max𖦹°｡⋆

Bruce walked over, carefully picked up a cup that had miraculously survived the blast, and poured you water from the tap. He handed it to you, his fingers brushing yours. You flinched, expecting the contact to trigger another reaction, but nothing happened.

“Tony’s announcements can be a lot,” he said, leaning against the scorched island. “I once broke a lab bench because he told me he’d managed to replicate super soldier serum in a toaster.” A huff of laughter escaped you, a rusty, unused sound.

That was the beginning.

You’d sit in his lab while he worked, a comfortable silence falling over you. And that's why you liked hanging out with Bruce. You didn't have to pretend with him. You didn't have to force the emptiness in your expression, because he understood; saw the monster you were so afraid of and didn't flinch.

“You know,” Bruce said one day, not looking up from a microscope, “the other guy, he’s not just anger. He’s fear. He’s everything I’m not strong enough to feel on my own.”

You knew exactly what he meant. Your explosive power wasn't just about anger. It was joy, it was sorrow, it was fear, it was love. It was every emotion, amplified to a destructive degree.

“I get it,” you said quietly. “One time, I watched a movie. A really sad one. Cried so hard I blew a hole through my bedroom floor. My landlord was not thrilled.”

He finally looked up, a small, sad smile on his face. “I turned a whole city block into rubble because I got spooked by a helicopter.”

It was a strange, twisted form of bonding. You were two sides of the same coin, cursed with power you never asked for, terrified of the person you became when you lost control.

The true test came during a mission. Heavy fire kept you and Bruce trapped behind a crumbling wall of concrete. You could feel the panic rising, a cold dread that made your skin prickle with dangerous heat. This was it. You were going to lose it, and you were going to take Bruce with you.

“Hey, look at me,” Bruce grabbed your shoulders, forcing you to meet his eyes. “It’s okay. Let it go.”

“What?” you gasped, your vision blurring. “I’ll kill you!”

“No, you won’t,” You could see it now, the flicker of green in his eyes and the strain in his jaw. “He won’t let you. And you…you can’t hurt him. So just let go. Give ‘em hell.”

His trust was a lifeline. You stopped fighting and surrendered to your emotions. Yet, you didn't explode in a chaotic, uncontrollable burst of destruction. This time you aimed. A torrent of explosive energy erupted from you, obliterating the enemy's position.

When the dust settled, you were on your knees, your clothes smoking as the Hulk stood in front of you, completely unharmed. He looked down at you, then at the smoldering crater where the bad guys used to be. He let out a low grunt, then gently, so gently, patted you on the back with a hand the size of a car door.

It was enough to knock the wind out of you, but it didn’t trigger a thing. His skin was too dense, his biology too alien to be affected by the heat of your body.

Later, when Bruce was back, bruised but himself, he found you sitting on the roof, staring at the city lights. “You didn’t lose control completely.

“You told me I could,” your voice was hoarse. “You weren’t scared.”

Arthur Morgan. He was a private man, kept his secrets locked up tight, and said only a few words. You know the type. But of course, people wouldn’t think said rough and tough outlaw would have a boyfriend of all things. Sure, he was an outlaw, but it could be a bit unexpected because of the times.

Yet, surely the man that stole Arthur Morgan’s heart must’ve been something grand, and it was only more of a surprise (mostly to the gang ofc), to meet the guy and see he was nothing more than an aristocrat horse racer. And a charming one at that. 

Where the two met was unknown, but everyone could see just how smitten the two men were for each other. The gang could see this man was good for Arthur, he wasn’t some stickler for the rules or an arrogant pain in the side. He was just happy to be around, maybe win a few games of cards and such. But, Arthur was still a private man, which proved to be a difficult habit to keep with [m/n].

And perhaps some of the gang got a peak of their romance, but he tried his best to keep the hand holding and smooching to a minimum around them, he wouldn’t be able to handle the teasing he’d hear after. That lovey dovey stuff was kept exclusive to the privacy of a hotel room or Arthur’s tent. It wasn't because he was ashamed or anything, he just wanted to keep his reputation as some cold hearted outlaw clean. (And because he got jealous sometimes..)

It didn’t help that his boyfriend was a sucker for public displays of affection. Nothing too crazy to make him uncomfortable, but he just had a knack for making Arthur flush in front of the others like it was a personal hobby of his. It was frustrating for the outlaw. But, he understood that [m/n] was just proud of their bond. Still, Arthur didn’t need Micah to have any more ammunition to shoot him with when he spoke the shit he did. And asking his boyfriend out for some alone time was always a pain. [m/n] loved making a big deal out of it, acting all flustered and batting his eyes obnoxiously. If Arthur weren’t so fond of the man he would’ve choked him out already. 

As Arthur checked his reflection in the little mirror he used to shave, adjusting himself as needed, he took in a deep breath. Going up to [m/n], who had to be around the camp, probably sitting near the lake or something, would be a feat. Avoiding everyone just to get to his man would definitely be a bit tricky this time a day, he could only hope he’d be left alone and that his boyfriend wasn’t in a teasing mood today.

He made sure to check all of [m/n]’s favorite spots to sit, near the horses, around Pearson’s wagon, and even near the lake, but he seemed to be nowhere to be seen. It was only then, a pit grew in his stomach when he saw his lover, sat at a table where he, Hosea, Lenny, and Uncle were playing a game of poker. God this would be harder than usual. 

Pulling [m/n] away from a poker game would be impossible, that man was more competitive than an angry badger claiming its territory. And asking him out for a date would be even more painful around listening ears and wide smirks. 

But he wanted to spend time with his lover, so he swallowed his pride and trudged over, standing behind [m/n] and peering over his shoulder at the cards he had in hand. He seemed to be winning.. This was good.

“Gentlemen.” Arthur gave a curt nod as he glanced around the table, a warm hand landing on [m/n]’s shoulder out of instinct. “Can I talk to you, [m/n]?” He wanted to call him sweetheart, like he always did, but he caught himself before he could, noticing the smirk on Hosea’s face.

“Course you can, Artie, whatcha need?” That goddamn nickname.

Arthur shifts, his boots crunching the earth beneath him. He clears his throat, feeling like a love-struck idiot as he looks away from the back of his boyfriend’s head. He already felt the embarrassed flush creeping up his neck. 

“Privately, I mean. Need ta ask you somethin’.” He was about ready to just drag the man away from the table, but he didn’t want to come off as desperate for affection or attention. He just knew someone would say something.

“Mm, can’t it wait? I got a good hand here, Darlin’..” [m/n] chuckled, glancing back at his boyfriend with a big grin, that competitive look in his eye. It made Arthur just want to kiss him right then and there, seeing all happy like that, and his heart was practically beating out of his chest at that term of endearment.

“I suppose.. But I’d like ta chat before sundown..” Arthur huffs, but he knew his man didn’t hear him, watching as [m/n] placed down his cards, revealing his winning flush to the table. Here comes the gloating.

Every man at that table groaned and threw in their cards, Uncle grumbled under his breath about foul play. [m/n] happily denied the accusations as he collected his earnings, stating “It’s just good luck, old man”.

Arthur rolled his eyes, stepping back as his boyfriend triumphantly stood up, his pockets now lined with the money he won. He was just thinking he’d be able to pull [m/n] away, but Hosea had to go and say something.

“Now, Arthur, I wish your taste in lovers had changed sooner! I haven’t had a good game of poker in years!” The silver haired man laughed, a wheezing sound that came with his old age. It was harmless, but it was enough for Arthur’s cheeks to set ablaze. Goddammit.

[m/n] laughed, his own cheeks flushing slightly. He liked the gang, all of these people were rather entertaining to be around. Well, except for a few of them, but he wouldn’t let a few bad apples ruin the batch.

“C’mon, old man, I can’t be that good.” [m/n] grinned, standing next to Arthur practically glowing with pride. And Arthur just stood there, his face on fire from what Hosea had just said. That old man knew how to just embarrass him, and he knew he was doing it on purpose by that same smirk on his face. 

“Well, if he’s so good then I should pull him away, save your pockets the hurt.” Arthur grumbles, almost pouting as Uncle laughed at him, Lenny had already stepped away, more interested in some book than teasing Arthur and his relationship. Hosea only smirked wider, waving the two men away, having had his fill of poking fun. 

[m/n] turned to glance at his boyfriend, smiling as Arthur suddenly took hold of his arm and began pulling him away from camp. He found a quiet spot around the horses, taking a moment to gather himself before he turned towards [m/n], pulling him closer by the belt loops of his worn out jeans. 

“You’re difficult to deal with, you know that right?” He mumbles, his hands heavy on [m/n]’s hips, his thumbs rubbing circles against the fabric of his shirt. He sighs, shaking his head as the other man just laughs, his arms wrapping around Arthur’s neck. 

“Am I? Maybe you just can’t handle me..” [m/n] hummed, tilting his head slightly, one hand toying with the hair at the nape of Arthur’s neck, a soft smile on his lips.

A comfortable silence settled between the two as they stood there, the sounds of the distant camp and snorting horses filling their ears. [m/n] watches Arthur closely, seeing that his boyfriend was holding something back, remembering the mention of him wanting to ask him something.

