manhattan ii.

Konstantijn
Konstantijn can see it.  That point of no return.  That moment her choice is made.  That moment all her struggles cease, and her eyes meet his.

It is not the first time he has seen surrender like this, and every time, every single time, he thinks of hunting.  He thinks of death.  He thinks of the prey he has borne to the earth, the thrashing limbs, the terrified beating of wings, hands, heart, that always inevitably settle into this.  Exactly this.

And yet: not exactly this.  It is not the first time he has seen surrender; it is not even the first time he has seen this woman submit to him.  Even so, it's different.  It's different this time.  What's in his breast is not the savage swell of triumph but something far more treacherous.  It's akin to what he felt when he saw her scar.  It's akin to what he felt when she told him: a son.  Stolen from me.  And when she held her hand across her mouth, as though to seal in a sob.  And when she flinched, as though he might strike her.  And

here, now:

when she looks at him; drops the pretense.  Forgets, like him, how to pretend.  Now, for once, she is honest and unguarded.  It pierces him like a spear.  It curves his ribs in on the great beating engine of his heart, pierces him through and through.  He can trace every step that led them to this juncture, but none of it makes sense.  He's reeling; he did not expect this, and could not have prepared for it.

She makes him burn.  She makes him ache.  The humans have a story: Adam and Eve, the rib and the lover.  Konstantijn wonders, half-drunk on the moment, if that progenitor of all mankind ached too, like a phantom limb remembering its amputated self, at the sight of his mate.


Take me to bed, she says.


So he kisses her.  There's no other possibility in that moment.  It's a ferocious thing, his brow furrowing with intensity, his mouth so harsh on hers he drinks the breath right out of her lungs; lets it back out into her mouth, a groan.  In the next second the world tilts, it spins.  His hands are at her small waist, and then gripping her ass: he lifts her bodily from the floor.  It's not the first time tonight she's had no choice but to straddle him, but this time there's no chair beneath her, nothing else to rest her weight on but him.  Compared to him, her body is so slight.  He's an engine of destruction, burning hot, his waist hard and lean between her thighs, his chest a solid wall against her torso.

The kiss falls apart.  He's breathing swiftly, smoothly, looking at her.  His pupils are blown.  His eyes are everywhere: her cheekbones, her mouth, the tip of her nose.  Her eyes.  He doesn't close his this time when he kisses her again, an open-mouthed, breathing affair, the tip of his tongue flirting with hers.

Without a word he carries her in from the terrace.  Leaves their half-eaten dinner, their wine, their scotch behind.  Someone will take care of it.  They're Silver Fangs, and such details are beneath them.  The sound of the city fades behind them.  The wet air from the river is replaced by cycled, conditioned ventilation.  The second story of his penthouse is a expansive as the first, but he navigates it from memory; barely even takes his eyes from her.  They pass a study, all smoked-glass desk and sleek shelves.  They pass a guest room, impeccably kept and largely unused, and its well-appointed but impersonal bathroom.  They pass an open area, a billiards table ... television, couch.

His room is darkened.  City lights kept it from utter darkness, but with the door closed they're shadows to one another.  He stops when his knees touch the side of his bed.  Gravity shifts again.  He sets her down at the edge.  Between frame and mattress the bed is waist-high; he doesn't have to bend so very far.  His hands don't seem to want to leave her body.  He runs them up her back, around her sides; he cups her breasts in his palms for a moment, and even through her brassiere she can feel the warmth of him, the strength there.

Then he's tugging her ruined shirt away from her shoulders.  Down, down; off.  Bending to her, putting his mouth on her shoulder, on her neck -- so hungry, biting at the strap of her bra where it crosses the lee of her shoulder.

"Take it off," he mutters, and saying it, reaches back himself - grabs his undershirt by the back, claws it up over his head in one motion.  Leaves it a scrap of fabric on the floor.  Bared, his torso is brutal, beautiful: massive and defined, a woven synergy of strength and tenacity.  Then his hands are on her again, and if she hasn't reached back to unsnap her bra yet he pulls it down, sweeps the straps down from her shoulders and pulls the cups down, pushes her down, holds her down to the bed where he bends over her, ravenous as an animal.

Puts his mouth on her breasts, then.  Takes her nipple in his mouth; devours her whole, the beat of her heart a flutter beneath his lips.  A savage sound rises in his throat.  He muffles it against her flesh.  His hunger is a rough, overwhelming thing.  He doesn't want to frighten her or hurt her, but -- god, he's wanted her since he saw her; he can't remember how to be gentle.  He barely knows how in the first place.

Victoria
For brief moments Victoria is laid bare, metaphorically rather than physically. He can see the whisper of brick and mortar put in place to protect her from savages like him, crumble. There is loneliness and regret and want and confusion reflecting back at the Silver Fang in the pale blue of her eyes. He would know then without question that no matter the Garou she keeps in Virginia or the wren of a mother who consumes too much alcohol and holds too much hate in her heart or the son that she had stolen on the pretence of carrying forward a lineage ...Victoria is alone.

Has been alone.
Has resigned to being just that, mated or not.

She is kinfolk. And when her life passes from this one to the next, no one will even ever know she had a story. No Galliard will relate her life's woes or accomplishments. It'll end in a smallsize coffin with a beautiful headstone and nothing more.

When their eyes lock for a few beats of her heart, that is what he sees. Everything she's terrified of and desperate for all at once. He kisses her hard and there's betrayal in that kiss and it's both bitter and sweet. He takes away her breath only to give it back in a bruising press of his lips to her own. He is a thing meant for death. A life that burns so bright, so fast, that it's only path is to burn out and fade away.

Hands grip her bottom. Feel the soft silk of her panties and the firmer edge of the garter. She is cool and smooth and soft - the way a woman is meant to be. Not firm or muscled, but soft and tender. Up the stairs, to his bed and it's there that he deposits her so that his hands can become as familiar with her breasts as his eyes have longed to. Teeth and lips and tongue sweep all along the sweet curve of her neck, her throat, and up her jaw in movements that are not quite deliberate but are certainly hungry.

Take it off he commands, and he would find her obedient at that moment because as hungry as he is to feel her beneath him, surrounding him, clinging to him, she is just as needy. Her entire body and every muscle within it is quivering. Arms reach round and unfasten her bra, he helps by pushing down the narrow straps. It falls to the floor, somewhere, forgotten. Before he can push her back and loom over her like some hungry beast, she's unfastening that narrow skirt and then wiggling free of it. It joins the bra leaving her in those panties and that carter and those silk stockings.

He doesn't want to hurt her or frighten her, he just doesn't realise he's already done both.

Victoria
Loneliness is not something he expected to see in her.  Solitude, certainly: to be alone by choice and not by accident or fate.  That, he expected.  Defiance.  Winter's chill, as cold as her eyes.  But not -- this.

Not loneliness.  Not regret.  Not confusion.  She looks so lost; he doesn't think he can find her.  He doesn't think she wants him to, or expects it, anyway, but all the same she lets him take her to his bed.  She helps him take her clothes off; no slow seductive striptease, this, but something rushed and silent and breathing in the dark.  His hands are rough and he can't help it.  There goes her shirt.  There goes her bra.  There goes that narrow skirt that he might have simply torn if it had remained on any longer.  He sweeps it all to the floor in a single push of his hand.

He's pushing her down, then.  His heart is a hammer in his chest.  He comes over her like a storm, like a beast; buries his face in her skin, drenches her body in kisses.  He sucks at her breasts until he feels her back arching, until the shivering in her core becomes something she can't hide.  She's trembling.  He lifts his head.  So like an animal is he: a wolf over a kill, a predator over prey.

His hand presses against her lower abdomen.  By design or accident, the heel of his hand rests where her body and womb were opened years ago; he doesn't seem to notice.  He curls his fingers under the waist of her panties, but he doesn't tug them off just yet, doesn't tear them off, doesn't shred them in his naked urge to find her.

A beat of pause; no more.  His mouth lowered to the soft slope of her stomach, then, touching against skin so soft and pale.

"You're shaking," he whispers.  "What is there to fear?"

Victoria
Whatever he translates from her eyes and gaze and expression is likely something he won't ever have the chance to see again. His hands are all over here, feeling the faint curve of her hips and the swell of modest breasts whose nipples harden beneath his touch or even the threat of it. Her breathing comes quicker, her heart races and when his mouth captures her breast and teeth she knows are capable of rending flesh and bone brush the too tender pale skin she arches into him with one hand hooked around his neck and fingers lost in  thick dark hair.

Theirs is not a graceful union - not yet, not this time. There's too much pent up want and desire and a need to know what the other feels like beneath them, around them, inside of them. He pauses, hand at her lower abdomen. Every time he takes notice of that scar and every time he touches it, Victoria tenses. That wound may have healed just less than a century ago, but he knows without question that it is as if opened and bare and bleeding.

"It doesn't matter." She says, twisting her upper body by scant degrees and tilting her head over to the side so that she can see him without craning her neck or lifting her shoulders up off his bed. "Not right now."

Konstantijn
An echo of what was said on the terrace:

"It matters to me."

He doesn't press, though.  She has her secrets.  He lets her keep them.  The tension in her is palpable whenever his hands are anywhere near that single scar, but he never was the merciful sort.  He scoops his hands under her bottom; he raises her hips from the bed and he kisses her over the scar,

at the edge of her panties,

between her thighs, a breath of silk the only thing between his mouth and her cunt.  He's shameless about it; ferocious; rubs his nose and his mouth, his face, against her.  Even here she's scentless, as pale and insubstantial as clear water.  Sudden frustration burns in him.  He seizes her panties in his teeth and drags them down, curls his fingers into the scrap of lingerie, rolls it down the smooth length of her legs as he rears up on his knees.  They drop to the floor: a last flag of surrender cast to the shadows.

There's a distance between then.  Enough for him to see her in her entirety: pale and lovely and perfect and fragile.  He's shrugged those bracers -- so classic, himself -- off his shoulders hours ago.  He undoes the button of his pants now, and then the zipper, and then there's just a moment where he pauses, where he reaches out, wraps his hands around her waist and runs them up her sides, covers her breasts.

Shields her a moment.  As though her nudity is too much for him to bear; too much for her to suffer.  "Should I tell you you're beautiful?" he wonders aloud; a murmur.  "You know you are.  I'll tell you something you don't know:

"I didn't expect you."  He rises up to stand on his knees, pushing his slacks down.  "I couldn't have foreseen this.  I'm afraid of where it will lead."

His boxer briefs are dark -- indistinguishable from black in this light.  Konstantijn is not shy about nudity.  There's a certain practice in the way he lifts his cock from beneath the waistband; curving and heavy, pulsing with his heartbeat until he has to hold himself in his hand, stroke his palm along the length of it to give himself some measure of relief.  He's so hard for her already.  That can't possibly be a surprise to her.  They've both been waiting for longer than they want to admit.

"Put your legs around me," he whispers.  "Hold on to me."

The mattress indents under his palm; then his forearm as he comes down over her.  His chest touches hers; then their abdomens align.  She's so soft; so small.  He overshadows her entirely in all his hard, angular strength, holding his weight over her so as not to crush her.  His mouth finds hers -- already there's a familiarity in that, the glancing, languid kiss he gives her, but that languor is a lie.  He lays his cock over her cunt; gives a single hard flex of his hips to rub the shaft of it along her slit; lets her feel the length of it, the thickness.

There's nothing languid about that.  There's nothing but a dark, raw hunger there, and the next kiss matches.  His eyes search for hers in the half-light; find her.  The lights of the city glimmer across their skin, sheen where sweat has begun to break out at his temple, the side of his neck.  He takes himself in hand again.  Fits the head of it to her cunt.

