Page 32 of Holly & Hemlock
The gamesmanship is still there, but it has mutated—a chess match turned bare-knuckle brawl. He hooks his fingers in my waistband, dragging the fabric down my hips without ceremony; the cold licks at my skin, a shock so exquisite I almost arch off the floor.
He slides further down, mouth pressing urgent, wet heat to the inside of my thigh, and then I realize—his hands are shaking. Only a little, but enough that I want to reach for him, anchor him as much as myself. I don't. I let him have his way, let his teeth find the sensitive seam just above my knee, let the anticipation bloom and then crash into the real thing.
His mouth on me is not what I expected; it's rough and greedy and relentless, but then—so is he. I dig my heels against the cold, slip my hand into his tangle of hair, scrape my nails along his scalp until he groans into me, and the vibration almost untethers my bones.
He works me methodically, tongue insistent, fingers spreading me wider. It builds, the pace crueler, all teeth and want, until he finds a pulsepoint with his tongue and does not let go. Every sound in the room turns to static.
The ache starts at the base of my spine and spreads outward, fire and ice, fighting for supremacy. I hear myself gasp, a fractured thing, and I’m almost humiliated by how quickly I’m undone—but Larkin only pushes harder, thumbtracing impossible circles, tongue mapping the edge of pain and pleasure until my vision whites out.
I come with a shudder so sharp I think I might snap, my hips bucking up to meet his mouth, my hands crushing his hair to my skin. I don’t recognize the sound that escapes my mouth.
He holds, rides it out, relentless as gravity, until I sag and the world folds back into color and shape.
At last, silence. Or rather, the silence of breath, of nerves rewiring, of heartbeat finding its way back to steady rhythm.
He rests his forehead against my thigh, the heat of him branding the inside of my knee as his breath steadies, deepens. When he looks up, I see the mask stripped away . . . lips swollen, hair a mess of deliberate ruin. My pulse is a riot.
"You always this obedient when you lose?" he says.
I don’t have the strength for words, so I make a noncommittal grunt.
He peels himself off the floor with a violence almost equal to what put him there, and for a minute I think he will say something—something raw, or real, or impossible to admit. But he only sits back on his heels, forcibly calm, hands neatly folded over his knees as if reciting penance.
He fishes a single black pawn from under the table, spins it in his fingers, and gives me a look so leveled, so calculating.
“You’re starting to learn what the house wants from you. It’s best if we all play our parts.”
9
Shelter
It happens not with a whimper, but a thunderclap—a single, sickening crack that shudders the length of Hemlock House and reverberates in the meat of my bones. For a heartbeat I think the world itself has split, a tectonic shearing visible only to those cursed enough to remain awake through a night like this.
Then comes the second sound: the brittle crash of glass, multiplied by a chorus of smaller, shrieking fragments.
By the time I reach the stairwell, I’m already breathless, feet numb in my boots and hands gripping the banister as though it might collapse next. I smell the snow before I see it—a sharp, mineral tang, half-ice, half-electric, punctured by the sour reek of old wood giving up the ghost.
The east wing corridor is a scene from a disaster film, but slower, more deliberate, like a ruin that’s grown old waiting for an audience. The floor is a chaos of splintered lath, blackened slate, and drifted snow so pure it hurts to look at.
Above, the ceiling is simply gone—a ragged mouth chewed through plaster and beams, exposing the black marrow of the attic to the sky. The air that funnels through isalive, a howling wind that slams me against the far wall, rips the breath from my throat, and flings wet needles of snow into my face. I blink, and they melt on my lashes, blurring the edges of everything.
The shock gives way to a kind of awe. I’ve spent a week cataloguing the slow decay of this place, measuring it in spiderwebs and mildew and the creak of settling timber. But this is different. This is violence, raw and unmediated—a brute force trauma that renders all my small, careful interventions pointless.
I edge closer, boots slipping on the glass-slick boards. The wind has flung everything to the floor: a chandelier’s worth of shattered glass, the brittle bones of a bookcase, a sheaf of ancient linen that thrashes in the gusts like a drowning bird. I kneel and run my hand along the break in the wall, where wet plaster shears clean through to the lath. The damage is catastrophic, but not final. The house, I think, is still deciding whether to accept the blow or rage against it.
As if in response, the wind screams louder, bending the old walls inward until they groan. A section of cornice cracks loose and sails past my head, missing by inches. I jerk back and slam my shoulder into a doorframe, cursing in a language I barely recognize as my own.
Sleet is everywhere now, water sluicing down the walls and into the carpet runner, turning the faded fleur-de-lis to a smeared watercolor. I know, with the certainty of the doomed, that soon the floors will be buckled and rotten, the wallpaper will blister and peel, and the mold will colonize everything with the efficiency of an invading army.
The rational part of me—the part trained in the incremental disaster of restoration—counts the losses, estimates the man-hours, tallies up the chemical cocktails that will be required to reverse even a fraction of this. But the rest of meis simple animal: cold, afraid, and desperate to plug the hole before the entire house hemorrhages out into the storm.
I retreat to the main corridor, my body shaking with adrenaline and the effort of not shattering myself on the way out. I pause at the vestibule and press my hands to the radiator, which is, of course, stone cold. I stand there, back to the wall, and try to think. The wind buffets the windows, finds every gap in the caulking, hisses and claws like something alive.
A voice—a memory of Larkin, sardonic and inevitable—floats up from the marrow of my skull: “The house is always hungry.” It’s not the house that’s hungry now, though. It’s the storm is not content to batter Hemlock from the outside, but is bent on invading it, one room at a time.
There’s no question of waiting it out. If I let this breach fester, there may not be an east wing left to salvage. I need tarps, rope, nails, ladders—real tools, not the ceremonial fuckery of a Vale’s toolkit.
I need Lane.