“What did you want to tell me earlier, hm? Seemed important.” [m/n] leaned in closer towards Arthur, looking into the pretty pool of blue and green that was the outlaw’s eyes. 

Arthur just hummed, glancing down at his boyfriend’s lips before looking into his eyes again. He chuckles lightly, his cheeks gaining a red color. 

“I just—I wanted to ask if you’d like to.. Maybe go out on a ride? Just us.”

“Mmm… Like a date?”

“..Yeah. A date.”

[m/n] huffed, a soft smile pulling on his lips as he cheeks flush darker. He seemed almost bashful, all that confidence he had early slowly disappearing. Being asked out on a date by his boyfriend always made butterflies flutter in his stomach, even though they’ve been on plenty of dates it still felt like the first time. God, if only this man knew just how in love with him he was.

“Where was you thinkin’ we go?” [m/n] asked softly, unable to fight the grin pulling on his lips. He felt like some schoolboy with a crush, his heart beating loudly in his chest. He feared he’d pass out with how giddy he felt.

“Dunno, there’s a few spots I’ve been meaning to show ya..” Arthur responds, feeling just as love struck as the man in his arms. The urge he had to kiss him stupid was hard to ignore, the longer they stood here the more eager he got to get out of camp.

And [m/n] say the longing in Arthur’s eyes, a small laugh leaving in before he leaned in closer, their breath mingling. In a matter of a second, their lips met in a soft, slow kiss. The rest of the world suddenly disappeared, it was just them, two men deeply in love. It was like time had slowed down, minutes feeling like hours.

Before the kiss could deepen, could get too heated and become sensual, the both of them pulled away. The risk of being watched was too high, not that anyone would likely care, they just weren’t those types of people. This would be done more comfortably in a hotel room or a private spot amongst the wilderness.

“Well, best we get goin’ then, hm?” [m/n] smirked, stepping away and pulling Arthur by the hand, leading him, almost beckoning him with the look in his eyes towards their horses. And Arthur went willingly, the both of them grinning like idiots as they both rushed off to their respected horses, mouthing up quickly and riding out of camp without any care.

Notes: I'm already out of ideas 😭

The first thing that registered when you came back to yourself was the dry sour weight of the wool blanket pulled up to your chest and the cold scratch of dried cum at the front of your boxers, fabric gone stiff in one long uneven patch from your fly to the inside of your right thigh.

Curled on your side the way you'd fallen asleep, one arm thrown up over the pillow above your head and the other lying loose across your abdomen. The room was a wash of grey-white light, sky outside the small window packed with the same low clouds as yesterday but brighter now.

For a long minute you didn’t move, eyes tracing the watermarks on the ceiling, brown old shapes of damp that had set and dried out.

Events of the night assembled themselves piece by piece between talking with him on his couch with a glass of wine in your hand, the blue burning steady behind his pupils and a cry from a baby down the dark hall that he had not turned to acknowledge.

Sleep that had taken you between one blink and the next to then teleport your mind into one hell of a dream where his hand was around your cock and his mouth on yours. him saying constantly saying ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’ into your mouth as you came on his fingers.

Heat climbed up the side of your throat and you pressed the heels of your hands hard into your eye sockets until small white sparks burst behind the lids.

It had to have been a dream, the door of the room was closed and had no inner lock. You would have heard him with how of a light sleeper you were after living in a rural village infested by lycans.

Wouldn't you?

The small hot sour question lodged behind your sternum, down to the bandage at your side. The linen there was clean, still neat, no fresh blood through it and through the cloth, when you pressed lightly with two fingertips, there was a faint warmth.

Outside the small window a clump of snow fell off the branch, light through the glass was the deep pale flat light of the usual winter mornings in this place.

It wasn’t the thin light of dawn, you must had slept for hours.

How could you have slept like that?

A man you had met yesterday whose eyes glowed blue in the dark of a meeting hall, whose mold lived in the walls of his house and beneath your skin, yet you were gone out like a snuffed lamp and slept through the night with your trousers undone and your spend drying on your stomach.

The simplest answer was that you had been tired, having been tied and stabbed, then patched and dragged on a cart for half a day and your body had wanted to die for whole stretches of yesterday.

You drew the blanket up higher and lay there with the wool against your throat and let yourself, for one cowardly minute, consider not getting up at all. You could lie here and if he came up the stairs in the afternoon to look in on you, you could keep your eyes shut and you would not have to feel his eyes pick at the side of your cheek while you tried to eat.

It lasted a minute and then your eyes drifted, against your will, to the writing desk against the wall by the door, where you had set your boots last night, jacket draped on the back of the chair where you had hung it.

Nothing in the room had moved.

If he came in here at any point in the day and found you in this state, you would not be able to crawl far enough down inside yourself to survive it.

You sat up, blanket falling off your chest and the cold of the room slid in across your shirt where the damp at the collar had cooled overnight and you pushed yourself up onto the side of the bed and put your bare feet down on the floorboards.

Undressing in small clumsy stages, peeling the trousers down off your hips with your face hot, balling them up and setting them very carefully on the corner of the desk furthest from the door. From your small bundle of belongings at the foot of the bed with the few things the Duke had wrapped for you yesterday, courtesy of Lord Winters who purchased them, you pulled a clean pair of clothes and stepped out of the room with them.

The wash basin on the stand against the wall had a thin skin of ice on its surface. You broke it with the side of your hand, hissed at the cold, dipped a cloth in and dragged it down your stomach and across the inside of your thigh, scrubbing harder than you needed before pulling a clean undershirt on over your head and tugged your shirt down over that.

When you straightened in front of the small foxed mirror over the basin your face was pale at the edges and red at the cheekbones, looking like a man who had been fucked in his head.

The hallway was quiet but from below, through the floorboards, came the bare smallest sounds of a spoon against the inside of a pot, dull thump of something heavy set down on a wooden counter, faint hiss of fat hitting hot iron and the low pop of a fire in a grate working through dry wood.

There was also the low arrhythmic creak of someone moving slowly back and forth across a kitchen floor.

You knew where Ethan was in the house as you stopped at the top of the stairs with your hand on the banister.

The small sick feeling that ran up the inside of your sternum at that knowledge was a new flavor of bad, there was a thread strung now between you and him and you could feel where it ended.

The wall along the staircase on your left had a thin dark vein of mold and it pulse as you passed.

A second vein, lower down, ran in a long lazy curl across the wallpaper near the bottom of the staircase and, as you stepped onto the next tread, it pulsed in answer.

Three or four thin lines braided into each other that contracted rapidly when you came close to them at the bottom of the stairs and relaxed.

Was it greeting you?

Turning around the corner, through the wide archway that led from the entry into the main room you could see the long dark couch where you had sat with him last night, low table in front of it still standing exactly as he had left it, empty wine glass still on the corner of the wood with a small ring of dark sediment in the bottom of the bowl, your glass beside it with a swallow's-worth of wine still pooling there, gone cold and tarry overnight.

Room in the morning light let you see the low ceiling, heavy old beams crossed the plaster in dark squared timbers, plaster between them yellow with age and webbed with fine cracks.

A wide stone hearth set into the far wall held a low orange fire under a black iron grate, above the mantel a tall narrow mirror in a tarnished gilt frame hung at a slight angle and threw the firelight back into the room in a long warm bar.

The leaves farther from the window, deeper in toward the wall, were spotted at their veins with very small dots of black. Off the living room to one side, through an arched opening, you could see the dining nook with its small square table covered in a printed cloth, two ladderback chairs facing each other, a wooden high chair pushed in tight against the table on one side.

A wooden high chair, your eyes caught on it for a half second and then went past.

Dining table had a half-burnt taper in a small brass holder at its center and two cloth napkins folded into neat triangles laid one to each side, knives and forks set out with absolute careful symmetry on either side of two empty plates.

He had set the table for two while the candle had been lit and blown out, tiny coil of white smoke still ribboning up from the blackened wick.

In the way old farmhouses in this country were, it was beautiful.

Mold was above the front door where it met the ceiling, a long thin smear of black spread across the corner, lacework of fine filaments grown into the plaster. Behind the sideboard where you had not been able to see it last night because the angle had been wrong, a much thicker rope of mold climbed the wall and it pulsed every few seconds in a faint rolling wave from the floor toward the ceiling.

Your eyes went all around the place and at the very edge of your sight there was a movement from the deep end of the corridor that led toward the back of the house.

A shape went past the far end of it, tall and hunched with one shoulder higher than the other, it shuffled with a crooked sideways gait. You caught only the silhouette of it, the broad coat-back and long arm dragging at its side before it rounded the corner at the end of the corridor and was gone past the doorframe into whatever room sat beyond.

A small clatter from the kitchen and soft tink of a glass being set down on a wooden counter.

There was a beautiful smell in the air that came up out of the kitchen and rolled toward you across the living room and your stomach made a long low noise out loud, embarrassingly loud in the quiet of the house, identical to the smell of your childhood.

Your throat did something you were not prepared for and you swallowed while you took a step toward the kitchen.

He had heard you on the stair, or the mold had told him.

"Hey," came his voice from the kitchen, lifted a little to carry through the doorway. "Morning. C'mon in, take a seat. I'm almost done here."

Your feet carried you the rest of the way to the kitchen archway before your head had finished catching up to itself.