"Come on."  There's a new roughness in his voice; as though he has to grit his teeth against the urge to shove into her, plunge into her.  His penetration is slow, but it is not quite gentle.  It is inexorable; undeniable.  He stretches her open slowly.  Steadies her with a hand at her hip.  Pulls her up as he slides into her, inch after inch.  A sigh, "Oh, that's it."

Victoria
He tells her (again) that what she says or feels or thinks matters to him. He could say it a thousand times and the chanes are slim that Victoria wouldn't believe him. Thankfully, he leaves it alone, allows her to keep the small bits of herself private and away from the too intense glare from his eyes.

Hands on her bottom, hips lift off the bed and his mouth claims the soft flesh at her lower abdomen, at her thigh. But it becomes something more than that in the span of a breath. The quicening of her heartbeat. Mouth and nose and face nuzzles and press between her thighs with great insistence and it's maddening. Fingers curl into his bed linens - his duvet - and grip it as tight as she can. Teeth catch her bottom lip and long dark lashes lower like a fine curtain over the pale hue of her eyes.

When he kneels, raises to his knees, his body is silhouetted by the lights of the city filtering in through his windows. She cannot see his face nor those wolfish amber eyes, but she doesn't have to to realise that his attention is on nothing but her. Laid bare and vulnerable before him, he covers her breasts with his hand and her own lift to drag rounded, well manicured nails down his forearms until her palms cover the back of his hands for the briefest of moments. The beat of her heart is dangerously fast, he can feel each beat rattle against his touch.

Words. He's speaking and she draws open her eyes to half-lidded slits and watches him as he pushes slacks down off his hips and draws a hand beneath the waist of his boxer briefs to draw out the heavy, curve of is cock. He's swollen and her eyes drift lazily down and watch his hand stroke over the length of him. Her own fingers mender up her belly from her navel until her palm is covering one breast, massaging it in a way that men rarely can manage in their haste.

Hold onto me...

And she does. Thighs part wide, letting him settle his weight between them and without though she lifts her legs and wraps them around him near his hips. Lips press to lips and Victoria anchors one hand on his waist while the other cradles his jaw. The heaviness of his cock, the swollen head of it, are washed in an immediate sensation of heat. One hand guides him, hips thrust and beneath him she catches her breath; the sound a sharp gasp of air drawn in to fill her lungs. The walls of her body grip him tight, cover him in wetness and blanket him in overwhelming heat.

Konstantijn inches his cock deeper and deeper. Her thighs tuck in against his, calves and ankles and feet wrap round him. The hand that had been resting on his waist slides down and urges him deeper and deeper. She writhes beneath him, hips shifting and pushing until he's buried to the hilt inside her and the heat and weight of his balls rest against her.

She whines. Whimpers. The sound feral and not at all quiet.

Fuck me, she whispers to him. Teeth finding purchase on his bicep, biting firm before whimpering once more and then kissing the angry red mark all better.

Konstantijn
There's a curious gentleness about this, and Konstantijn is not a gentle wolf.  He's a savage, a brute.  He cornered her and harried her to this moment, but now that he has her here --

he's careful with her.  He forces himself to be careful.  The arm that supports his weight is hard and taut.  Every muscle bunched, every joint locked.  He strains against himself, because the truth is

he is hungry.  He is starved for her, and he wants to bear her down; pound her.  He fights against that urge because of what he saw out on the terrace.  Her hands trying to hide that scar.  Her eyes: a history of loss and loneliness.  He is not gentle.  He is an animal.  She is of his tribe, of his blood; his concern and his to protect -- and so has it been since time immemorial.  As powerful as the instinct to dominate and conquer and take is the instinct to ward and protect.  If that were not true, their race would have died out a long time ago.

And so: he holds her steady to keep her from taking too much, too fast.  He eases into her, gives her time to open, time to adjust.  But god, she makes it difficult.  She wraps herself around him.  She pulls him into her.  She rides up against him, rolls her hips, writhes, and he has to grasp her hip; he has to push her down to the mattress, hold her there, hold her still.  His eyes are closed, his brow furrowed with strain.  Lips parted.  Teeth half-bared.  His breathing is harsh already.  She whimpers, and she doesn't sound like some frightened, fragile thing at all.

She sounds feral herself.  Half-wild.  He remembers then: she is half-wild.  She's half a wolf, and when she bites him she cements it.  His eyes flash open; the force of his stare is very nearly physical, a jolt of impact.  There's a dangerous light there: an alpha born, unaccustomed to even this much defiance.

He snarls at her.
She whispers: fuck me.

Something trips; something snaps.  His hand pushes heavy and hard into her hair.  Grips at the back of her head.  He pulls her head back, he puts his mouth on her throat, sets his teeth to that flash of muscle in her neck.  It's something like a warning.  There's a growl in his chest, pressed so tight to hers.  A single, percussive slam of his hips into hers -- his cock into her, right to the base, every last inch -- sudden, very nearly brutal; a taste of what he could give her.

"Be careful, Victoria."  The whisper is a harsh, raw thing, his lips moving against the soft skin of her neck.  "I'm trying but I can barely control myself.  Ask me again and I won't even make the attempt."

Victoria
Konstantijn is as careful with Victoria as he is capable of being. She can feel him tremble with restraint, his own strength and corded muscles keeping the animal inside of him at bay. There is something very nearly sweet about the way that he protects her from his more base wants and needs. A hand on her hip, his body adjusting himself so that she's stretched and opened slowly rather than hard and fast and forceful.

If it's a struggle for him, it's maddening for her. She cannot be still, cannot wait for him to fill her up slowly after dragging the heavy length of his cock out of the warmth of her body. All of her desire is brought to bear in those first few moments and he holds her done. Insists with just his touch that she calm herself and allow him to be tender to her in a way that isn't common or normal for him.

The way that she told him to fuck her was not with the timid voice or tone of a girl who is unsure of what she wants or unaware of what she's getting herself into. Those two words were spoken on a sultry purr with a thick backing of confidence behind each one. That sound, that bite, that lick and lips upon his bicep threaten to let loose the wolf bearing down on the Garou's flesh begging for release.

Be careful, he says and she nods running her cool fingers down his sides. Ankles and calves and feet drag soft and smooth over the backs of his thighs and down to hook round the back of his knees. He tugs her head back and she bares her throat to him, listens to him speak again with attention that is acutely focused on the sound of his words.

A growl rumbles up in his throat, rattles in his ribs and rolls in his belly. It vibrates against her body as he slams his hips against her own, cock shoved deep inside of her until she quivers and whines low and audible. Her eyes are heavy lidded, slitted like the eyes of a cat resting too long in the warm noon day sun.

Fuck me, she whines, the small body beneath him asks for more than he may assume she can handle.

Konstantijn
What was it she said to him, a week ago and half a continent away?  Virgins are overrated.  Well; this much is obvious: Victoria is no virgin, no stranger to this primordial dance.  There's nothing shy or uncertain about the way she moves.  He saw fear in her eyes when he closed in on her out on the terrace -- not of him, perhaps, but of the moment, the situation, the threat he represented, the walls in her that came tumbling down -- but it was never fear of sex.  It was never fear of intimacy.

It doesn't matter, she said: of fear, of doubt.  Not right now.

She knows exactly what she's doing.  She knows what that slide of her hands down his sides would do to him.  The way his skin tightens to her touch.  The way the musculature beneath flexes of its own accord, reflexively.  The way his breathing changes, grows rough; the way his stomach tightens, his flanks, to drive himself into her another solid notch.  She knows how it'll make him feel when she wraps her legs around him like that, finds on his body footholds, lifelines, anchors to hold her to him

even as she's telling him -- giving him permission -- to let go.  Stop pretending he's not an animal.  Stop trying so damn hard, for once in his life, to be gentle and careful and not, not, not the ravenous beast he is.

She says it again: her lidded eyes, her parted mouth.  His eyes are on that haughty mouth of hers.  He's watching her, the catch of her lower lip beneath her teeth on that first filthy syllable.  The touch of her lips together, and then apart.

Fuck me.


It's all the blessing he needs.  He grabs her wrists.  They're frail in his big palm, in his strong fingers.  It's not the first time he's done this, not the first time he's restrained her or held her or arrested her like this, and perhaps all those other times were leading up to this.

Her hands aren't allowed to drive him mad any longer.  He slams them over her head, pins her wrists to the bed -- her body elongated, her breasts offered up.  Quite without hesitation he takes what is given, voluntarily or otherwise: his mouth is all over her, mauling her breasts, sucking on her tits, biting with ever-so-barely restrained violence at her nipples.  She has a glimpse of him at her breast, ravaging her like an animal at the kill: his blazing golden eyes, his eyebrows dark and harsh, his snarling mouth, the wreath and slide of muscle in his shoulders.

Then his free hand is at her waist, grasping her, easily encompassing the front-to-back span of her side in his grip.  He shifts and the mattress shifts with him.  She's negligible compared to his mass, a pretty little doll in his hands.  He's still holding her wrists down.  He's moving her, positioning her, dragging her a breathless few inches against him even as he's shifting his weight to his knees.  His mouth breaks from her skin; he's leaning over her, he angles her hips to accept him in a single rough pull of his hand, and then

he fucks her.  No apology; no warning.  Nothing held back now.

Just like she asked.  Pounding, slamming, plowing, hammering her like they've been going for hours already; like they've been fucking all along, like he's been waiting for just this, like she's wet and hot and slick and ready for him, for this, for this level of intensity.  His head is bowed.  His brow is furrowed.  His breath slides harsh through flaring nostrils, and then through clenched teeth.  His hand slips from her waist to prop against the bed; it gives him the leverage he needs to lean over her a little more, penetrate deeper, hit her harder, batter those last edges inside her until she relinquishes, surrenders, accepts all of him into her.

"Say it again," he snarls at her.  There's a growl on every thrust, punctuating the brutal slam of his cock into her, over and over.  " 'Fuck me.  I want you to fuck me.'  Say it."

Victoria
There is something to be said about the sharp intensity of physical pain. It's an awakening. An epiphany that puts everything into perspective. When you're certain you can't take any more, it pushes you a little further and insists that you can. It helps to remind you that you're alive. So she goads him and pushes him, gives the feral beast fucking her with restraint the permission to just let go. She's small and delicately put together, but durable. He doesn't know the things her body has been put through. He isn't fully aware of just how much she can take.

Hands grip her wrist, thrust them over her head. Mouth claims breast and nipple, devouring them with rumbling growls and teeth that graze her, reminding her of just what sort of predator he really is. He can feel her watching him then, with each sharp suck or threatening bite or fierce kiss. It drives her mad, watching his mouth move across her body. Victoria whines at him. She whines in a way that no human woman can.

The sheets stay in place as she is drug just bare inches across his bed so that he can fuck her. Hard. Just the way she requested. The way that she is angled, the tilt of her pelvis, the spread of her legs - it all allows him to dig deeper inside of her, feel himself nearly bottom out only to draw out and thrust back in. His room is filled with the sharp sounds of flesh to flesh. Low cast growls and genuine primal cries fill his bedroom. Echo off the walls and threaten to spread further throughout his loft.

She doesn't care, abandon has found Victoria and she is without walls or pretences or masks at that moment. He fucks her without care or concern, their flesh slapping against one another. He is already slick and coated with her wetness which threatens to become a bit more messy with each demanding fuck of his hips against her. Despite the rough dance they engage in, there is some oddly beautiful bit of movement in unison between them: he flexes his hips, she thrusts her own toward him, he goes for her breast and she arches her back to offer it up. They seem too familiar to be strangers, too comfortable to not be aware of one another. Yet, that's exactly what they are: no more than strangers connected by the loose ties of tribal blood.

