damp, as it is now, there's some remnant of it at the tips.

He opens his eyes again. They're clear as ever, clear as day, level on the pebbled ceiling.

"Why did you let me bring you here?" There isn't a trace of sleep in his voice; but he's quiet now, steady again. "I would have thought you'd prefer something ... " he looks for the word for a moment, " ... nicer."

[Danicka Musil] The last time she was lying like this was just after he nearly killed her. Stretched out on her right side, propped up on one elbow, her left arm laid loose and lazy across her body. Now, though, she's drowsy, she's relaxed rather than that careful placidity he's seen so much of. There's still that vibrancy in her, the vitality and energy he could feel coursing through her while they were ...whatever that was. Fucking. That'll work.

She doesn't touch him after her hands lift off his chest, but she's close enough that when they breathe his side and her chest make brushing, almost too-sensitive, too-heated contact.

For some reason what he says makes her smile a little, not much of a smile but her eyes soften and her mouth curves a bit in quiet amusement. "Why'd you bring me here if you thought that?" she counters.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "You know why."

Did she think he would shy from the truth now? If she knows him at all, she wouldn't have. He looks at the ceiling another moment. The bed is stripped bare, and now even the fitted sheet is rumpled, wrinkled, the folds moving as he turns his head to look at her.

"Because I wanted to make a whore of you."

A pause, and his eyes move to her mouth, then back. At this range, in this light, her eyes lose some of their greenness -- become some indefinable hazel color.

"Why did you let me?" he repeats, quieter.

[Danicka Musil] She does know why, and even hearing him go on to say it aloud doesn't seem to disturb her. Kissing him disturbed her. Being held onto as closely as he held her had disturbed her. Being brought here, curling into a self-protective ball, begging him to stop because the way he was trying to take her was fucked up...none of it was so much as a breeze across the still pond she seems so often to be. She knew why before she asked, could have given him half a dozen answers for his own behavior.

She knew when she got out of his car for the second time in three hours that he wanted her. Then again, she knew coming up the stairs and looking over to him sitting on the sectional couch that she wanted him.

There's flecks of nutmeg-brown in her eyes, which are a translucent green in the right lightning and soft blue when she's out in the sun...which he's never seen. And his eyes, always blue. Steady. Either cold and icy or the color of fire almost too hot to be seen, but always gleaming, vivid blue. Always were. She reaches over with her left hand, but doesn't start drawing patterns on his skin or tracing his scars. She just drapes her arm over him.

"I'll tell you a secret," she murmurs, resting her cheek on her right hand and looking closely at him. "The word 'whore'? The word 'slut'? 'Cow', 'bitch'...all the things you could call me don't. Mean. Anything. And I'll tell you another secret, because...well...I'm just that generous," she goes on, her voice still conspiratorially soft. "Being somewhere nicer wouldn't have made any difference."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Whore. Slut. Cow. Bitch.

Could call me, she says, which is a kindness, because the truth is he did call her these things; and if he didn't, he thought them; and if he didn't, his packmates did.

He wraps his hand around her forearm where it crosses the moving planes of his chest. His thumb traces her skin; thoughtfully; absently. Then he extends his other hand -- the one closer her, and at an angle that he can only brush the backs of his fingers over her cheek.

She had looked at him, earlier, as though to ask if he could see what he has done to her. The question turning in his mind is even simpler than that. What have you done to me. What have you done, over and over and over, like an ouroboros swallowing its own tail, like a mobius strip, an illusion of two sides, two paths, two possibilities, when there is only one.

He sucks a breath in. Then he snaps the used condom off, reaches for the strip of durexes or trojans or whatever the fuck she keeps in her purse, and maybe it should bother him that she carries them in her purse, not just one or two but half a fucking dozen, but really: who the fuck gives a fuck, right now?

"Come here," he says, low, and he could mean any number of things, or perhaps only two, or perhaps just the one: "I've waited long enough."

[Danicka Musil] That really was a secret, and the second one more potent and more many-layered than the first. Wouldn't have made any difference to what? he could ask, or Why not? But ultimately it really doesn't matter. He's called her a whore, bitch, slut, and so have others, and so he may again and others certainly will, and she could apparently not care less. As for trying to turn her into one, to make her a whore by bringing her somewhere filthy and meaningless, it had not changed his Rage or her want or the aching twist in her chest when he kissed her.

Which she is not thinking about right now, even with his hand on her arm and his fingertips on her face and her eyes softening on him as though she can read the same question in him that she was asking when she came. It's not a simple question, really, not as simple as any of this, as simple as he'd like it to be. When they leave here there's still the matter of facing his packmate, whether he cares anymore or not. There's still the matter of Katherine telling her no and telling her don't and hell there's still the matter of his pack in flux and her home life with an alcoholic coke addict but they're not talking about what Katherine said or what's going on with the Circle or even who the hell it is Danicka lives with in that glassy high-rise.