Ethan was at the stove with a wooden spoon in one hand and a folded dish towel slung through his belt loop.

He was in a soft blue thermal henley with the sleeves shoved up to his elbows and a pair of dark jeans, dirty blond of his hair was damp at the tips, freshly washed, combed back off his forehead in uneven thick strokes, feet bare in the slippers he must have been padding around in.

He turned sideways at the stove when you came through the doorway and his face when he looked at you broke open in a warm smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes.

"There he is, morning sleeping beauty." He said. "Sit down, I'm five minutes out."

The easy American accent of his voice did a small odd thing to the inside of your chest.

"Lord Winters, have you not eaten yet? I can wait." The Lord came up at the back of your throat by reflex, word used by the hag.

He laughed quietly and turned the spoon once, bringing the rim of it up to taste with the side of his thumb, frowned at the taste, tipped a small pinch of salt off his other hand into the pan.

"Oh come on," he said, half over his shoulder. "I told you to ditch the Lord stuff. It's Ethan."

"Ethan," you said, careful with it. "Have you not eaten?"

"Been waiting for you." He glanced at you and the smile crinkled deeper. "Don't make that face, I'm not really a breakfast guy. One coffee and I'm good for half a day. I just wanted to do this one."

The guilt that had started to crawl up your throat at the thought of him standing in this kitchen for an hour and a half with the burners on, waiting for you, dimmed only slightly at his words as you took a step into the room.

"You didn't have to," you said quietly. "Really."

He glanced sideways at you and the smile softened.

"Yeah, I did," he said. "Sit down."

You did not, in that moment, see yourself walk to the table.

It was set in the dining nook off the main living room through the arch.

You did not remember pulling the chair out and sitting down on it, nor setting your hands on your thighs under the table, but they were there.

There was a high chair next to the table empty and you could not stop seeing it.

You watched him through the archway.

He had turned a quarter turn back to the stove and the fabric pulled across the broad flat of his shoulders as he reached up for a plate from a high shelf, hem of the henley rode up an inch above his belt and you saw, for a small second, the dip of his back at the base of his spine and a thin dark vein of mold riding the line of it under the skin.

Taking your eyes off him did not help, the image that arrived in your head was not something you had asked for.

Suddenly you were not at the table, but on the table.

He had lifted you up off the chair, large hands hot under your thighs, set you on the long flat of the butcher block in the kitchen with a small heavy thunk of your weight settling on the wood with your hands bracing on it, stepping between your knees and his hips fit right there.

His mouth was already on yours in the same slow open kiss from the dream, lips parting yours easy and unhurried, tongue coming forward warm and patient, sliding along the top of yours and curling under, exploring every soft place inside your mouth with a heavy hint of hunger.

He tasted of black coffee along the clean fungus smell at the back of his palate as you opened your mouth for it because you were addicted by it.

Your hands had come up off the wood and had laid themselves on the broad flat of his shoulders and stayed there, line of his bulge through the denim of his jeans was right against the inside of your thigh, heavy and fully shaped along the length of his fly, round head of him riding high under the seam at his hip and the long thick line of his shaft running down the inside of his pant leg.

He rocked his hips forward slowly and the line of him dragged up the inside of your thigh, pressing at the soft warm space behind your balls through your trousers and the breath punched out of you into his open mouth.

"My Lord…" You said it into his mouth, trained-in word out of prolonged education that made him groan, hips snapping forward without meaning to and the long shape of him through his jeans dragged hard up the cleft of your trousers right under your ass and your whole body jerked.

"Say it again," he breathed into your mouth, tone of his voice husky and shooting positive feedback down to your dick.

"My Lord—" He tilted his head, deepening the kiss and blocking any more words out of your mouth, hand coming up to cup the back of your head and angling you the way he wanted, tongue sliding deeper, wet of him filling your mouth as his hips ground forward in a long slow possessive roll, heavy weight of his bulge dragging across your ass through two layers of cloth and your toes curled in your socks where your feet had risen and locked around the back of his thighs.

Your arms were around his neck and you did not remember putting them there, henley soft under your fingers and the hot lean muscle of his shoulders shifted under the cotton on every long roll of his hips, broad flat of his chest dragging against your own through the cloth, small hard points of his nipples just barely brushing the cloth of his shirt against the cloth of yours and you were rutting up against him with your hips lifted off the wood, fucking the line of him and his hand at the back of your skull tightened in your hair as his mouth ate yours.

In all of this you kept whimpering those words he wished to hear again, “my Lord, my Lord, my Lord,” into his mouth as if you could not remember any other words and every time you said it his hips jerked, breath breaking in a small ragged moan that came back into your throat from his.

You were going to come in your pants right there on his kitchen table with his tongue down your throat and his bulge dragging across your ass—

"You okay?"

Your head jerked up at the voice, slowly reconnecting your location on the chair, table in front of you that had been set with four small plates and one large one between them, none of which you had seen him carry to the table fully of delicacies from breakfast in this place you had come to rarely see these days with Lycans destroying agricultural crops and animal’ interiors.

A wide shallow bowl of mămăligă caught your attention with the small dip in its center filled with melting butter and a soft golden runny pool of mixed cheese and sour cream that was just beginning to spread out across the yellow.

Across the table from you, his place was set with a single small white cup of black coffee steaming.

He was sitting in the chair opposite you, elbows on the edge of the table and the cup held in both hands at chin height while looking at you over the rim of it with a faint pull of concern between his brows.

The blue of his eyes was not glowing unlike yesterday in the snow.

"Hey," he said again. "You with me?"

The heat at the front of your trousers was real as you realized it with a painfully obvious erection against the inside seam of the new pair of grey trousers and your face had gone the color of the pickled peppers in one dish he had made for you.

Both of your knees scooted closer in toward each other, hiding the shape of yourself, all of it useless because there was a table in front of you blocking his view of your lap.

"I'm… sorry," you said, cough coming up on its own. You raised your hand and pressed the back of it to your mouth and coughed once into it, kept the hand there and used it to mostly cover your face.

"I'm sorry," you said again into your knuckles. "I— I think I stood up too fast. I haven't eaten in a while."

He held very still across the table and just looked at you over the rim of his cup with that small curious pull between his brows. The steam off the coffee rose between his face and yours, soft white curl of it threading up past the bridge of his nose.

His eyes, very briefly, did the thing.

A thin bloom of blue at the back of the iris for a half second, coming up at the bottom of the pupil and washing faintly through the underside of the iris before he had finished blinking once.

"Okay," he said, slow, voice gentle. "Yeah, that makes sense. Eat then, please."

He set the coffee cup down in its saucer with a small porcelain tink, sat back a little in his chair, lifted one hand in a small ushering gesture toward the plates.

"This is really good," you said very quietly after picking the fork and getting a piece of the first target in your sight. "You didn't have to do this much."

"Mm." He had picked his coffee back up. The cup hid the bottom half of his face. "I figured you might not've had a real breakfast in a while."

"I haven't." You took another small bite, everything so tender it fell open at the cut. "But still."

"After what you told me last night," he said, "about your family and what they did… the least I could do was put something on a table for you."

He set the cup down and looked at you across the rim of it, eyes tired and kind.

"I don't deserve any of this." Your throat closed for a second.

"Hey," he said and you looked up.

He had folded his arms on the edge of the table, one hand still wrapped loose around the cup. His head was tilted slightly to one side, corner of his mouth pulled up in the small crooked half-smile.

"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard at a breakfast table," he said, "and I lived with a woman who once told me I didn't deserve waffles because I left a sock on the bedroom floor."

The laugh came out of you before you could catch it, a short small surprised thing high in your throat and you felt the muscles around your eyes pull at the corners with it.

He grinned, both sides of his mouth and white line of his teeth viewable.

"There it is," he said quietly.

You ducked your head over the bowl and took another bite, drank a sip of the cold water from the glass and it was so cold it set your teeth ringing and he took a sip of his coffee.

"What was your kid like?" you asked.

The instant you said it you wanted to pull the words back into your mouth.

The high chair was right in the corner of your eye, whole house full of small cribs and that baby cry you heard yesterday still replayed inside your head.

He went very still for a while before a small thin smile spread on his face, not unfriendly or warm.

"Eat your breakfast," he said.

The voice was soft and closed a door.

It’s confirmed your doubts it was something he didn’t want to share

He asked you what part of the village you had grown up in and you replied back to him the exact location.

Sharing something as well by telling you that he had grown up in a small town in Texas.

At this point you were completely pretending those two stupid dream’s didn’t occur, yet your suspiciousness of him being the culprit told your mind it’ll be only harder from now to stop thinking of them.

If only you could figure out what he actually wanted and why he kept creating those mental images inside your head so strong to the point they brought real life effects on your body.

When you had finished, more than you'd thought you could eat, he pushed back from the table with a small grunt at the back of his throat and stood up with his cup still in his hand.

"All right," he said. "I'm gonna head up and let you finish in peace. There's hot water in the kettle if you want tea, the cups are in the cabinet above the sink."

He stretched once, one hand to his back and he glanced down at you with a tired but warm smile.

"I'm really glad you came down," he said.