Hovering over her, hands finding purchase on the bed, he growls and rumbles with each unforgiving battering of her body and she accepts it all with an honest, bare desire.

Say it again...say it..

"Fuck me..." She no longer whispers those words, but whines and gasps between them as each leaves her lips. "Fuck..yes fuck me...I want you to fuck me..." Her body trembles, her voice does the same. Glistening beads of sweat dot her brow, the hollow of her neck and down her belly.

Konstantijn
She shouldn't do that.

She shouldn't give him what he wants like that.  She shouldn't tell him to fuck her like that.  She shouldn't lay back for him like this, not when they barely know each other, not when he walked into her life a week ago with such arrogance, such presumption.  She shouldn't

give in

just like this, because the truth is: it just drives him closer to madness.  It just pushes him higher, makes him wilder, makes him wrench her hands harder against the bed, makes him drag her up in counterpoint to every thrust, makes him fuck her that much harder.

And she takes it.  She takes what he dishes out; there's more resilience in that sweet little body of hers than he suspected.  But then there has to be.  She's survived so much already, and he doesn't know the half of it.  He doesn't know the tip of the iceberg.  She's like ice, but no, no she's not; she's not ice at all but diamond, something hard and pristine, created by enormous heat and crushing pressure; something that must be shattered and cut and ground and polished to be

perfect.


She's perfect to him.  Every tremble of her body; every drop of sweat.  She drives him wild.  She's crying out now; there's no restraint in her either.  She's not ice, she's molten, he's coming down over her and wrapping his arms under her, letting go her wrists at last, gathering her in his arms, crushing her against his chest.  He surrounds her, fills her; the two instincts dueling in him coalesce into one.  Protect her.  Dominate her.  His teeth scrape her skin as he licks the sweat from the hollow of her throat, and then he bites down on her shoulder, grips her like a wolf mounting his mate, holds her still to -- quite frankly -- get fucked.

He's snarling like an animal now.  No words left.  No attempt to be human.  He's pounding her, hammering her to the mattress -- shaking the bed despite the weight of its foundation, its frame.  Good thing he has thick walls.  Good thing he has a two-level suite.  Good thing the neighbors can't hear them, though right now, right this moment, Konstantijn wouldn't care if they did.  He wants them to, wants them to hear the way he's making her cry out, wants them all to hear how prettily she surrenders, wants the whole fucking world to know:

she's mine, she's mine, she's already mine.  she always has been.

Victoria
Everything ceases to matter then. Time, space, objects. Just his hips relentlessly driving his swollen and hard cock deeper and deeper, over and over. He draws her forward, threatens to tug her up but doesn't. Konstantijn growls at her body. Growls at her. She grunts and whines and cries out with each cresting wave of orgasm that threatens to drown in her in an immense sea of pleasure. There is no shame between lovers, nothing matters right then. Not his neighbours or the way his bed shakes while he lays claim to her body. Not his offer of convenient, loveless mating and certainly not the Modi waiting so patiently to do what it is that Konstantijn has considered ...

The normal world and all of the problems collected in it is but a distant thing. So far away that she wonders if it exists. He overs, then wraps a strong arm with coiled muscles around her body. She cradles his jaw and has his mouth. They behave as familiar lovers one moment and  the animals his kind always has to hide the next.

Repeatedly she allows him to have her neck. Bite me, she whispers, then cries out softly when he does. Long pale fingers drag through incredibly soft thick dark hair. She is unabashed in that moment and he must wonder if he'll ever see her this way again. She told him nothing held past tonight, past that moment of maddening intensity when he made her cry for him, whine at him, need him.

They are sweaty, she drags her nose across his chest and kisses the skin there languidly. He holds her still, she wraps her arms about him, dainty hands holding loose to his hips. Konstantijn has pleased women before Victoria, he knows without question or doubt that he's pleased her too. Felt the muscles of her body tighten and flex around his shaft as the warmth of her orgasm washed over and covered him.

Without doubt, for that moment, Victoria Wilmington is without question, his.

Konstantijn
It'd be nice to say Konstantijn was concerned about such things as her enjoyment, her pleasure.  And the truth is at the beginning of this encounter he wanted to be.  He tried.  As with all attempts at magnanimity or true nobility in his life, it didn't last long.

It's been said before.  It's worth saying again: he's an animal.  He's selfish.  He wants; he takes; he leaves little enough for others.

Pure luck, then, that they match up so well.  At least in this alone -- whether because of fate or who they are or what they are -- they are aligned; they are perfect.  What he does to her might terrify another woman, might send her running from the room in tears, cursing him all the way out.  The way he fucks her, which is on the verge of violence; the way he bites her, seizes her in his teeth, holds her, as though any moment he might simply lose control, slip his skin, reduce her to a raw red stain on his bed.

It doesn't terrify her.  It makes her come.  She comes and it's a long cresting wave; it starts somewhere inside her and he feels it, those deep involuntary pulses in her cunt, that suddenly undeniable pull of her body that strikes a spark down the axis of his spine,

lights him off as well.

His hands grip her back.  His teeth leave marks.  Suddenly he's bearing her down with all his weight; fucking her with all the considerable strength of his body.  His own orgasm lights off like a detonation, a stormfront of heat that obliterates its way up from the center of his gravity.  His breath catches hard; then he roars against her shoulder, tattoos the sound there with clenched teeth.  He pins her, he penetrates her, he pounds his cum into her: as though if he held her tightly enough, fucked her hard enough, filled her deep enough, he could simply consume her.

Sate himself.

Cure himself of this unexpected and undeniable passion.



Afterward he doesn't move for some time.  His weight is barely still on his elbows -- enough that she isn't smothered.  Enough that she has room to do what she does: nuzzling his chest, kissing him over his heart.  Beneath his breastbone his heart is a hammer, pounding, pounding, slowing by degrees.

It's several moments before he finally moves.  Several moments before he trusts himself to move: some of his armor returned by then, some of his strength of will back in place.  A long deep inhale precedes motion, and then he lifts his head, kisses the side of her neck.  Slumps to the side, drawing himself out of her with a repressed shudder; turning on his back in a few slow, lazy, incremental shifts.

He says nothing for a while.  They are shoulder to shoulder; their legs are loosely tangled.  The city continues to shine through the windows.  Sweat lifts from his skin.  The beast in repose is a primitively beautiful thing: all thick biceps, broad chest, long limbs, softening cock.  Eventually he reaches over; lays his forearm across her lower abdomen, his hand wrapping around the far side of her hip.

"I think I'll follow you back to Virginia."  His voice has a rough, blurred edge.  "You should accept my proposal, Victoria.  We've something ...rare, between us."

His thumb sweeps a lazy arc across the crest of her hipbone.  Beautiful creature, he thinks.  Even his thoughts are lazy.

"I think we'd both be sorry if you let it slip away."

Victoria
He holds her with fingers that bear the promise of both greatness and murder. He bites into her neck with dull human teeth that still leave impressions on her skin. There's a beast beneath his skin and it's trying to claw it's way up through his bones and muscles and dermis and epidermis. Victoria can feel the wolf inside of him thrash at the bonds Konstantijn has wrested it into.

The warm waves of release spill over and across her body, tighten her muscles from head to toe while her hands hold fast to him. He's on the heels of her own, roaring and pressing the whole of his solid weight on her much smaller frame. There's no mistaking the feeling of his body pulsing and releasing waves of cum inside of her. It makes her gasp, her body arch and her legs cling to him.

For a few quiet beats the moment is tender. He rolls off her body and leaves her thighs slick and glistening. Shoulder to shoulder, his forearm over her belly to hold her at her hip. Victoria's eye lids are closed, she looks angelic - as peaceful if she were dead.

Strands of consciousness threaten to leave her when her eyes are closed, and then he speaks. Lashes lift, head turns. Blue eyes swivel to take in the shadows that play on his face, leave his eyes hollow holes and his cheeks gaunt. The spent kinswoman is too pale for the play of light and dark, she simply looks ethereal. Not of this world.

"There's a Wolf there waiting to claim me. We're in....a relationship." The words are a whisper, as if she were afraid to utter them any louder than that. He thinks they'll both be sorry if they let whatever this is go and she doesn't deny it. Not just then, anyway.

"He's climbing in Rank he calls it Adren.. Once he does..." She leaves the implication hang and turns her eyes away from him, though she leaves her hand resting cool atop the back of his at her belly. "When I go back to Virginia, I'll be going back to him." walls are rebuilt, masks fall into place.

She's not moving though, not until he makes her.

Konstantijn
Perhaps he should be angry.  Perhaps he should shout.  Demand to know what she's thinking, how could she, why would she, what.  Certainly the potential for violence is in him.  His rage burns so strong; more potent, even, than that of the wolf waiting for her in Virginia.

He doesn't rage, though.  He laughs - a low, dark sound.  The beast in him is satiated right now; lust and violence, after all, entwine so closely in the heart of an Ahroun.  Or maybe it's not that at all.  Maybe he's just that confident, that arrogant.  Maybe he doesn't care.  He's had her now, hasn't he?  And she knows all about men like him, doesn't she?  They always want women like her.  They take.  They always move on.

And yet still: her hand on his.  His hand across her midsection, his thumb stroking soft patterns over her softer skin.  He is quiet for a while.  Then she hears his head turn; he faces her, though she's turned away.

The question is a veneer of simplicity; a one-word composition of all the things he could ask her right now.  It is not angry.  It is not hurt.  It is soft, and curious:

"Why?"

Victoria
He laughs and the shape of her lips curve into a smirk that says she knows far more than she's letting on. Lying there together, basking in the heat from their bodies and the release their fucking had brought, she should be curled into him and comfortable. Without care or worry because whatever may be out there - however big and strong - would be met with something even bigger and far more strong in here.

Victoria doesn't allow herself that, though.
She takes the potential for that moment, the hint of promise in his words, and discards them.
Too much hope, she thinks. Far too much.

Why? One question that stretches out over every thing they've done tonight and everything they've said. Why did you kiss me? Why did you rip my shirt? Why did we just fuck like animals?

Why.

"Because."  It's like imagining the answers to the universe can be found in stars if you just look hard enough. One question, one word. Her head turns back so that her eyes rest on his face. Lips press to his chin and Victoria rolls onto her side, facing him, tucking one leg bent at the knee between his thighs.

Konstantijn
"No."

Like that every shred of humor, dark or otherwise, is gone.  She slides close to him, curling against him as though she wanted to play lovers.  Cuddle.  Or maybe she just wants another go.  It doesn't matter; his hand comes up and catches her by the jaw, gentle but unshakable.

"That's not an acceptable answer.  You know it isn't."

It's like he isn't naked in bed, the sweat of sex not yet evaporated from his skin.  It's like he didn't just fuck her, bury himself in her, lose himself in her -- if only for a few moments.  Konstantijn is rough and dark again, his savagery only barely masked by his cultured language, his flawless diction.

"You let me in tonight, Victoria.  In every possible sense.  So tell me why you would return to that lover of yours.  It can't possibly be loyalty, or you wouldn't be here in the first place.  It can't be love, or you wouldn't speak of him so dismissively.  It can't be duty; he is not your tribe.  You do not belong to or with him.

"You belong with me."  Another man, a lesser wolf, would have swallowed those words.  Kept them safe in his heart.  Not this one.  He is too bold for that; too dominant.  "Your blood and mine are the same, and blood calls to blood.  You know that.  You feel it.