They're also not talking about what the hell kind of woman (whore) carries a half-dozen Trojans in her purse, even if she did know or expect or intend (or hope) that he would be taking that pale-colored lingerie off her skin when (never if) he met her at the bar.

They're just lying there.

Til he turns to her and tells her to come here when she's already close enough that her very breaths make their bodies touch, when her arm is already over him, hand now sliding to his bicep, his shoulder, to pull him to her before he even finishes speaking. "You've waited," she says quietly, in a mocking scoff that really isn't, not even remotely. Her leg slides up his, hooks over his hip, and she is kissing him again, purring throatily in that language again that is not his, or the country's, but one he has certainly heard before.

The first time was the last time she meets his eyes upon orgasm. The second time she is curled against his chest and moaning against his neck. The third she is facing away from him, holding his arm over her waist and his hand on her breast, her head thrown back so that her temple is on his cheek and though her free hand clutches at the pillows they've thoroughly ignored or upset and her fingers brush his she doesn't take his hand, does not lace them together as she's moaning that she doesn't want him to stop.

And so on. Not a half-dozen times, but more than once, more than just fucking each other to get it over with so that they can get back to their lives the way they were before he looked at her and corrected Gabriella Bellamonte's pronunciation of her name.

Later, spent, sweat-drenched and overcome by thirst, by weariness, she does eventually leave him. It takes time to unfold herself from him and from the tousled sheets. It takes time to get her clothes on when they've been lost and her legs are indeed somewhat coltish before she steadies. It takes a little time, and no she can just shower at home -- she's said that before -- but she never says she should go (Absolutely). She brushes her hair and shrugs into her coat, looking over at him wherever he is at that point and if she was going to say something that would be the time.

Danicka doesn't say anything. She leans over and kisses him the way he should have kissed her at the waterfront, til the breath she's caught back is stolen from her, til she pulls back, licking her lips and murmuring, "Dobrou noc, Lukáš."

This is what she does. Whether he is asleep or not.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] At some point, Lukas left the bed. He went to the tiny, cramped bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He looked at himself in the mirror, his face drawn, his jaw dark with stubble, his eyes a blue so intense he startles himself. Had he always looked like this? Pirate-faced -- half-unhinged -- savage?

He turned the lights out when he left the bathroom. He turned the desk lamp out too on his way back to bed.

The last time is in the breathing dark, she above him, her hair swinging against his face, his hands exploring her body in heavy, deliberate strokes. Slow now, surreal, the edges of the world made stark by exhaustion, indistinct by the dark.

Afterward there is silence, until she unfolds herself, draws away. There's a difference in this, from every other time: a sense of an ending. He is not sleeping; his breathing is too quiet, and his hand trails her body as she leaves the bed. He would not sleep, anyway: perhaps because he does not trust her enough to let down his guard; perhaps because he does not trust her to wake him before she leaves.

The curtains are imperfectly closed, and there's a shaft of light coming through. It was ochre all night -- streetlights in the parking lot. It's grey now: approaching dawn. Their eyes have long since adjusted. She could dress by it if she wants, or she can turn on the floor lamp, the desk lamp; the bedside lamp.

He watches her, whatever it is she does. He watches her dress herself and comb out her hair, his eyes alert and clear but shuttered, unrevealing again, colorless in this light. He makes no move to dress himself, or follow her. The blankets are still strewn all over the floor. He has no discomfort with his nakedness, the chill of the room. No words either: not to ask her where she's going, or why she's leaving, or who was going to drive her home this time, or when he'll see her again, or if she'll stay. He has said so little to her all night, ever since Vezmi mě uvnitř vás. A fragment of a conversation, motels, whore, making no difference. A quiet question in one lull or another, his hand covering the outer curve of her shoulder -- Není ti zima? -- because after he'd turned the A/C off he hadn't bothered to turn the heater on.

There is a moment where, if she was going to say something, then would be the time. It passed.

She leans over and he raises himself on his elbows and she kisses him, and he accepts it, and returns it. There's a ferocity in this, even now.

There's a moment when, if he was going to say something, then would be the time.

It too passes.

What he says instead, sinking back down to stuff a pillow under his head and catch a scant few hours of shut-eye before heading back to the Brotherhood, and the Circle, and the brother he may or may not have betrayed, and the Alpha who may or may not be an Omega now, and the Gamma who was now an Alpha, and...

What he says instead is: "Dobrou noc, Danička."

The door clicks shut in her wake. He can hear her heels walking away for some time; the walls are that thin. He peels the sheet up from one side of the bed and drapes it over himself -- makeshift blankets -- closes his eyes. The bedding smells faintly of her, but Lukas is not the sort to grow maudlin or sentimental over such things. He registers it; sets it aside; is asleep within two minutes, and gone within four hours.