You opened your mouth to thank him and he was halfway to the archway when he stopped, line of his shoulders rotating a quarter turn as he half-glanced back at you over his shoulder, cup still in his hand, coffee in it tilted toward the rim.

"Oh," he said, easy. "Right, almost forgot."

He turned the rest of the way and leaned his hip on the archway, free hand going into the pocket of his jeans.

"Got a letter this morning from a crow this morning," he said. "Mother Miranda's calling us up the mountain for later today."

"Us?" Your throat had gone a little dry.

"You and me." He nodded slowly. "She wants to see you. Just routine, see how you're settling. Nothing to worry about." He flashed a small grin. "She also says she's ready to call off the rituals for good."

He huffed a small soft laugh, almost to himself and shook his head. "I've only been telling her to knock that crap off for, what, a year and a half? Two years? Apparently today is the day she finally decides to listen to me." A small wry pull of his mouth at one corner. "Miracles do happen."

The smile he was wearing was warm at the surface, blue at the back of his eyes bloomed, pale ring around each pupil filled in for the smallest fraction of a second with a soft underlit color.

Uneasiness ran up out of your stomach in a long and slow climb while you smiled because he was smiling.

"Alright," you said, word coming out almost as a hum.

He pushed off the archway and took his coffee with him, slippers making small soft slides on the wood floor as he padded away and you heard the soft long creak of the first riser take his weight as he steadily went up.

The Duke was exactly where you'd expected him to be.

You came down off the porch of Ethan's house with said Lord a half step ahead, both of you bundled now against the cold, you in the wool coat the Duke had laid in your bundle yesterday and Ethan back in the same gold canvas jacket he had worn at the meeting hall, collar turned up against the wind.

The Duke himself was in his accustomed posture on the box, a great mountain of velvet and wool propped under his small cloth-roofed cabin, orange tip of his cigar glowing soft in the grey of the afternoon light.

He had a book open in one enormous palm, spine cracking back against his thumb, a small dry rumbling chuckle to himself every few lines.

He looked up at the small soft creak of the runner taking your weight.

"Aaaaah." The cigar came out of the corner of his mouth in a slow practiced sweep, smoke trailing past the curve of his cheek. "Lord Winters, the afternoon's first pleasant face."

"Hi, Duke." Ethan stamped the snow off his boots on the running board. "How long have you been waiting?"

"An hour. Two. Who counts?" The Duke shrugged one mountainous shoulder, book closed gently around his thumb to hold the page. "It is a fine afternoon for reading, Lord Winters and you have your place stocked away from pesky creatures. I was content."

His small clever eyes slid past Ethan to settle on you and warmed.

"And there is your little stray," he said, the cigar lifting again toward the corner of his mouth. "Still wearing his own face. I confess, my lord, I have been pleased to note that your new companion has not yet, ah—" the cigar made a small delicate gesture in the air "—turned into one of your less agreeable creatures. Forgive me the term."

Ethan laughed and glanced sideways at you and the corner of his mouth pulled up at the joke.

"Yeah," he said. "He's holding up better than I had any right to hope."

"Splendid," the Duke said. "In, in. The day will not wait on us and the lady up the road has been very clear about the hour."

Ethan stepped up onto the running board first, cart creaking as he swung up into the small cabin and the moment his weight had settled inside he turned in the open door to lower his hand back down to you, palm open, fingers loose.

The leather of his glove had been pulled off and tucked into his pocket, bare hand waiting for yours.

You set your fingers in his palm and his hand closed on yours, large and warm. He drew and you came up the step, his other arm caught your back exactly the way it had the night before as you came over the threshold.

Same dark red upholstery, same hanging lantern on its slow swing and one bench. You sat and his thigh was already against yours, shoulder against your own and his hip wedged into the curve of your hip, wool of his sleeve and your own pressed flat together along the entire length of your arms. There was nowhere else to put yourself and you did not try.

The door clapped shut while the Duke clicked his tongue twice up on the box and the cart began to move.

For a while there was only the soft grinding crunch of the runners on snow.

"So," the Duke said up through the small slot in the forward wall, raising his voice just enough to carry, "the orders, my lord. While I have you, shall I read them out, or let you suffer in suspense?"

Ethan huffed a small soft laugh against your shoulder. "Go on. Lay it on me."

"Lady Dimitrescu," the Duke said, "has placed her usual standing order plus a supplement. Six bottles of the Bordeaux…" he gave the French name its proper sound, accent suddenly precise "and two of the Sauternes for what she calls her marketing. She has been wholly unsubtle about the bottle she would like for her own personal cellar, which I shall not name aloud as I have heard you have a man on the box, but I trust you will not be surprised by the size of the invoice."

"How much?"

"You do not wish to know."

"Probably not." Ethan's shoulder lifted against yours in a small shrug.

"Mm. Also her middle daughter has, ah, somewhat dismembered her scythe."

"Cassandra?"

"The very one. Apparently a maid displeased her in some specific fashion and the scythe was, shall we say, too old for the resulting deep strike. I have procured for her a smith out of the lower valley who is willing, for considerable consideration, to anneal the haft and replace the blade."

"Smart man." Ethan laughed while sat and listened.

Castle Dimitrescu where they sent females and you’ve lost endless friends.

Six of the girls you had grown up with had gone up to that castle in the last four years and none of them had ever come back.

Your eyes drifted to the small slot at the front of the cabin and you watched the back of the Duke's huge head bob slightly with the motion of the cart.

Small slow climb of fear crept up the back of your throat.

Beside you Ethan's hand, which had been resting palm down on his own thigh, slid the small distance across the bench and found yours, fingers lacing and thumb settling itself over the back of your knuckles.

You felt him turn his head a fraction toward you, small soft pressure of his attention coming down across the side of your jaw.

Out of the corner of your sight, when you let your eyes flick sideways the smallest distance you dared, you saw his pupils widening, soft underlit blue gathering in a steady ring around them, side of his face touched with that pale glow.

"Nothing in this village is gonna touch you," he said.

He had pitched it very low that the Duke up on the box could not hear it, mouth tucked toward the curve of your jaw, breath warming the small soft place behind your ear.

"I promise you that. You stay close to me and you don't even have to look at them."

He squeezed your hand steadily.

"Okay?"

You nodded without questioning how he had known to say it and how the words had matched the shape of the thing in your head with such absolute precision that a small clean cold shiver ran down the inside of your spine.

Deep down you had a clue, by now, of what he was doing and of what was sitting under the bandage at your side. The thread that ran between you, one you had felt at the top of the stairs this morning when you had known where he was without looking, ran the other direction, too.

He could feel the spike of your fear the way you could feel the warm pulse of him on the bench beside you and what was in you originated by him.

The words did help and the fear settled.

"Okay," you said quietly.

He held your hand for another long count before, gradually, his thumb resumed its slow easy stroke across the back of your knuckles and the blue in his eyes dimmed.

"Heisenberg," the Duke said from the box, "I shall not mince words, has been a particular trial this season. He has 'borrowed,' if you will allow me the use of so generous a word, every piece of scrap iron in my long inventory that is not nailed down and I include in that several pieces that very much were nailed down. He claims he is owed it as a Lord and I claim I am owed payment as a merchant and somewhere in the middle of these claims is a small mountain of junk that he has carted off without giving me so much as a copper for it."

"What does he even do with all of it?" Ethan said.

"My lord, if I knew, I would charge him for the knowledge."

Ethan laughed and it rolled out of his chest right at your shoulder as you felt the small vibration of it travel through the press of his body against yours.

It was soothing and you leaned the smallest fraction closer to his shoulder, body doing it on its own in a soft drift of your weight settling deeper into the warm line of him.

His thumb stroked the back of your knuckles.

"And our Lord Heisenberg's factory," the Duke went on, "I gather, is currently in some species of revolt against itself. He has demanded a new shipment of copper plate and a barrel of mercury and what I can only describe as a frankly disturbing quantity of fine leather strap."

The factory where one of your friend’s older brother had gone three winters back and hadn’t come back.

"Duke," you said right after wetting your lips

It came out smaller than you had wanted and the Duke's huge head dipped slightly in acknowledgment up on the box.

"Yes, young man?"

"You— you go to all of them, don't you? All the lords."

"I do."

"Do any of them ever…" Your throat worked once. "Do they ever talk about the people who go to them? From the village?"

The Duke's hand holding the cigar stilled, small orange tip of it tracing a faint trail in the corner of your sight where it had been moving and stopped.

Ethan's hand around yours tightened in a grip, pressure of him on the back of your knuckles went from soft attentive to firm in a small absolute increment.

From the corner of your eye you could see the blue at the back of his iris bloom brighter than it had risen in the cabin so far, a clean cold wash of color that lit the underside of his lashes and threw a faint pale glow across the leather of his glove on the bench.

His jaw was tight.

The Duke let out, after a long beat, a slow soft breath that was almost a sigh.

"Ahhh," he said. "Young man."

"I'm sorry," you said quickly. "I shouldn't have asked."

"No, no. No. The question is a fair one from someone with friends he has not seen in years would be a coward not to ask." His huge head shook slowly, side to side. "I am sorry, truly. I will not lie to you, I do not bring news of those who have gone. I trade in goods, not news of this sort. I am very sorry."

He let the silence sit a beat.