"So tell me.  Why would you go back to him?"

Victoria
Maybe she thought it would of been that easy: fuck me, let me share your bed and when the sun creeps over the city we'll pretend it doesn't matter and that neither of us care. Konstantij isn't having it. The humour bleeds out of him and he takes hold of her jaw. Brows furrow. Body tenses.

His voice is smooth, the rumble of a feral wolf. One of her dainty hands lifts and fingers curl around his forearm, holding lightly to the arm that grips her jaw. He speaks as if he knows her. There's familiarity in those words, in that list he ticks off so non-chalantly - the reasons why that Fenris can't mean a thing to her.

You belong with me.Those four words are dirty and filthy. She hates him for saying them.

"I care for him." A pause, "He cares for me."

"Don't go to Virginia." She says firm. The feel of her soft palm slides up his forearm and to his bicep, back down and around until she's cupping his elbow lazily. "Please."

Konstantijn
Just now Konstantijn is beginning to notice Victoria never really resists outright when he manhandles her.  Not when he grabs her, not when he shakes her; not when he moves her, positions her, treats her rather like a lovely fuck-doll.  She has other forms of resistance, though.  Softer, more subtle things.  The touch of her hand.  The stroke of her palm, as though he could be gentled like this.  As though she could gentle him.

And perhaps she can.  His grip on her eases; slides away.  The back of his knuckles brush her jawline; then his fingers -- those dexterous, marvelous marks of humanity -- tangle with hers a moment.  Her touch slides away.  His bicep, then the jut of his elbow, the hard angle of bone there that could so easily reduce someone's face to a battered red mush.

Konstantijn tilts his head.  It is a consummately animal mannerism.  His brow is quizzical, then clearing.

"You genuinely think I'll die in Virginia," he says -- slowly; half-amazed.  "You think you're saving me."

Victoria
When she should be terrified, she is still. He grips her, grabs her, holds her and she takes it. He's just now noticing but she's been doing it all along. Long dark lashes lower at the feel of his knuckles brushing back against her jaw, Head tips into that touch, dangerous and comforting all at once.

Konstantijn looks confused. She can literally watch him trying to figure her out, a curious look rolls over his expression before giving way to a slow dawning of understanding.

He accuses her of caring. Of harbouring concern for his well-being, his life. Hand falls away from his elbow. The expression on her doll-like face hardens. "I don't want your death hanging over my head."

Yes, I care. Yes, I'll save you even if you're too proud to save yourself.

Konstantijn
It's more than understanding that passes over his face.  It's a complex, complicated interplay of thoughts and emotions; something that threatens to lend softness, tenderness, to that kingly face of his.  He looked at her like this outside on the terrace when he put together the story of her son, his birth.  He looked at her like this in his bed when he laid her down and she trembled like a leaf.

He touches her face again.  He strokes his knuckles over her cheek; runs his thumb across her mouth.  Explores her as a blind man might, by touch, learning the high arch of her cheekbone, the elegance of her eyebrow.  And all the while, the way he looks at her: the faint furrow to his brow, the darkness in those wild eyes.

"We all die someday, Victoria," he says softly, "and Ahrouns sooner than most.  I am a sacrifice born.  What I said earlier wasn't bravado; it was truth.  If I stay in New York City, I will die.  If I go to Amsterdam, or Paris, or Moscow, I will die.  It's inevitable.  I don't fear it.

"If I choose to go to Virginia, that's my choice.  If I die there, that's my fate.  It has nothing to do with you."

A pause.  His attention sharpens; focuses.

"Do you want to be mine?  Answer me honestly: yes or no.  I might never ask again."

Victoria
She is, quite suddenly, embarrassed.

She's embarrassed that he's seen her weak and that he's already begun to read through the cracks in her armour that he's caused. Her face is a delicate thing with cat shaped eyes that are not too wide or two narrow or too beady. Her nose is small and what some might consider slightly pug. Her mouth is something that's caused wars, that's brought down houses and melted the coldest of hearts. And all of those things - those eyes and that nose and her mouth - are set perfectly on a face that's as pale as northern snow. This what his much darker hand smooths across, the lines and angles of a face that is absolutely stunning.

He just wanted to protect her, take care of her. Victoria wanted none of it. Tenderness meant caring, caring led to love. She pushed the Fang to fuck her - hard - so that leaving and disavowing any knowledge of him and this would be so much easier. Now, he's doing it again. Watching her with wolf-like eyes, caressing her jaw and feeling the warmth of her lips. Becoming familiar with the shape of her bones because he doesn't want to forget.

He really ought to forget. They both should.

"Men always do this." She says low, gripping his hand and tugging it from her face. Without a hand to stop her Victoria is turning to climb out of his elevated bed, eyes already seeking out where her clothes have fallen in the darkened room. "I am not yours. Or his. Or theirs. Or anyone's. I am not a commodity to be traded. I'm not some bit of property to own or a trophy to hang on your arm when you feel like it. I've made a commitment in Virginia. Regardless of your opinion on my honour or loyalty, I can't pretend as if that commitment wasn't ever made."

A pause, a beat.

"This was a horrible mistake." A whisper, faint and distant drifts from her lips.

Konstantijn van der Valk
She takes his hand to remove it from her face.  But she takes his hand, and once taken that's a grip not so easily relinquished.  She turns to climb out of his bed.  The twist of her spine is liquid; poetry in motion.  And then it's arrested.  He holds fast to her, pulls her right back around to face him.

"You're always going on about men like me and women like you," he murmurs.  There's an edge in his voice now.  "I've told you already.  There are no men like me.  I'm not a man at all.  I'm a Silver Fang, and so are you."

A beat.  And then he's rising on an elbow, facing her squarely across that rumpled bed; those wrinkled sheets.

"Yes or no, Victoria."

Victoria
There is a lifetime of history in that spine. Decades of birthright in her bones. It might be easy to say that it's all been wasted. In her mid-twenties she's without a proper mate of her blood, heavy and pregnant with his heirs. It might be easy to say except for that fact that Victoria has already given the nation one sacrifice. One son. As pure in blood as she is. As true in birth beneath the heavy full moon as Konstantijn is. So, rather than a waste she is a promise of greatness. A mother to heroes.

Not allowed to leave, she's turned to face him once again. Long strands of blond waves hang loose across her right jaw, nearly covering her eye on the same side. Her eyelashes tangle with strands of her hair and the paleness of her eyes seems nearly luminescent in the shadows of his bedroom.

"There are always men and women like us, Konstantijn. There will be a beautiful monster like you, born beneath your moon, destined to die before he sees thirty five.  Thick with arrogance and promise. And another woman, like me, arrogant just like you and pretty enough to look at." A pause, " There are always others very near to what we are."

Her shoulder shrugs, she has to look away from him. Cannot handle looking at his face just then.


"No." She says. She says it with a voice that's pitched low and run through with stress. Pale jaws firm,  muscles tighten with resolve.


Konstantijn van der Valk
[percep + subterfuge: TRUTH? +WP: THIS IS IMPORTANT.]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Victoria
(man+sub: not a thing to see here!)

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )

Victoria
He is an intuitive wolf. His senses rely on far more than just what his eyes can see. The tension in her muscles, the stiffness in her bones. The way that her eyes avert from his face and she cannot be out of his touch - grasp - reach fast enough. Victoria tells Konstantijn that she does not wish to be his. She tells him this with a voice that is struck firm and strong, but still bears the faintest threads of untruths.

Konstantijn van der Valk
There's no hesitation; just a dreadful flash of motion.  He yanks her back by that hand still caught in his, grabs her by the shoulder, wrestles her down on the bed.  An instant later he slams over her, caging her in, his rage beating so heavy in the air the edges of one's vision turn dark.

Nothing gentle about it this time.  Nothing seductive.  Nothing remotely safe; just a primordial rawness, a disturbing sense of a different sort of awakening in him.  A sense that as much as he'd wanted to fuck her, enjoyed fucking her, he just might enjoy tearing her to shreds just as thoroughly.

A beautiful monster, she called him.  Beautiful is disputable.  Monster is not.

"I told you."  His voice is a velvet growl, low, soft, rich.  "Don't lie to me."

Victoria
He isn't letting go. She is more aware of this now than she has been the entire night. Yanked back, her brow furrows deeply at Konstantijn, that expression giving way to uncertainty and then fear when he wrestles her back down on the bed. This is no young girl, too stupid to realise the gravity of her situation. Victoria is a woman schooled on interacting with Garou. She is well aware of the danger the Wolf hovering over her (caging her in, trapping her, keeping her there and still) poses. The only protest the blond kinswoman offers is a quick shrug of one shoulder that tells him to get off.

Still. It doesn't change the fact that her own Willpower is dwindling away, oozing out of her like sand in an hourglass counting down to the moment when she won't be able to bear the heaviness of his fury. The first sign of this comes now when she refuses to look at him and her body begins to tremble faintly beneath his.

All gentleness and civility has left him. Victoria finds she is suddenly becoming claustrophobic in the confines of his arms and the weight of his body.

"Let me go, Konstantijn." Blue eyes flirt with his own gold. He can read how uncomfortable she is. He can feel it in the tension and quiver taking over her muscles and bones.

Konstantijn van der Valk
It's a different sort of tremble this time.  He knows it.  He's intuitive; he's primal.  He understands the language of the body better than any other.  It's why he feels her lack of scent so keenly, so frustratingly.  It's why she never was able to hide her want from him.

Or her lies.
Or her fear.

And that's what he smells now: a scent at last from this scentless creature.  She smells like him.  She smells like fucking.  But she smells of fear.  That should twist in his heart like a knife; he, who an hour ago almost wanted to protect her.  Almost wanted to love her, and heal her, and fill that loneliness he saw in her eyes.

And it does twist in him.  But it also rouses him in some dark way; makes him want to bite her throat, taste her flesh.  Careful, he told her once.  Careful, he tells himself now.  Careful now.  There's the line.  Don't cross it.

He exhales slowly.  A pervasive pressure in the air eases.  His hand loosens on hers.  He drops his brow against her shoulder for a moment, just a few seconds; he wouldn't blame her now if she were stiff as a board, afraid to move.

Then he pushes himself up on his knees; sits back on his heels.  There's something unpracticed about the way he pulls his fingers back through his hair, tugging on his scalp, lacing his hands at the back of his neck.  His head bows and his eyes close a moment, then open again.  They find her wherever she is -- on the bed, off, dressing herself, preparing to flee.

"I apologize."  His fingers unlace; his hands fall to rest atop his thighs.  For once, he makes no move to follow her.  "Perhaps you're right.  This may have been a mistake."


Konstantijn van der Valk
[ffs.]

Victoria
The little woman beneath him is shaking. Not so much that it would be noticeable visibly, but the way he's lying on her - near her - he can feel each tremble as it arrests her body...like tiny little earthquakes caused by his Rage. He almost wanted something with her. Almost. Had stood on that dark and forboding precipice of want and had been prepared to fall blindly into the black. He had not intended it, but he was almost accepting of it.

Almost.

She almost ran. Almost pushed him to the point of sating his more dark and carnal wants and desires. Fed the dangerous monster with her fear and lies.

But the most peculiar thing happens when he drops his brow to press it upon the pale slender shape of her shoulder. Despite her fear and her feelings of loyalty to whoever is waiting back in Virginia...despite the churning in her stomach at the thought of accepting what he's offering...Victoria Wilmington does something quite unexpected: She wraps one tentative arm around his waist. Opposite hand cradling the back of his head gently, holding him to her and comforting perhaps not just him but herself as well.