"Okay," you said, it came out thin and you nodded down at the bench between your boots.

"It's okay," you said. "I— I just wondered. Thank you."

The Duke gave a small slow incline of his head up on the box and clicked his tongue at the horse and the cart rolled on.

Ethan's hand around yours did not loosen, thumb resuming its stroke after a long count, slower now and more measured. The blue at the back of his eyes dimmed by degrees and you felt him turn his head the smallest fraction toward you and bring his mouth down close to the side of your jaw, warmth of his breath gathering at the line of stubble.

"I'm sorry," he said, very quiet and you nodded.

The cart had slowed.

"Ah," the Duke said. "And here we are. Sooner than I'd have thought myself, aoads have been kind today."

"Wait." You sat up a little. "Already?"

"Already, young man."

"But yesterday why did it took so long?"

"Yesterday was a different road and a different load." The Duke's huge shoulders rolled in a small shrug as he reached for the brake. "Also, yesterday you were asleep. To many a long road feels longer if one is awake for the whole of it. Consider it a small mercy of physics, hmm?"

Ethan let out a small soft breath through his nose, half laugh. He squeezed your hand and let it go.

"Come on," he said. "Let's get you down."

He stepped down first into the snow at the edge of the village's outer track, boot punching through the crust with a soft heavy crunch and he turned in the same motion and lifted his hand up for yours. The grey afternoon sky framed him, gold of his jacket bright against the dark line of dead trees behind him, hair tousled by the small wind that came down off the mountain.

You took his hand and stepped down and he squeezed your fingers as your boot found the snow, not letting go immediately. He held your hand for two heartbeats longer than balance required, same way he had held it yesterday at the door of the meeting hall and his eyes when they came down to yours were steady and pale, corner of his mouth pulling up just slightly on the one side in that small crooked half-smile.

"So." His breath made a small grey plume in the cold air between you. "Lady D's offered up the castle for the event."

"Event?"

"Yeah." The half-smile pulled a little wider, there was something almost shy at the corner of it and he scuffed his boot once in the snow in a small awkward gesture, free hand back in his pocket. "They're making it kind of a thing for us. I'd rather not spoil it. I think it's better if you see it yourself."

"Lor—Ethan."

"It's good, I promise. It's nice." His thumb passed once across the back of your knuckles where his hand still held yours. "And it's not gonna start for a bit still. They're waiting for everyone else to come. There's like an hour left to wait."

He glanced past your shoulder at the village then back at you.

"So I was thinking," he said.

The half-smile pulled a little fuller, small dimple appearing at the corner of his mouth a little bit nervous.

"Maybe we could do a walk," he said. "You and me. There's a road that comes around the back of the castle, it's pretty quiet, view's good and you can see most of the valley. Or we could do the castle, the lower gardens are kind of nice, even in winter, there's a path that loops down past—" He cut himself off with a small soft laugh. "I'm rambling, sorry. Just… if you wanted. I thought it'd be nice to get to know each other a little before all the rest of it."

His pale blue-grey eyes were on yours and they were not glowing but only tired and quietly hopeful.

He was, you thought, a very handsome man who had killed people.

Also a man, right now, scuffing his boot in the snow and asking you to take a walk with him.

Your mouth opened and what came out of you was not what he had asked for.

"Could I— would it be all right, since we're here, I have some friends down past the smith. They think I'm dead… actually nobody from the village knows I'm alive. I'd like to see some of them, if it's all right."

The change in his face was very small, half-smile not exactly disappearing but it just thinned, no glow in his eyes.

For a long beat he just looked at you, hand still around yours, wind off the mountain stirring the front of his hair.

"Oh," It was a small word and the smile he put on after was the same one he had this morning when you'd asked him about the kid.

"Yeah, no, of course," he said. "Of course. That's— sure. Yeah."

He let go of your hand, cold rushing in across your palm where his warmth had been and you missed it before your fingers had finished closing on themselves.

He took a small step back and put both his hands in the pockets of his jacket, glancing once down the road toward the village and then back at your face.

The blue rose in his eyes and under the skin of his neck, where the collar of his hoodie met the line of his jaw, two faint bright blue threads stood out along the side of his throat that climbed up the side of his neck and disappeared under the line of his stubble at the angle of his jaw.

Your heart kicked once against the inside of your ribs.

"Please," you said, wetting your lips and taking a half step toward him, tilting your face up and you watched, in the steady pale glow of his eyes, the small slow shift as his pupils widened.

"It would mean a lot to me," you said. "Just a little while."

The blue in his eyes brightened for a second and then, very slowly, dimmed.

He let the breath out.

"Yeah," he said. “Okay, sure."

A small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.

"Go see your friends," he said. "You don't have to worry about the time, I'll handle that."

He held your eye one more second and then looked past your shoulder, chin lifting slightly.

"He's coming with you," Ethan said.

The thing that was standing five paces behind you on the open snow had not been there a heartbeat earlier.

Height of a very tall man, body a long dark shape made of black from the mold. Sheathed in fibrous knotted ropes of it from the shoulder all the way down past where the wrist would have been and where the hands should have been, there were huge claws.

Another one of those moldy monsters that made a small ragged curse came out of your mouth and you took a step back.

Your boots caught on the small ridge of snow at the edge of the cart's runner-track and your weight tipped backward and an arm came around your chest from behind, settled across your sternum and pulled.

You went back flush against him, chest a wall of warm muscle at your back, gold canvas of his jacket rough at the line of your shoulder blades but through the thinner layer of the dark hoodie you could feel the long flat shelf of his pectoral pressed firm against your back, slow steady lift and fall of his ribs behind your back. His bicep where it lay across your chest was thick and dense, muscle of it warm through both your sleeves and his other hand had come up and settled flat against the front of your shoulder.

His chin came down past the side of your head, stubble at his jaw caught the rim of your ear. His breath was warm and steady at your hairline.

"He's not going to hurt you." He murmured, words puffing warm on the place behind your earlobe.

Your hand had gone, without your permission, to his forearm where it lay across your chest, fingers closing on the canvas of his sleeve.

"He's just gonna walk where you walk and protect you, that's it."

The thing in the snow tilted its great wet head, tilt curious of an animal that had been told to wait.

"You go where you wanna go," Ethan said at your ear. "He comes and keeps you safe, that's the only deal I'm asking for. The lycans don't come into the village in the day but they've been getting bolder and I'm not gonna risk that, okay?"

The arm across your chest tightened, bicep going thick against your sternum and the thumb on your collarbone pressed.

His mouth was at the shell of your ear, soft of his lower lip catching the curve of it as he spoke and you felt the warm graze of him along the cartilage.

Heat spread where your heart was as you leaned back into him before you had decided to.

"Okay," you said quietly.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

You felt him smile.

"That's my—" he started and stopped. Whatever he had been going to say, he ate it back. "Thank you."

His arm loosened gradually until you could step away and the cold rushed in where he had been.

You missed him already and you hated that.

Stepping forward out of the warm pocket of his body before you turned slightly and looked up at him.

"Go on," he said quietly. "Have a good time. See you later."

He took one small step back and put his hands back in his pockets before glancing once at the moss-headed thing in the snow.

‘You touch him, it’ll be the last time you see the outside world.’

The thing in the snow did not move, fibers on the surface of its head pulsing once in a long slow ripple from the crown to the base of the jaw before it turned around and began to follow you down the path of the village.

The goat heads started at the edge of the village where the path bent down out of the trees, one to every other branch.

They had been hung by their horns with lengths of dirty twine that the snow had crusted white.

Six of them in the first thirty paces of path and more deeper in.

It had not been like this when you had left, week before they had taken you up the rock there nothing.

You walked down the path with your hands shoved into the pockets of your coat and breath rolling out in slow plumes and you did not look up at the heads but they were there at the edge of your sight on every step.

Behind you, at a distance of about ten paces, the molded thing came along, hunched and crooked as it walked with sideways shuffling trot you had seen down the back hallway of the house, one shoulder higher than the other, long arm hanging almost to the snow with its four curved talons clicking together every time the shoulder rolled.

It just walked like a dog following it’s owner.

You had turned around once in the first hundred paces from the house and stopped on the path to let it catch up before looking up at its deformed mouth.

It had stopped when you had stopped, tilting its head a fraction to one side and held it there at the angle in curiosity.

It was, you had thought against your will, a little bit cute.

He must had been someone before.

There were people in the square but not many and you did not look at anyone who glanced at their windows or hid somewhere behind carts to observe you.

You walked the rest of the way across the square at the same pace, boots crunching snow and you took the southern lane out of the square.

The lane bent and ran down the slope past the houses of the fishermen and the old smokehouse that had been abandoned three winters ago when the smoker had died from too much alcohol.

Past that, where the houses thinned and the trees came down close to the path, ground started to give and the snow had a sheen of grey under it where the swamp water sat just beneath.

At the end of the lane, half-fallen into the reeds, old wooden structure leaned where it had always leaned, the place you had all met since you had been twelve.

It had been a fishing shelter once, the roof had collapsed on one corner about ten years ago and nobody had come to fix it, floor half gone as well, planks gone over the swampy parts and the joists showing through underneath with below the gaps where the floor was missing there was dark water of the swamp lightly skinned with ice.

All of you called it the gross house.

You stopped at the edge of the trees where the lane ended and you turned, a molded thing stopping behind you again, head tilted to the right and its fibers pulsed once before settling.

"Stay here," you said and tried to put the village authority in your voice but came out softer than you wanted. "Don't make a scene or come close, stay back."

The fibers on the moss pad pulsed in a long wave from the top of the head down to the collar before the thing took two long shuffling steps sideways off the path into the bare black trees and stopped in the deeper shadow where the trunks closed in.

It just stood with its higher shoulder against a black trunk and its head tilted very slightly and from the path it was almost invisible.

You could only see it because you’ve followed as it retreated obediently and the sight of him like that was terrifying, yet knowing he listened and was on your side felt comforting.

You turned away from it and went into the house, door of the place gone, just a hinge and a frame you’ve walked through and your boots made the floor of the place creak.

Stepping over the wide gap where the floorboard had rotted clean through to the swamp water and you put your weight on the long narrow joist that ran across it and your boot found the next solid plank and you crossed.

Voices came around the corner of the inner wall from the back where the floor was solid all the way to the far wall, part that had always been your part.

Anuța’s female voice was registered first by your ears, low and hard the way she always sounded when angry about something but trying not to show the full size.

"—because nobody can tell me," she was saying, "how it makes any sense for them to be friends with the lords. Those lycans were always supposed to leave us alone, that was the whole agreement."

"I'm not saying friends." That was Tudor, heavier voice with the slight catch in the throat from the time he had been twelve and gotten dragged through a thorn break by a goat. "I'm saying they were born here and were once people we knew. My grandfather always repeats this to me."

"He says a lot of things, your grandfather. Half of them he says to the wall."

"Hey! Take that back right away." Only annoyance and no real threat.

"And the rest of the lords—" Mihai, third voice, slow and dry while sharpening the axe in hand. "—aren't doing anything to stop the lycans either. There were eleven goats in the south paddock at the start of autumn and there's three goats ‘cause they got slaughtered."

The floorboard under your foot gave its long thin whine and the three of them stopped talking but you came around the corner of the inner wall before they could think the worse

Three faces looking at you in fright before their expression shifted in shock.

Anuța's hand came up to her mouth before crossing the room in a stumbling sort of run and she hit you in the chest with both arms hard enough that you had to step back to keep your balance, both her arms around your neck and her face pressed into the front of your coat already crying.

"Oh God," she said and her hair smelled like woodsmoke.

"You're alive," she said into your coat. "Mother Miranda heard all of my prayers!"

"Mother Miranda's got nothing to do with him being alive, you little fanatic," Tudor said.

He had not gotten up, sitting back now, weight on his hands behind him and the grin had split his whole face with eyes that had gone wet at the corners and he was working hard to keep that out of his voice.

"She had nothing to do with it. Stop trying to take the credit for the saints again, Anuța. They don't need a sponsor."

All of you were laughing and it came out in a small surprised wet burst against the top of Anuța's head and you felt her shoulders shake under your hands as she started to laugh too, her crying did not stop and Mihai was finally getting to his feet on the other side, axe set down carefully against the wall as he came across the boards more slowly than Anuța had.

"How," he said. "How the hell."

Then he stepped in and pulled you, half awkwardly with Anuța still attached to your front, into a one-armed hug against the side of his chest, arm sliding over your shoulder, his hand thumping the side of your neck twice.

"I don't know," you said and your voice cracked on it while Anuța made a small wet sound against your coat. "I don't really know either."

Mihai had stepped back and was looking at you with a long unblinking sort of focus, long face and dark hair cut by his mother at the kitchen table, a small thin scar across the bridge of his nose.

"You look thin," he said.

"I've been eating well today, actually."

"Don't ever do that again," she said while pulling back.

"I'll try really hard not to."

"Sit. Come on before he falls down.“

The four of you settled in the same way you had been settling here for years, in a rough half-circle on the solid part of the floor at the back, with Mihai sitting on a board that put his back to the open window and Tudor sitting cross-legged with his big hands on his knees, Anuța tucked herself in close on your one side with her shoulder touching yours and her hand around your wrist. Your feet hung off the edge of the boards over the gap where the floor was missing and dark flat of the swamp water below.

You told them what you remembered from start to now excluding those dreams.

"What's he like?" Tudor said, with the eagerness of a man who had been waiting his whole life to ask a question, leaning forward over his crossed knees.

"Mihai's grandfather says Lord Winters is a tall black shape with no head." Tudor said immediately.

"He has a head actually and also blond."

"You're shitting me?"

"He's American, not from here."

Tudor sat back on his hands and looked at the ceiling.

"What does he do all day?" Tudor managed. "Does he has like a place where he keeps all the people he feeds on?"

"I’ve got no clue but he made me breakfast today.”

"He made you breakfast? The Lord that makes people hallucinate and feeds on people’s life force?”

The three of them just stared at you.

"Stop. Stop right now. Stop."

"And he—"

"Don't say anything else."

"—and he gave me a glass of wine last night."

"I‘m leaving," Tudor said and flopped onto his back on the boards, putting his arm across his face. "Goodbye. I'm going to walk into the swamp, tell my mother I love her."

Mihai was laughing so hard he had to take his glasses off to wipe his eyes on the sleeve of his shirt and that made you laugh harder, because he had not worn glasses in five years.

"He has to have something weird about him, though," Anuța said. She had recovered first, hand still around your wrist and her thumb stroked once. "Tell us the weird part please or I’m gonna go and get caught by him as well."

"His eyes glow sometimes," you said before you had decided to. “Does that a lot when staring at me for so long.”

"Huh," Tudor said. He had taken his arm off his face, looking at you sideways, grin had gone smaller and there was something thoughtful at the corner of it now.

"He looks at you."

"He's been alone for a while," you said quietly. "He said he hasn't had anyone in a long time."

Tudor and Mihai exchanged a look over the top of your head.

"Anyway," you said, "it could be worse like Lady D."

"Don't even joke about that," Anuța said. She crossed herself fast.

"Lady D would have hooked him on a wall," Mihai said. "Like a hanging side of pork."

"Mihai stop." Anuța threatened.

"What. She would have, everyone says she hangs them by the ankles in the cold rooms and bleeds them slow."

"I'm leaving," Anuța said. "I'm walking into the swamp now too. Tudor, scoot over."

"There's plenty of swamp," Tudor said.

You laughed again and it felt good.

"So how did you get down to the village today, by the way," Mihai said. "Did he just let you out for a walk?"

"We have to be at a meeting with Mother Miranda"

"Oh," Tudor said.

He sat back up, grin fading a little.

"Yeah, Mother Miranda said today that she's calling off the rituals," Mihai said. "All of them forever. She says the last one was a success and the new Lord is stable. Something about a miracle."

A small cold thing moved across the back of your neck.

"Whatever that means. Probably you, right? You being alive."

"Probably," you said.

"Either that," Tudor said, leaning back on his palms, "or Lord Winters finally went down on her and she's in a good mood."

"TUDOR." The word came out of all three of you at once. Anuța slapped his shoulder hard and he flinched theatrically away from her with his free hand up.

"I'm saying," Tudor said, "maybe he didn't save you because he hates the rituals. Maybe he saved you because he needed one to live."

The room went quiet.

"And maybe," Tudor said, smaller now, looking at the boards between his knees, "you should be careful, tat's all I'm saying. People who've been alone a long time can be dangerous especially in all those years. Who knows what he wants to do to you."

The word landed flat on the boards between you all, water below your boots did not move.

"I'm sorry," Tudor said, quieter. "I shouldn't have said all that. I was just thinking about it. He's been good to you. I'm sure he's been good to you. It's just—"

"Get up," Anuța said.

She was already on her feet.

"Get up, Tudor, come here."

She grabbed Tudor by the elbow and hauled at him. Mihai, on his other side, was getting up too with a small tight set to his mouth and the two of them had Tudor by the arms and were walking him in a small low half-stumble back across the room toward the broken window in the far wall, hissing at him in the kind of hushed angry tones you had not heard them use since they had been fourteen years old.

The three of them stood at the broken window with their backs to you and their heads in close and their voices low but you did not turn to look.

Sitting at the edge of the boards with your feet swinging over the gap in the floor and you looked down at the swamp water below your boot toes while thinking about his words.

The slick of black on its surface moved and now it was a open spiral that turned once.

‘Come back.’

The voice was inside your head that for one half second you thought you had said something aloud. The voice was Ethan's, soft and warm.

Your heart kicked sharp once against the inside of your ribs as you looked across the room. The three of them were at the window, still hissing, Anuța gesturing at Tudor with a finger pointed at his chest, Mihai with a hand on her shoulder trying to keep her quiet.

Two black ropy threads came up out of the swamp so slowly that the surface did not really break, threads sliding up through the wet membrane of the water without disturbing it, two long black filaments rising out of the dark beneath the broken floor and lifting themselves up through the gap and curving very slowly toward your boots.

Each about the width of a finger, ends of them unbulbed as they moved.

‘Come on.’

The voice in your head was not impatient.

Behind you, Anuța started to cough.

Small at first in a small surprised sound in the back of her throat before it turned into a long ragged set of coughs that climbed up out of her chest and broke at the top of her throat, it doubled her at the waist over the windowsill and you heard Tudor say her name while she kept going.