Gathering himself, his wits, she lies beneath the Garou and just holds him. It's tender in the way that she wasn't able to accept from him earlier. Maybe he won't accept it now.

"Maybe I am." is said only after he's pushed himself up to his knees, then heels. Watching the way that he holds his head, the movement more an unaware thought than a conscious movement of his arms and hands. There's no quick movement to flee him. No flash of pale skin as the doe flees the wolf. She too drags her hands back through her hair, sits up and tugs her knees into her chest, legs crossed at the ankle. All of her private parts covered by either knees or ankles.

"I was glad to have met you." She says quietly, chin resting easy on one knee while her eyes fix on him and the strength she finds in his nakedness.

Konstantijn
It's easy enough to read her posture as self-protectiveness, and easy enough to attribute it to fear.  Fear of him.  Fear of what he almost did; that dark brink he always seems to balance on.  Konstantijn, who is so superficially confident, so superficially certain, is always at war with himself.  Animal instinct against animal instinct.  A side of him that wants to protect.  A side of him that wants to dominate.  A side of him that wants to claim.  A side of him that wants to destroy.

These urges tug at him always.  But Victoria, uniquely, brings them all to the fore at once.  It leaves him caught in the middle, tilting from one impulse to the other; so unstable, so volatile.

But we digress.  The point is: she curls up like she's afraid.  But he knows that's not it.  A moment ago, when he let her up, she didn't rabbit from the bed.  She didn't flee, and this time - for once - it wasn't defiance.  It was something else, truer, aching.  And a moment before that, when he was on the verge of something terrible, when he pulled back from that edge and set his brow upon her body like she meant something to him,

she wrapped her arms around him.  Like he meant something to her.  It made him startle, a minuscule jerk of his body that he couldn't quite hide.  She didn't let go.  She held him, and it was so hesitant that he knew she wasn't expecting it, either.  She hadn't planned it.

And now they've drawn apart.  And she's protecting herself, and he thinks perhaps it's because they're drawing apart.  He looks at her across the new distance.  Their eyes have adjusted to this dimness, and she can see him now: the powerful scaffold of his bones; the heavy, supple musculature that gives him such speed, such strength.  Absently a hand rises, as beautiful and strong as a marble David's: prominent knuckles, a cast of veins.  He mops his palm down the side of his face, across his mouth.  His eyes are lost in the shadow beneath his deep orbits, but that princely brow of his furrows; knots.

When his hand descends, he doesn't return it to his thigh.  He holds it out to her.  There's something hesitant here, too.  An extended arm.  A palm turned up.  The slightest bend of fingers, beckoning.

"Come here," he whispers.

Victoria
Her attention is focused to pinpoint clarity on Konstantijn's face. The shape of his fingers against the chiseled from marble jaw he bears. His body is a thing of near perfection: muscles and tendons against bones that weren't meant to be broken. Compared to him she is as if nothing. Too fragile and delicate, like a fine porcelain doll meant for sitting on a shelf and never for enjoyment.

The first stone is cast, his hand extends palm up. There's something genuine about that. Something gentle. She doesn't deny him now, not when they both seem to need the nearness of the other far more than the space she was rushing to put between them.

Arms unwrap from knees, the soles of her feet press to the bed and her body very fluidly rearranges itself from sitting on her bum to kneeling. The bed does not protest beneath her weight. It is strong like it's owner and remains sturdy and firm as she almost crawls across it toward him on her knees. Free hand touches his jaw, drifts back to brush at the hair around the top of his ear as if grooming him.

He told her to come to him, and there she is.

Konstantijn
He asked her to come to him.  And there she is.

She touches him first.  It feels like a sort of permission; he who never before this bothered to wait for such from her.  Remember the way he walked into her hotel room that first night: she held the door, she tried to make him wait, and he pushed his way in anyway.  That's Konstantijn.  That's who he was, and who he is outside this room.

Inside this room, a tiny bubble of space where what's happening outside hardly seems to matter.  It hardly seems to matter that he is the descendant of an ancient lineage; it hardly seems to matter that he is expected to take a mate, to breed, to pass his perfect genes on before the war takes him.  It hardly seems to matter that she is being courted by a Garou not of their tribe.  'Courted'; that's the word their Tribe would use.  Chased, he would say, disdainfully.  In a relationship, she said; he could not tell, did not look or did not want to look, to see if she was lying.

It doesn't matter.  It doesn't matter here; it doesn't matter in the grand context of what they feel.  He extends his hand.  She comes to him.  Her knees slide across the sheets, and then her hand touches his face, combs into his hair.  He wraps his arm around her; swoops her up as though she weighed nothing at all.

There's something breathless and exhilarating about his strength when it is used like this.  Suddenly they are so close again.  Suddenly he has borne her up onto his body, and she is astride him, her breasts against his chest, her knees to his lean hips, her thighs against his taut waist.  There's such intimacy in the melding of their bodies.  So much bare skin, so much contact.  He could so easily be inside her again.  They could fuck again,

but no; that's not why he called her back to him.  His arms wrap around her.  She's small enough, narrow enough, that the span of them encircles her utterly; that his hands spread open almost cover her back.  He holds her achingly close, as close as he can; turns his face to the curve of her neck.

Victoria
He says nothing. She has no words either. What was there to say? Words are what brought them near to ruin just a handful of moments ago. Long arms wrap around her lean frame and she drapes her own over his shoulders, one arm crosses his back and her hand lies lazy against his shoulder. The other is lost at the back of his head, in his hair, nails dragging lightly across his scalp. Warm breath pushes across the soft slope of her neck. He cannot smell her, but where she is lacking in an identifying scent his own has more than made up for it.

Head  tilts, tips to the side a few degrees to rest against his. Lips press to his head and get lost in his hair. On a deep inhale she takes in the smell of his hair and sighs. It would be natural for him to want to have her again. The way that he positions her in his lap is more than just suggestive; he can feel the heat of her against his pelvis.

"Do you want to sleep?" her voice breaks the silence that sat so heavy between and all around them. He can feel her heart beat slowing, that rapid thumping easing into something easier. Can hear her breath, slow and easy, against his head.

Konstantijn
There's such a deep, primordial comfort in this moment.  Heartbeats slow.  Respiration settles.  Something intrinsic and primal about the way she nuzzles him, then -- as though right now she remembers that she, too, is as much animal as human.

She asks a question.  He shakes his head: that slow, slight, deliberate motion.  Back and forth, twice, then once more.  No; he doesn't want to sleep -- and yet he is shifting his weight, and hers with him.  He lies back, stretches out.  The lights of the city glimmer and glow on the high ceiling.  His bed is hopelessly rumpled, but that hardly seems to matter.  It is a den; it is warm and safe and more than sufficient for sleep.

"You know what I want," he murmurs; an echo of himself.  "It's what I've always wanted."

His arm anchors her to his side.  He closes his eyes.

manhattan.

Victoria

At the very least a week has passed between the moment when the Silver Fang left her suite in Norfolk and when his assistant relays a message left for him by Ms. Wilmington. It's a very simple, impersonal message : If you would please let Mr. van der Valk know that I'd like to arrange a meeting. It's quite possible that there is a day of scheduling, his assistant contacting her to offer available times, she checking her schedule and needing to return the call. In the end, though, they settle on a time (after dark, between seven and eight pm) and a day (soon, a day after and no later) and a location (wherever Konstantijn happens to lay his head). 

When she knocks it's with just four minutes to spare. Hands smooth once over a black, pencil skirt, attempting to smooth out faint wrinkles from her flight from Norfolk to New York City. He would immediately notice that she's taller than he recalls. A glance down the length of her curvy body would quickly contribute the extra five inches of height to the black satin stiletto pumps she's wearing. Fingers arrange the collar on her white button front shirt, as if she needed to be certain just one more time that her appearance was neat and orderly. With her clutch in one hand Victoria waits outside of Konstantijn's door with all the patients of a saint.

Constantine

Konstantijn's assistant is exactly what one might expect: crisp, professional, with a lovely voice.  The scheduling process runs smoother and faster than one might expect; if there are delays, they come from Victoria's end.  Then again, that was always the case.  Konstantijn's people are efficient and effective.  Konstantijn himself is eminently without patience.

It turns out Victoria's 'suitor', as she would put it, lives in a Tribeca loft.  But then, there are Tribeca lofts and there are Tribeca lofts, and this is the latter.  In the lobby a uniformed doorman calls upstairs for her.  She is escorted to a private elevator, which begins to move seemingly of its own accord.  Whatever straightening-up she performs is done on the swift trip upward; when the door opens, it opens on a penthouse suite with a sprawling view of lower Manhattan and the river.  It's a striking affair of exposed brick and soaring spaces, powdered black steel and glass, latticed stairs and unusual, sophisticated lighting: the new and the old, the modern and the vintage juxtaposed.

In front of the elevator is a decorative brick wall that stretches up to the ceiling some thirty or forty feet above.  Spot lighting spills down that wall like water.  There's a grouping of two armchairs and a table at the foot of the wall, all sleek angular things.  A bottle of scotch and two poured glasses waits on the table.

Konstantijn lounges in the armchair on the right.  He is waiting for her, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee.  He is not dressed for company.  He's in an undershirt, thin and plain white.  He is not wearing a belt.  The braces on his slacks are shrugged off his shoulders, falling to loop at mid-thigh.  He is smoking; it smells like marijuana, and a rather choice strain at that.

The corners of his mouth curl upward.  His tawny eyes glint and narrow.  He takes his time looking at Victoria.  Then, when he's had his fill -- momentarily, anyway -- he uncoils from his seat, a thoughtless sweep of his hand snagging up one of the glasses.  He approaches her, but his rage hits her first.  It feels like a weight, like gravity, like beach sand giving way beneath one's feet as a wave rushes back out to the ocean.

"Victoria."

His acknowledgment is a greeting; his greeting is her given name.  He's never used her family name, though surely he knows it.  Surely he knows who she is.  Konstantijn holds the glass out to her, but not very far; she has to come close to take it.

"Pleasant flight, I hope.  I would have come to you in Norfolk if you'd asked.  Or are you here to personally inspect my holdings and possessions?"

Victoria

Her eyes are allowed to roam appreciatively over the opulence that Konstantijn calls home. Pale eyes travel over the exposed brick and ornate the smooth reticulation of the stairs. The understated yet masterfully placed series of spotlights that send soft illumination running down one exposed wall catches and holds her attention for a few beats before she's moving on. He can hear the even staccato clicking of her designer high heels coming down the polished corridor of his loft. The Garou may know very little intimate information about the kinswoman, but with little to no effort exerted he can easily identify the sound of her stride.

Her expression is a carefully guarded thing. Whatever he is allowed to see is nothing more than what she wants him to know. Everything else is window dressing. Her smile is practised and perfect and as close to genuine as any woman could ever manage. But when Victoria lays her eyes on the Silver Fang the surprise that registers upon seeing his attire is all too easy to read. It's expressed by the drawing up of her brows high above her eyes and the slow to form smirk that threatens to tug her mouth into a sharp and harsh slash across her pale face. The pungent odour of what could possibly be marijuana wafts toward her followed up by the cushioned blow of his Rage against her face. It firms her jaw up. Pulls her spine a little straighter. Her shoulders back just barely.

Victoria he says, sweeping up a tumbler of scotch and offering it to her should she desire to get close enough to take it from his hand. Which she does, though whether it's to be in the pulsing embrace of his Rage or just because she wants the god damned Scotch in that tumbler is hard to discern. She's in his personal space now. This woman who's scent he cannot (won't ever) claim. She lingers there, a riddle to his senses, drawing the scotch to her mouth before dragging her eyes up his chest and to his face. Not quite to his eyes, she isn't that stupid or brave, but close. Close enough. 

"I'm going back to Virginia." She states, as if that should matter. "I thought a visit to my mother would be appropriate." Though the dry and insensitive tone of her voice seems to say she cares very little for what is appropriate where her mother is concerned. Victoria gives the Werewolf her profile, a soft curtain of flaxen hair hiding her relief from his eyes - all save for the tip of her small nose and the ends of long dark eyelashes. 

"The flight was horrid." A pause, "Would you like for me to personally inspect your holdings, Konstantijn?" There's no coy or demure flick of her eyes toward his. In fact, she doesn't even turn to face him. The tumbler is tipped up and drained of Scotch as they stand there facing opposite directions despite being less than a foot or so away from one another.

Constantine

In a matter of moments they are closer than what could strictly be called -- how did she put it? -- appropriate.  She is in his personal space.  He does not step politely back.  Her heels make her five inches taller, which brings her five inches closer to his height; leaves her some eight or nine inches short all the same.  When she stands close to him, the whole of his focus seems to curve in on her.  Though his carriage is as balanced and poised as ever, he seems to loom; he seems to surround.

She takes the scotch he offers.  She drinks it, and if she has a tongue for such things -- which she must with the way she pulls that drink down like she owns it, like she means it, like she knows just how to drink it -- she'll discover it's the same label as the one she served him half a continent away.  He has an eye for detail.  She turns away from him, which she always seems to be doing, and he watches her,

which he always seems to be doing.

There's a near-silent scoff of a laugh as she questions him in return -- needles him in return, perhaps.  "You know what I'd like," he replies.  It's only been a week, and yet somehow the subtle timbres of his voice are so hard to commit to perfect memory.  It's different in person.  His very presence is different in person -- more savage, more feral, more complex.  "You know what I want."

And down her throat pours the last of the scotch.  As she lowers her glass, he takes it back from her.  "Careful," he cautions.  "Any faster and I'll suspect you're in search of liquid courage.  Or just plainly alcoholic."

This time his fingers fold over hers; even after he's worked the tumbler from her grasp and set it back on the table, his hand is on hers.  Firming, actually.  He takes her hand in his grasp, leading her farther into the loft.  This is as open-plan as it gets.  Different spaces are delineated by light and color, not by walls.  Hot bright light glows off the subdued sheen of stainless steel appliances: a kitchen.  Warmer pools of light bathe a living space, an entertainment center.  A modern-day cavern -- that's what the penthouse is reminiscent of.  The civilized eked out of the primitive, the primordial.  The intricate staircase stands boldly near the center of the space; it's a placement a lesser architect would not have dared.

Konstantijn leads her to and then up those steps.  Perhaps he's taking her to his bedroom.  Perhaps she should protest.  He's a step ahead, which is perhaps impolite, but is also a mercy: she would not want that rage at her back, pursuing her.  Once, about midway between the soaring first level and the second, he glances at her over his shoulder, down the length of his leading arm.  There is something covetous in his eyes, but the hand that holds hers is unexpectedly courteous, even gentle.  He doesn't drag her up those stairs like an errant child or a spoil of war.

And on the second story, where the ceilings are mere fifteen-footers, he does not in fact take her to a bedroom.  He takes her to a set of doors which open out onto a terrace.  The tail end of summer is fading fast, and the night outside is cool.  There is a table laid out there.  Two place settings.  A small and intimate dinner: seared steaks, red wine.  Victoria's hand is released as Konstantijn moves to draw out a chair for her.

"Please," he invites.  And if she sits, he pushes her chair in: the perfect gentleman tonight, it seems.  If one discounts the attire, the joint, the look he gave her when she arrived in his loft, the prize delivering herself.

Konstantijn takes the seat across from her.  He spreads a napkin on his lap, and then he reaches to uncork the wine; to pour.

"Why have you really come?" he asks.  "To accept?  Negotiate?  Question?"  Those questions of his again: a slow and deliberate sequence, like hunting.  He finishes pouring for her, giving the bottle a twist to catch the drop that wants to spill.  Filling his own glass, then, "Or are you just lonely; looking for a little civilized company after so long in the backwaters?"

And now he's smirking again.

Victoria

He takes her tumbler and would find that the grip she'd had on it wasn't all that firm at all. Her fingers had only been loosely curled around the crystal. Just tight enough to keep it from shattering all over his fine floor. There is no mistaking one's preferred brand of spirits and Victoria knows her Scotch. Maybe she should say something to him: How thoughtful of you, Konstantijn or I'm quite flattered you went through the motions of trying to impress me. Perhaps she ought to, but she doesn't. The amber liquid is drained in but two drinks. This is a woman that has learned to handle her liquor with responsibility and confidence. It would be impossible to imagine Victoria a giddy drunk, laughing and being loud or obnoxious so that everyone is aware of her inability to control herself. No, that's not Victoria Wilmington at all. So, as the warmth of the fine whiskey brings a flush of soft pink hue to her cheeks, she lifts her eyes toward his face with an air of casualness. As if it meant nothing at all the way she allows her gaze to wash over his chest and throat, lips and nose to the piercing eyes of a man-wolf too filled with white hot Rage. 

Her gaze seems somewhat fragile this evening, but certainly not helpless.

He's watching her. Studying her. Observing the most minute of mannerisms she may bear. It doesn't seem to bother her, not in the least. Her spine stays straight, chin lifted - proud.

When he speaks, she listens. Head tipping to one side and gaze lowered, thoughtful, the full natural pout of her heart shaped mouth stretches wide and thin when he says that she knows what he wants. His fingers touch hers, tangle with them and he would find them to be  lovely, like the rest of her. The nails beautifully shaped and polished and only very slightly tinted.

They're moving. Through the open layout of his rough-yet-modern loft. He can hear her the sharp clicks of her heels with each step, that sound so telling of her grace and poise in shoes that are not as easy as they may seem to walk in. Now, she ought to stop him. Just then is when her hand should tug itself from his grasp and withdraw it back into her own body. She doesn't. For the briefest of moments, he is allowed to lead them - her - wherever it is he wants to go. 

Which thankfully is his terrace. He pulls the seat out, ever the gentleman, and she sits. Her knees are pulled close together, feet tucked under her seat all very proper. With her scotch refilled, she takes a drink and relaxes back just slightly in the chair. He wants to know why she's really there. What she could possibly want that would bring her all the way to New York. 

"To talk. Not about your proposal. Or about me accepting it or not accepting it. But to talk. Who are you? Why me? How long are you here for?" 

It's the simple things, really.

Constantine

Fragility.  Yes, there is that about her; the subtle, treacherous keystone to her undeniable allure.  He wonders if she knows that.  He wonders if she knows that he would have been bored if she were merely an arctic maneater, a polite and devastating seductress who made a game of toying with men, who had no flaws at all, no damage beneath her perfect skin, no unexplained gaps in her past.

He wonders if she knows that's what he wanted.  A lovely, boring, ultimately ordinary Silver Fang kinswoman to hang on his arm and place on his trophy shelf.  A nice, placid, emotionless mateship.  Separate, unattached lives.

And he wonders if she knows: she could not be ordinary if she tried.

And now Victoria wants to talk.  About him.  Who he is.  He leans back in his chair, setting the bottle back down on the table as he regards her with hooded eyes.  There's an indolence about him: he is the lord in his domain.  Yet something about it feels false, feels like a veneer.  He is a wolf in his lair.  He is a wolf, a wild, hungry, savage thing,

and she is something he wants.

"Those are dangerous questions," he says - abrupt, deliberately light.  Jet black lashes shade those extraordinary eyes.  He reaches for his wineglass, idly turning it against the tablecloth.  Once.  Twice.  "Mateships of convenience depend on emotional detachment, and emotional detachment depends on ignorance.  If you don't know who I am, you can't possibly grow to care for me.

"And that is what you would prefer, isn't it?"  His eyes rise to hers again; it's a genuine inquiry.  "A loveless alliance.  No jealousy.  No possessiveness.  A wolf who knows how to share; isn't that what you said?  A clean, cold partnership that benefits both parties, uncluttered by emotional strings.

"It is wholly possible to lust and still share the object of your lust, Victoria.  But it is not possible to care for someone, to love someone, and share that person with another."

A brief, restless pause.  He has not started in on his steak yet.  He takes a small sip of wine.  Her scotch has been refilled, if that's what she wants, but he himself is drinking only a robust red with his dinner.  Maybe he wants a clear mind.  He watches her; his attention is heavy on her.

"Or perhaps you don't want to be shared after all.  And perhaps you don't want to share."

Victoria

The sensory input at that moment was astonishing - the smell of the seared steaks, of scotch and red wine, the heat and weight of his Rage and the fierce intensity of his eyes on her person. There is something to be said about Garou: rarely do you find one that is unable to bring a blush to the skin. Victoria is certainly not immune to the tug and pull of natural attraction built into the genes of both Garou and Kinfolk. Konstantijn bore an undeniable and scorching force of will that sucked the air from her lungs. The intense magnetism he exuded grew in strength, becoming a near-tangible impression of vibrant and unrelenting power. He's talking and she draws the Scotch to her mouth while her eyes take a more intense inventory of his face and features, appreciating the inky black hair that framed a masculine, impressive face combined with bone structure that could make a sculptor weep with joy.

His mouth was a firmly etched thing and his eyes made him savagely beautiful. Her attention fixes on those eyes - predator to prey. Knuckles turn white with her grip on the tumbler and when lastly he idly wonders if maybe she wants someone or something that isn't shared or loveless or impersonal or simply there for convenience her eyes narrow slightly, features otherwise schooled into impassivity.

Victoria did not avert her gaze. Her heart beat a quickened rhythm, a war drum that rattled the bone cage of her chest. Still, she doesn't look away. She finds his gaze shrewd, assessing. There's murder in his eyes. A viscous and unforgiving promise of violence just waiting to be fulfilled. Small yet full lips part to accommodate faster breaths. He smells sinfully good - she knows this from being so close to him just a handful of minutes prior. It isn't cologne. Or body wash. It's not his shampoo. It's him. It's the undeniable natural scent that made him who he was in an olfactory capacity. It was what she didn't and wouldn't ever own.

She didn't know the name for it. Couldn't define it to someone without the capacity for understanding the way their world worked. It just was, and the idea of how it threatened to effect weighed down the outer corners of her mouth.

"Perhaps your right." Blue eyes snap quickly from his and she clears her throat, fingers uncurling from the serving of Scotch to pick up her cutlery. Victoria's leg's shift in that narrow A-line skirt - some throw back from the 1950's when combined with the back-seamed sheer pantihose that clings to her pale legs. One leg crosses the other at the knee, her hips shift so that her body is turned at an angle, toward the Garou. Her attention is on her food, or so it would seem.

"I've a feeling, Konstantijn, the less I know or care or like about you...the better of I'm going to be." Her meat is cut properly, fork and knife held in such a way that says she's been schooled on that very thing: This fork is for this, here, hold it horizontally by balancing it between the first knuckle of the middle finger and the tip of the index finger while the thumb steadies the handle. You're butchering it like a heathen. The knife is to be used with the tip of the index finger gently pressing out over the top of the blade to guide as you cut your meat. Very good, Victoria.

Constantine

"That's quite likely," he replies.  It is almost gentle, but what little humor there is scorches away so quickly.