"Hey," Tudor said, very different voice now. "Hey, Anuța, breathe, breathe, here, sit down."

She coughed harder and you could hear the wet shape of it now.

"Anuța, I— I can't—"

"What's wrong with her?"

You turned and saw the three of them against the window, Anuța bent over from the waist and both her hands at her throat, while Tudor had one arm around her shoulders and Mihai had her by the elbow while they were trying to bring her down to a sitting position on the boards, but she was coughing harder, uneven red across her cheekbones.

Above them, mold was moving out of the broken corner of the roof in three slow long ropes and they spread across the underside of the rafter that hung at the sharp angle over the room. They split and became six.

Now twelve and braided themselves into a fine flat lacework of black across the wood.

A long thin tendril dropped down from the corner of the rafter directly above Tudor's shoulder and hung in the air a hand's breadth from the back of his neck, swaying gently in the cold air.

‘Come back to me, sweetheart. Don't make me wait.’

The voice in your head was the same patient voice and your stomach turned inside out.

"I have to go." You said it out loud and already on your feet before your mind had caught up to where you were going.

Anuța looked up and her face was a mess of streaming eyes along red cheeks but the cough stopped between one breath and the next.

Above her, on the rafter, the lacework of black slid back along the grain of the wood, every fine vein of it shrinking back along the line it had come and the long thin tendril above Tudor's neck pulled itself up into the wood.

"You have to go?" Anuța said. Her voice was hoarse.

You nodded, not trusting your voice.

"Mother Miranda," you said. Your voice was very thin. "He said she wants both of us up the mountain. I have to go."

Anuța crossed the room before you had taken a step and caught the front of your coat in both hands.

"You come back every week, you hear me?"

"I'll try."

"Don't try, come here. Promise me."

"I promise," you said.

The lie tasted like a copper coin under your tongue and Tudor came up behind her, looking at you for a long second with the same thoughtful narrowed look he had been wearing before.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly. "Forget what I said and be careful."

"I will."

Mihai squeezed your shoulder before you turned and walked across the floor of the place faster than you had walked into it, stepping over the gap on the long narrow joist and you went around the angle of the collapsed rafter.

At the edge of the trees the molded thing peeled out of the shadow and started to walk almost the second you cleared the doorframe, same shuffling sideways trot, ten paces behind you on the path and the long arm with the talons swung at its side as you speed-walked towards the castle.

You turned your head over your shoulder for half a heartbeat and there he was, ten paces back, breaking into that broken sideways trot to keep up.

Something in your throat gave a small dry hitch and you swallowed it, turning your face front and walked faster.

The square opened out ahead of you and beyond that arch the whole flat of the square lay open under the noon light there was a little raised stone of a saint once.

Statue of a woman standing with her feet braced apart on the round of the base, a broad round shield held out from her left side at the height of her hip and a long straight sword lifted from her right hand up over her head.

Cutting past the stature and skirting the wall-door of a demon getting slayed by said woman, the road for the castle was opened with the bridge already brought down.

Someone had prepared it for you.

Or, you thought as you slipped through the open wall-door and heard the wet scrape behind you speed up as the molded thing came into the arch, he had prepared it.

You crossed the bridge at a jog and the planks had been swept, mostly, since the last snow.

Two long chains on either side of you creaked faintly in the wind coming up out of the ravine and you kept your eyes on the far end of the bridge where the pier climbed back up to the road that ran into the trees, up the shoulder of the mountain toward the castle.

There were a lot of dead body placed in the snowy path like scarecrows and, ironically, said birds were currently chipping rotten meat as a meal.

You almost vomit at the sight and bent slightly at the waist, pressing the back of your hand to your mouth and standing very still with your eyes on your boots and you swallowed twice to let Lord Winters’s delicious breakfast stay in it’s place.

The molded thing had caught up and was standing about eight paces behind you at the edge of the road. The moss pad was tilted slightly toward the flat, doing the small curious tilt again, probably not seeing anything wrong with the picture.

He shuffled behind you around a long bend of the road, up under a low arch of dark branches, the castle rose above.

You reached the top step and put both palms flat on the seam where the two doors met and you pushed.

Behind you the wet scrape came up the steps as the molded thing stopped a pace behind your right shoulder. His higher shoulder was level with the top of your head and you did not turn to look at him, instead leaning harder into the door.

A long clawed hand came up past you on your right and each of the four talons on it was as long as your forearm, glossy and wet at the tips with the same slow clear fluid that had been beading on the tips in the snow, talons splaying and the knuckles under the black moss flexed.

The right door swung inward with a long groan of hinges and you pushed the left one with your shoulder as it went too, great weight of it giving under the combined push and swinging back on its hinges in a slow smooth arc to let you step into the gap and holding both doors wide with your outstretched arms while the molded thing shuffled through the gap sideways, higher shoulder ducking under the arch of the frame.

He left black smears on the pale marble on its path as you both went deeper inside the castle, small crescent-shaped patches of dark fungal wet that had come off the underside of him.

"She's going to be pissed," you said and the molded thing tilted his head at you, pulsing his fibers once in a long wave from the crown of the pad down to the collar and, if he had been a dog, you would have said he was wagging.

"Well, she has maids at the end," you said. "It's fine, don’t worry. That's what maids are for. Right?"

Of course he did not answer.

You walked down the entry and the hall opened out ahead of you into a long corridor with a floor of the same pale gold-veined marble, walls hanging with tall tapestries in dull greens and dull reds.

The chandelier overhead was unlit and hung with crystals.

A pair of doors down the wooden staircase stood closed further on at the other side of the large area.

"You have a name?" You asked him and he cocked his head.

"You have to have had one," you said. "Right? Before… this. Somebody called you something?"

A small screeching noise came out of him and you did not know why you had asked.

"Is it all right if I call you Mold? For now. Just until we— I don't know. Until I find something better."

The molded thing screeched a little differently and it might have been a confirmation.

"Okay," you said. "Mold."

The screech came again softer and the corner of your mouth lifted.

The corner of the room by the base of the stairs began to hum in low buzzing and you turned your head toward the dark corner of the place.

Pattern of small individual insects, hundreds of thousands of them drifted across the floor of the hall in your direction and the buzz grew.

Your feet had rooted to the marble from fear.

That big cloud split into three and each of them began to condense as it rose in the shapes became women.

A red-headed and a blonde one wearing the same black cloaks with hoodies over their head, flies at the hem still moving in a slow current.

Both had blood on their chin, a thin dark smear along the jawline crusted at the corner of their lower lip down the chin,

The blonde-haired one lifted her nose slightly.

"Mmmm," she said and her voice was wicked and sinful. "Man's blood."

Somewhere very near the shell of your left ear the buzz of one specific fly close to your face bloomed and it soon became a hand around your shoulder.

Gloved fingers closed on the front of your right shoulder that pulled you back a half step against a body that had not been there half a second ago.

The other arm of her came up around the front of your throat and a curve of bright cold metal, blade of a scythe, settled over your throat from behind.

When she pressed against the skin of your throat a thin cold line and it went a bright hot thin line of pain, edge kissing skin and thin lines of warmth broke along it and traveled down the front of your throat, gathering at the top of your collarbone and spilling from there onto the fabric of your shirt.

The three sisters in front of you drew in a breath in unison.

She lifted the blade off you and you saw the small dark tip of her tongue come out, dragging one slow long lick from your collarbone up to the underside of your jaw.

She hummed in excitement.

"Mmm," she said into the shell of your ear. "Sisters, he's delicious."

Mold moved and his higher shoulder was rolling forward, huge splayed talon-hand at the end of his higher arm coming up and around in a long fast arc at the dark-haired sister and the whole shape of her burst apart into the swarm before the talon connected, fly-column of her opening and the talons went through the empty space where her head had just been.

Mold's own momentum carried him past the point where she had stood and he came down a half step further into the hall.

She reassembled behind him and raised her scythe, it swept across the back of Mold's higher shoulder in a long clean stroke that took the arm off him and landed on the ground with a wet sack, followed by a thick gush of pink-black fluid.

Mold staggered back on his higher hip and a thin high screech came up out of the vertical seam of his mouth.

"Get him, Cassandra!"

"Slice him up!"

Both the blonde and the red-headed cheered their sister while giggling right before one of them had her arm came around your chest and yanked you down on the ground.

Your knees hit the marble first, palms slapping the stone next and your side under the bandage seared with a sudden bright pain as if the wound had opened.

The blond one came around from your left and she was lifting her scythe with a sadistic blood-crusted grin.

‘Down.’ His voice came again in your head and your body dropped, forehead to the marble and you were flat on the cold gold-veined marble.

The marble under your left hand cracked as, in one long sudden upward eruption of black, a rope of mold thicker than your thigh burst up and split in the air above you into three ropes as each of the three shot outward across the hall in a long fast arc.

The first rope hit the blond sister's scythe in the flat of the blade at the peak of her downswing and knocked it out of her hands, same thing occurring to Cassandra and Daniela before the ropes of mold fused and rose above you as the hundred fibers formed a soft dark lattice above your body on the marble, and it settled over like a cocoon.

Very warm.