What's between them is primal and undeniable as any force of nature.  The sort of attraction that exists in any complementary pair.  See how they complement each other: the rawness of his edges against the smooth refinement of hers.  The ferocity of his rage; the stillness of her presence.  Where she is classic he is savage.  Where she is soft he is utterly unyielding.  They are nothing like each other, but creatures such as they were quite literally created for one another.

They share a tribe.  They share a blood.  Who knows how many times their spirits have met in the past; how many times he's had her, how many times he's lost her, how many times he's killed her, how many times he's loved her.

He doesn't remember those past lives.  He's not sure they ever even existed.  This might be the first time; the very first.  Still the rules are the same.  Ten thousand years ago, a thousand lifetimes ago, there would not have been this song and dance.  He would have seen her, wanted her, taken her, ripped her from the clutches of those who held her if there were any.  Claw and tooth.  Blood and sweat.  He would have pursued her, harried her, brought her down, made her submit.

The arena changes.  The time changes.  The game is more subtle now.  It's still the same bloody, primal contest, and he is still a beast.  He is still drawn to such cool, frail beauty.

He never stops watching her.  Amongst humans this sort of unwavering attention would be well past rudeness.  Even amongst their ilk, it rides the edge of discomfort.  He watches her shift, he watches her flawless posture, he watches those neat little movements, so well-entrained, by which she cuts her meat.

There are sides on her plate.  Herbed potatoes, a small salad with a light fruity dressing.  Soup perhaps.  It's an elegant, if simple meal.  He must have a cook somewhere in this modern-day fortress of his.  There are no such accompaniments on his plate though: he has a slab of beef steak there, charred on the surface and red inside, and nothing else.  He is a carnivore.  His eyes are on the subtle pulse in her neck while she speaks to him.  He can see how quickly her heart beats.  Her words drift past his ears; they register but it takes him a moment to respond.  He is thinking of laying her over this table and devouring her alive.  Perhaps he'll find her scent then.  Between her thighs.  At her throat.  In the loops of her entrails.

He closes his eyes for a moment.  No; no.  Back from that brink.  He reaches for his wine.  He takes a deep swallow, and then he sets his glass down.  Reaches across the table; plucks her utensils from her hands.  Whoever taught her to hold a fork and knife would have a paroxysm at the sight of him: the fork gripped in his fist, all the strength in his considerable right arm bearing down on the edge of the knife.  In three or four strokes he carves her steak into a collection of fingersized strips, ragged at the edges.  Then he just tosses her utensils over the side of the terrace.  It is all quite effortless, quite casual.  Pity the stray pedestrian on the streets below.

"I'm sick of pretending to be civilized."  He doesn't even cut his steak.  He tears it with his hands, tips his head back to snap meat from his fingers.  "You want to know who I am?  This is who I am.  Sovereign Winter, heir to kings, scion to savages.  A Garou, an Ahroun, the wolf at your door.  You want to know why I want you?

"I didn't."  His teeth flash; the word is almost a snarl.  He's suddenly answering those very questions he all but warned her not to ask, tossing his words out like pebbles, flicked, deceptively light.  "That's why I chose you.  You looked boring.  Typical.  You'd seen enough trouble in your life that I doubted you were still holding out for some mythical prince who would save you.  I assumed you would be after the same thing I was: a convenient alliance that would serve its purpose but leave us both free to pursue our own interests.

"That would have been nice, don't you think?  Pity that ship has sailed, and now I do want you.  You sit there so straight and dainty and proper, but you're wearing five inch fuck-me heels and I keep imagining what you may or may not be wearing under that skirt.  I can hear your heart pounding and I can see the blood racing in your veins.  God help you if I ever feel anything more than lust for you, Victoria; I don't know what I would be capable of then."

A moment's pause.  His breathing has shifted too: deep and steady, swift on the inhale and deliberate on the exhale.  After a while his eyes fall to the topmost button on her blouse.  Rise again.

"Unbutton it," he says.  Soft now.  "Let me see you."

Victoria

Quiet. Shh. If she closes her eyes and focuses she can hear the blood soaring through her veins, the quick racket her heart is making as it beats too loud in her chest, thrums like with rhythmic bass in her ears. If Victoria is still enough, she can weather the storm of his overwhelming intensity. He doesn't afford her those moments. Her fingers are wrapped around the half full (half empty?) glass of Scotch when he speaks. His words are harsh, violent things that batter against her strength of the fortifications that she's erected to protect her from things like the Garou in front of her. Like heavy artillery shells they blast against the foundation and small holes begin to appear. Pretences fall like so much broken brick and mortar. 

She's taking a drink when he snatches up her knife and fork. Victoria does not flinch or fall back in her chair in an attempt to be away from his reach. That would be futile. Ridiculous. So she remains stalwart and unflinching, though her jaw firms and that vein in her neck that pulses and throbs with every beat of her heart begins to pound against the pale cover of her flesh. It betrays her. She cannot hide that from him. 

Time stalls, she has a handful of seconds that pass as long drawn out moments to realise that she may have very probably made a mistake. No, when he tosses the meat over the railing and snaps those dangerous fucking jaws like some mad wolf hovering over his kill, defending it as Alpha who has the best and first of it, she knows she's made a grave miscalculation. 

Again, he assaults her with verbal violence. Each word threatens to knock the air from her very fragile lungs. Each sharp punctuation of a statement is like a sharp blade stuck deep into her gut. Victoria narrows her eyes, immediately thinks better of it and withdraws her gaze. Eyes lower, face turns just a few degrees to the right or left - whatever direction bears it away from him. She's still holding that tumbler of Scotch, though her arm is outstretched on the table and the glass is safe resting upon the surface. At least for now. She can imagine him sweeping an arm across it and sending the exquisitely prepared meal and that glorious whiskey sailing to the floor. 

"Yes." Wouldn't that of been nice? He asks her and she nods once, half of a nod actually...not even what could be labelled a full up and down of her chin. His next demand - request? - finds her eyes rounding on him. Sharp and hawk like, keen and wild like a doe who knows she's not outrunning the wolves nipping at her heels. 

"Why would I do that?" Her tone is pitched low. Intimate, though it's only spoken in such a way to mask the tremble that might be there should she speak any louder. "When you've given such articulate and beautiful speeches on the necessity of neither of us wanting the other any more than convenience dictates?" Her hand releases the Scotch and she drags pale fingers through the soft wave at the front of her blonde hair. When she rises to stand it's with elegance and grace: knees kept together, weight balanced and even on those too high heels. The hand that had only just run through her hair drops to smooth over the curve of her hip. 

"I don't believe in God, Konstantijn. So who's going to help me when your lust becomes more than either of us have bargained for?" Not if, but when. Her clutch is still on the table, off to the side and opposite the Garou. Her eyes shift toward the thousand dollar handbag and then avert to the city laid out beyond his terrace. 

"If you go to Virginia, you're going to die." It's said quite matter of factly and without care or concern as her hands lift and fingers start to unfasten the top three buttons. He can see the milky white softness of her cleavage and no more. "Which is why I ought to go. This was a horrible idea." 

Constantine

She agrees: yes.  That would have been nice.  Surprise flares in his eyes; it shears sideways into something a little more treacherous, just a hint of ache.  He didn't expect her to surrender that point.  It's so intoxicating, every time she surrenders just a little to him.  Then it's gone.  She stands, and his eyes are instantly alert.  Is she fleeing?  Is she capitulating?

Why should she, she wants to know.  "Because I want you to," he says.  The necessity of convenience, she says, throwing his words in his teeth.  Those teeth flash - a snap of a laugh, and then the wineglass swept off the table.

"Absolutely nothing about you is convenient."  Drained, every drop.  He refills.  His eyes never leave her.  "Unbutton it," he repeats.

And she talks about god, she talks about death, she looks at her handbag and he thinks in a vicious flash if she reaches it he'll throw it off the terrace too.  But she doesn't.  She didn't stand up to leave at all.  They talk like they're in a war; their words are aggressive and edged, a push and pull, but there's a lie in that.  What they say and what they do don't even remotely resemble one another.

She's reaching for her buttons as she informs him that following her to Virginia would kill him.  And a muscle is flashing in his jaw, and his tone is equally callous, equally blasé.

"If I stay in New York City I'll die.  That's life.  An invariably fatal condition."

He has his wineglass in hand again as the first button slips from its hole.  They're good at deception, both of them; they can keep their reaction out of their voices.  But they're only flesh and blood in the end, and his train of thought shudders on its tracks when that second button comes undone.  His face is a mask; he's trying not to tip his hand.  But his eyes are molten gold, the pupils huge and black, and he drains that second - third? - glass of wine in a single long pull.

Down he sets the glass, so carelessly it falls on its side.  Rolls, clinks against his plate.  He's forgotten his dinner.  She's barely touched hers.  Three buttons undone now; the upper curves of her breasts white as cream.  His breathing is visible, a powerful rhythmic expansion of his chest.  She tells him what a terrible idea this all is, tells him she ought to go while she's making a slow torturous production of the unbuttoning of her blouse,

and he grabs her around her waist.  There was a trace of steak juice on his thumb.  It's on her shirt now.  He drags her down on his lap; she can sink down gracefully or she can fall.  It's up to her, really.  Her dress is too slimfitting for her to easily straddle his thighs, so he rucks her hem up, his big hands wrapping around her thighs, his thick wrists pushing the fabric of that pencil skirt up.  He finds the edge of those backseamed stockings; so classic.  Garter belt if she's wearing one.  Then the palms of his hands are on her ass; it's a shocking presumption on his part.

Here's another one:

"If you were going to leave, you would have never come," he says.  "Now the rest of the buttons.  Quick, or I'll tear it off myself.  You wouldn't want me to ruin your pretty blouse."

Victoria

And what a production she makes of it. A thick thread of blond is drawn down to rest against her cheek as her chin drops toward her chest faintly. It covers one eye, dark eyelashes brushing against pale strands. All her fingers manage is three buttons out of ten or so before he hooks a hand about her waist and draws her into him. He leaves her very few options - fall or move with the motion of his grip and go easy into his lap. Victoria opts for the latter and he'd feel almost immediately her small hands pressing firm to the broad line of his shoulders. Her hands are cool against the Rage heated surface of his skin, his hands are like two small furnaces against her sides. 

And that steak sauce? It'll never come out. 

He tells her that he's suffering from the terminal disease of life and she frowns at him - faint as it is there's no mistaking the tugging down at the corners of her mouth or the disapproval that threatens to spark behind the pale hue of her eyes. She is straddling him, his hands drawing up the hem of that narrow skirt to her hips, exposing the silk of her pantihose and the midnight blue and black garter along with a slash of her pale thigh between. His hands are rough things, meant for killing and violence rather than anything that might require a gentle touch. A gasp skirts across her lips when he grips her ass. The way that her head is tilted down he might think she is going to kiss him. Blond hair tickles his cheeks, creates a curtain to hide their faces. 

Now the rest of the buttons.  Quick, or I'll tear it off myself. 

Victoria leans back as quickly as she'd leaned forward. Her eyes narrow to fine blue slits. "Your arrogance is disgusting." She says, and it almost rings true in the tone of her voice, the narrowing of her eyes. But she's not moving, she hasn't gotten out of his lap or slapped him for presuming she'd allow him to cup and feel and hold the firm curve of her backside. "It isn't at all flattering." 

But she doesn't move. 

Not just yet, at least.

Constantine

No.  That steak sauce is never coming out.  But that's hardly a concern anymore because

she's not making a move

so he moves instead: he seizes the front of her shirt in his hand.  It's quite impersonal, really.  With a single vicious tug he keeps his promise; his strength is such that it's not even brutal, merely effortless.  Buttons go pinging off the front of her shirt, scattering around the terrace.  A seam pops on her shoulder.  Suddenly there's a whole lot more skin on display, and she might expect him to rip the blouse off her entirely now, she might expect him to grab her around the waist and throw her down on the table, on her back, tear her skirt off.