It expanded and contracted around you at a slow steady rate and something soft brushed your cheek.

A very small vine of mold had come in through the lattice at your temple and its tip was rounded, not talon-pointed, finding your cheek and applying faint pressure there as if cuddling your cheeks

‘Shhh, sweetheart. I've got you, just be still.‘

You closed your eyes and leaned your face the smallest fraction into the small warm thumb of vine at your cheek, feeling absolutely warm and safe.

"Girls. Is this," and there was a small pause of the sort a mother takes when she is deciding whether to raise her voice further but decided not to, "is this how we treat your soon-to-be uncle?"

The word landed in the middle of your cocoon and rolled around into your chest.

You had a small ugly clean idea of what the word meant.

"Mother, we didn't know!" Three high female voices at once, tumbling over each other, all pretty and young.

The mother's voice cut them off.

"Winters, my dear. You did not, I hope, need to crumble my floor over this?"

Her voice was a warm dry rich thing that filled the hall from the top of the vault down.

"Alcina." The voice that answered her was calm. "You might consider keeping better control of your daughters."

He sounded so calm and flat when talking but the cocoon around you pulsed violently from the wrath he was feeling and trying to hide.

"They will be spoken to." Lady Dimitrescu's voice was smooth.

Something touched the outside of your cocoon, his hand slid down the outer curve of the lattice above your face, over the top of the mold and the lattice unspooled itself under his palm from the top down.

You lifted your own hand up and his hand closed around yours and lifted you up, mold under you dissolving and going soft, cocoon disappearing back down into the crack in the marble as you got on your feet and being pulled forward one step and another from the strength of his.

Pulled flush up against his chest, his arm came around your waist.

The gold canvas of his jacket was warm at your cheek and his shoulder was warm under your temple.

His other hand let go of yours only to come up and cup the side of your throat right where the blade had lain, pad of his thumb slid along the line where the cut had been.

He was accelerating your healing tremendously via his abilities and connections with you.

The line was closing under his thumb and those blue eyes were the underlit steady blue you had seen in the cabin of the cart, moving over you in slow patient sweeps, corner of your throat, curve of your jaw, side of your cheek.

"You okay," he said, voice so soft that only you heard it.

"Yeah," you said. "Yeah. I'm— okay."

"Good."

He did not let go.

"Oh! Oh oh oh." Three voices at once again, high and appalled and tumbling.

Behind you two the three sisters had condensed back to almost fully solid shapes, black cloaks pulled tight around them.

"Oh my God," Daniela said. "We are so sorry, we didn't know he was the one!"

"We are so sorry," Bela said, still through her hand. "We had no idea. Truly. No one told us we were expecting visitors today except our uncles and aunt."

Cassandra simply lowered his head down in silence, probably annoyed by her ruined hunt.

Daniela had a big grin on her face like a girl at a wedding when she had just been introduced to the groom, "you two are the cutest. Mother? Mother, look at them together."

"Yes, Daniela, I have eyes, thank you," said the tall smooth warm voice from above.

She was very tall. The top of her head, in the wide black brim of a wide black hat, was near the level of the great chandelier that hung three stories above you while her long white dress that fell in slow heavy folds down along the length of her body all the way to the marble at her feet.

“I’m sorry, it’s my fault for entering without alerting anyone.” You made up some excuses to simply get this down with, yet she smiled down at you.

"There," she said. "You see. Someone with manners."

She turned her head and her whole long neck turned with it,

“Perhaps someone could learn a thing or two from him."

You followed her look and, in the doorway of the dining room leaning against the frame with one shoulder, one bare heavy forearm dropped down along the edge of a huge wooden-handled sledgehammer whose great iron head rested on the marble at his feet, was Lord Heisenberg.

Behind him, in the far dining room, hunched over the back of one of the chairs with his long soft dripping bulk half-sagging against the wood, was a shorter stouter figure whose face was Moreau while beyond both of them, seated primly at the head of the dining table in a long black dress with a black lace veil pulled down across her whole face, was a small still figure whose hands rested folded on the tablecloth in front of her and on her lap was the creepy doll named Angie.

"Uncle," the doll said in a malicious and provocative tone before bursting into high giggles and you looked away.

Heisenberg in the doorway scoffed.

"Oh right," he said. "Right, right. Manners. I should… what, I should address my hosts or should I go straight for the throat like your daughters just did to suck blood like some—"

"Karl," she said and her nails grew fast.

"Do not," she said, very warm, very pleasant, "finish that sentence, Karl."

"Or what."

"Or I will send you back to your factory in a wheelbarrow like the garbage you persist in acting like, you understand dear brother?"

Heisenberg laughed and lifted his sledgehammer.

"Try it," he said challengingly. "Please."

"Enough." The voice cut down from above and you spotted Mother Miranda standing where the two arms of the marble staircase.

Above her shoulders, spread wide behind her, were four wings each made of black feathers crow-like.

Nobody spoke.

Ethan at your side did not move, arm around your waist while his other hand had come up under his own coat and was resting flat over the front of his hoodie in a small loose fist that pressed lightly against his own chest.

"Mother," Alcina said, warm and easy.

"Mother Miranda," Bela, Cassandra and Daniela said in unison.

"Mama," Heisenberg said, drawling, from the far doorway, followed by Moreau.

"Miranda." Ethan said quietly.

She looked at him through the round iron eyes of the mask for a long steady beat before she looked at you.

Behind you, unseen at the base of the stair where Cassandra's scythe still lay abandoned on the marble, a small dark shape hopped down onto the stone with a soft click of iron on marble.

A crow had come out of the wings at Miranda's shoulders and caught the weapon dripping with your blood.

No one saw it, all eyes were on Mother Miranda after all.

"We are all here," she said, layered and cold and even, "for a reason. I will not tolerate any more of this behavior from my family. I have said as much this morning. I will say it once more now. Am I understood?"

"Yes, Mother," everyone replied back.

"Winters," Miranda said.

"Yes."

She materialized right in front of you and Ethan did not move for a beat, his arm at your waist tightened, eyes glowing while he looked at you now.

"I'm sorry. This isn't how I wanted it, I’m sorry." His voice was strained.

"I gave my word to your village this morning." She said it to you, her mask tilted a fraction so that the two round eyeholes were on your face directly.

"Bow the village must be shown that the word has been kept. The chosen one was given and has been received into the family of the Lords. I had time to think about it and I’ve decided to indulge Ethan Winters’s request."

Somewhere down the gallery a small dry click of a crow's beak sounded and did not repeat, Mold made a low screeching noise as it stayed behind with a missing arm and gaze fixed down on the floor.

"There’s no quicker way than a marriage to satiate the villagers and give answers for the interruption of those rites they invented. You’ll marry Lord Winters."

Miranda said it in the flat even layered voice she had said all of the rest of it in.

Not asking or offering, rather announcing.

"You will marry him now," she said, "in the sight of his brothers, sisters and me."

Nobody in the room breathed.

Even Heisenberg, at the wall, had gone still, one boot crossed over the other, arms folded, cigar dead in the corner of his mouth.

"Do you consent?"

She said it flat and the pause after was small.

Your mouth was very dry before you looked at Ethan.

His face was very close and looking at you, head tipped a small degree down toward yours and the blue in his eyes was full and steady, pouring over your face like a lamp, jaw tight.

He was, you understood in a small slow way, hoping you would say yes.

In horror you saw through the bright light reflection of his eyes how your own were glowing as well.

Deep down you knew he decided already what he was going to do if the answer was no.

Now, with his blue eyes holding yours, you knew he was asking you not to make him do it.

"Yes," you said.

Your voice was quiet and Ethan's chest against your shoulder released by one increment, the small held-in breath he had been holding for the last half minute going out on a soft exhale that fanned faintly along the side of your temple.

"Good," Miranda said and raised both her hands.

"Winters."

"I'm here," Ethan said.

His voice was low.

"Do you consent in the sight of us?"

"I do."

He said it fast.

She lowered her hand a fraction and the wings behind her held and she turned the mask on you.

"And you," she said. "You take him to be your husband?"

"I do." The word came out steady and you did not know how.

"By the compact of the lords, I bind you. Winters, you may seal it."

You did not have time to prepare as he turned to you, arm at your waist becoming a hand at the small of your back and a hand at your jaw as his other hand came up to cup the underside of your chin, pad of his thumb settling at the corner of your mouth and his eyes on yours in the last half-second before he leaned in and he kissed you.

It was the kiss from the dream, very slow and patient as his mouth came down on yours with the same warm dry parted lips and soft press against the seam of your lip.

Somewhere behind you Daniela made a small delighted squeak into her cupped hand.

"Oh—"

"Daniela," Bela hissed.

Angie gave a small high delighted trilling laugh from the far wall and Donna's small still figure did not move.

Heisenberg exhaled a long stream of cigar smoke very slowly through his nose and Alcina made a small warm approving sound at the back of her throat.

Ethan kept kissing you unhurried patience and his hand at your back pulled you a hair closer, your body against his did the small answering thing your body had been doing.

When he pulled back it was gradual, mouth leaving yours in a small slow suck at your lower lip only you felt, catching and letting it go, coming back to press once softly against the seam and then, finally, drawing away, forehead settling against your own.