He doesn't.  He leans back in his seat.  There's something shockingly delicate in the way he folds the halves of her blouse back, smooths it off her shoulders.  Little by little he reveals that lovely body of hers.  Unwraps her rather like a present.  She can see him looking at her, staring, taking her in without a whit of self-consciousness.  She can see him taking a slow breath in, too, trying to catch the scent he'll never find.  His palms on her body then: smoothing over her abdomen, curving around her sides.

He's gentle with her now.  He doesn't reach for her breasts -- not yet, anyway.  He meets her narrowed gaze instead, and there's a dark sort of humor in his eyes; dark and unapologetic and

warm.  Odd, that.  Or perhaps that's a trick of the light.

"It's not arrogance if it's the truth, now is it?" he murmurs.  "Are you going to kiss me, or should I take that for myself as well?"

Victoria

His hands grip her shirt and tug - effortlessly - and she looks down at what he's doing, what's happening, and her lips part in shock. Palms leave his shoulders and find purchase on his forearms as if she might just push him away. A muscle ticks in her jaw. The bra matches the garter, the panties. Black lace and midnight blue satin. It's the sort of bra that cups her breasts perfectly. The sort that costs too much money because the lift it gives her chest is outstanding. Through a curtain of thick dark lashes she watches the Garou lean back in his chair, satisfied with the destruction he's just wrought on her expensive blouse. She watches his chest rise and fall in slow and rhythmic movements. Her spine straightens and she slowly shifts from sitting there straddling his lap to kneeling above him with both of her knees tucked in tight against his hips. 

With an amazing amount of patience he drags hands with fingers splayed up her abdomen. Victoria bears but one war wound: a horizontal scar below her navel, no longer perhaps than his index finger That is the only flaw he'd be face as his hands slide up to her delicate shoulders and push down the material of her ruined shirt. Spine straightens and she shifts her weight from one knee to the other, shrugging just faintly out of the expensive material he ripped apart so carelessly. 

When his hands curve  around her slender waist her hands crawl up his arms, feeling the curve and shape of muscle beneath tan skin. Fingers spider-walk up and over broad shoulders to cradle his jaws in the palm of her hands. The pads of her thumbs sweep up and over the apples of his cheeks, beneath his eyes that she's flirting with with her own. 

He wonders if she'll kiss him or if he'll have take that too. She wonders that too and maybe that's why she holds his face that way. Becomes acquainted with the strength of his features once again. Victoria sighs. It's a soft whisper of air that could mean oh so many things. Leaning in the tip of her nose touches his, her mouth hovers precariously above his own. They share breath, her lashes threaten to tangle with his own. 

Lips touch lips, her tongue rolls across the fullness of his bottom but she doesn't dive in and kiss him deeply. She presses soft her mouth to the corner of his, the middle of his lips and then his chin. 

"There's your kiss." She tells him, leaning back enough that she can look at his face, her hands slipping back down to caress the curve of his shoulders.

Constantine

Aside from that transient touch of her hand to his wrist a week and a half ago, the first time she's touched him was a moment ago, when she caught herself against his shoulders as he toppled her onto his lap.  And that barely counted.  This, though: this slow pass of her hands up his arms, across his shoulders.  This counts.

He's still in his undershirt.  Her palms find bare skin: the warm thick musculature of deltoids, shoulders.  A brief interruption of the strap of that plain sleeveless shirt -- and even here his clothing is quality, is soft cotton, could never be mistaken for the ribbed thin scraps that one might buy in packs of three or six from Target, Walmart, the like.  Then his skin again, rougher as her hands find the line of his beard-bristle at the angle of his jaw.

He doesn't look much like the stereotype of a Silver Fang.  It's hard to see white Russian ancestry in him, or even the Nordic blood that runs through so many of his house.  He is quite dark, his hair thick and black, his skin olive.  He has the lean taut cheeks of a nobleman, though, and the angular, symmetrical features.  And in truth, the purity of his blood is one that goes back farther than Normans and Russians; back thousands of generations, perhaps tens of thousands, right back to those Indo-European progenitors who first arose on the banks of the Caspian Sea.

His blood is so pure.  So is hers.  She can't see his, though, but he can sense hers.  It's the closest thing to a scent that she has.  Even so she's looking at him, holding his face between her small hands, looking at him as though she were not so much learning his face as recognizing it.  There's something dangerous about this, too.  It's not good for them to know each other.  That way lies ruin.

Still.  She sighs: he closes his eyes, and it seems instinctive, like an animal lulled by a gentle touch.  A camera would love his face.  Women, though -- the truth is she's one of the very few strong enough to see him through his rage.  He wears his rage and his threat like a royal mantle.  It is always with him, and like a solar corona, it is too much for most to look at; too much for most to bear.  She's different, though.  She didn't enjoy it when he made her look at him.  But she could do it.  She could bear it.  And that, too, is a rare thing.

The tip of her nose touches his.  He raises his chin a fraction of an inch; then a tilt, almost reflexive, sliding her nose alongside his.  Making room, until her mouth can touch his.  Her tongue finds his lips parting, a slow humid breath escaping.  He seems so patient; she can't even tell, doesn't even know, that it's not patience at all but control.

She kisses the corner of his mouth.  Then the center.  Then his chin, where an eighteen-hour beard prickles against her lips.  When she starts to lean back his eyes open, the lattice of his soot-black lashes unweaving to reveal those animal's eyes -- that color like amber, like gold; the pattern and thread of his irises wholly inhuman.

Not for the first time, his hand wraps behind her head.  He holds her fast for a moment, his spine straightening, his shoulderblades coming off the back of his chair as he rises to close that new distance again.  He kisses her this time, parted lips closing around her lower; the faintest scrape of teeth.  It's more than reciprocation.  It's the slightest of escalations before he lets her go, runs that hand down her body to rest at her waist again.

"There's my kiss," he corrects.  "You're making a habit of leaving me wanting more.  I can't decide if it's a good idea or a bad."

His hand moves again.  She can feel the distant echo of that motion in his shoulder -- the complex interplay of bone and tendon, the tension in those thick muscles.  His palm runs up her midriff until his fingertips find that scar.  It's only one.  He has more than that.  But then he's an Ahroun; he's born to fight and born to die.  It's different when it's her flesh that is marked.  That doesn't seem right; it upsets some natural order of things, the same way her scentlessness hangs in the air like a hole.

There's a knit in his brow when he raises his eyes to hers again.  "Where did this come from?" he asks her.  "And who was it that guarded you so poorly?"

VictoriaHis hand wraps round her head and grips it with strong fingers. Mouth to mouth, he holds her to him and at first she is stiff, palms flat on his shoulders once more. Cool fingers against the warm balls of his shoulders. Victoria never really relaxes into that kiss. Her spine remains rigid and whatever slight muscles she bears in her thighs and calves are tense. The kiss parts and it's a bruise of a kiss: strong and passionate and imbued with just a little bit of that lava like Rage in his soul.

Pink tongue swipes over her lips and the blonde kin remains seated in his lap - straddling him - narrow skirt hitched up around her thighs, silk back seamed stockings affixed to a garter belt. Pale, milky skin exposed in bits and pieces here and there. Her eyes narrow on his face, fine pale slits curtained by thick dark lashes.

A very regal chin lifts by degrees when his palm moves up her shoulder. It feels good. She's tense, he can feel the threat of knots in her muscles quite easily. It isn't until his fingers and palm drift down and round to become familiar with the scar that's slashed across her lower belly, beneath her navel. Victoria's face twists, brows furrow and the emotions that ebb and flow over her expression run the gamut from anger to frustration to indignation and humility.

Her hand slaps at his and she starts to wiggle free of his lap, hands hurrying to tug down her skirt hem.

"That's none of your business." She says stiffly, eyes lowered so she can try to set order to her clothing.


ConstantineThere was more than a hint of dominance and claim in that kiss, but the truth is it wasn't brutal.  At least -- it wasn't as brutal as he could be.  She's never seen him fight.  She's never seen what a monster he is, huge and hulking, sides that heave with every breath, jaws that snap bones like twigs; paws that thrash everything asunder.  White as winter, and as pitiless.

There's a hint of that brutality now, though.  So quickly he flashes into cruelty: she slaps at his hands and he moves like lightning.  He retaliates, his long fingers wrapping around her wrists, those slim bones there gripped in his palms.  She tries to get free.  He yanks her closer, suddenly enough to jar her breath from her lungs.  In his eyes there's a certain flat possessiveness: like an animal snarling at anyone who tries to take his kill.

Softly: "Tell me."


VictoriaHer heart races inside of her chest, rolling up into her throat and vibrating in her ears. Bones so light and delicate they might be hollow, avian, are gripped in strong, dexterous hands. The frown on her face deepens, creases form laugh lines. Constantine jerks her, the insistence in it isn't something she ought to deny. He could hurt her quite easily: grip to hard and break a bone or bruise her flesh. Of that she's well aware.

Blue doesn't met wolfish gold. Gaze averts, lips pursed. Defiance and arrogance run through her expression and posture despite how he holds her.

"It's nothing. It's private." It's everything, it's nothing. "I told you, I had a son."  Her tone is dry, hands shake. "It isn't any of your concern." She can feel his breath and the beat of his heart. The weight of his gaze lingers heavy on slender delicate shoulders. Victoria denies him that, though. She doesn't let him have her eyes, not just then.


ConstantineA moment ago he was ordering her out of her clothes.  A moment ago he was tearing her out of her blouse.  A moment ago he was this close to laying her out on the terrace table, and she, perhaps, was not so far from letting him.

Something's changed in the air since then.  She is closed now.  Tightened down; batten down the hatches, seal the doors, shade the windows of her eyes.  Her defiance is a dangerous thing, wakens the beast in him, makes him want to insist, but

perhaps he is not wholly a monster yet.  He doesn't want to be a monster; not here, not with her.  That realization is one that surprises him.

Konstantijn sighs.  It is a soft sound, barely heard.  He raises those stiff resisting hands of hers to his mouth; he kisses her knuckles.  Then he lets her go, sitting back, taking his hands off her to allow her to climb off him or remain on her own terms as she will.

"You didn't tell me it was a son," he says.  "And you didn't tell me they cut him out of you."

It is early September.  The end of summer.  The wind coming off the river is moist and cool.  They are rather exposed here, if we are honest: his building is taller than most, but even so theirs are not the only eyes here.  Anyone looking over here would see them, assume them to be lovers drifting inexorably toward a rooftop exhibition of a tryst.  Anyone looking over here would think them strikingly contrasted, beautifully matched.  She is so small; she is so delicate his hands could almost span her waist.  And he is massive, powerful, lounging like a tiger; watching her with those animal's eyes.

"It is my concern," he says.  "You are my kin."  A longer pause; and for the first time, something almost like hesitation.  "You could be mine."


VictoriaShe wants him to hurt her. Twist her wrist. Squeeze the carpals until he can feel them threaten to give way beneath the insistence of his grip. She wants him to lay claim to her mouth - lips and teeth and tongue fierce against her own. She'd be happier if he smacked her or threw her from his lap, lips peeled back - viscous.

She'd rather he do any of those things - or all of them - than what he does. He sighs. The sound tugs at something inside of her. He is the heat to her cold. She is the comfort to his need. Victoria is kinfolk - his kinfolk - and he is a warrior of her birth tribe. She will blame it on that. Some mystical link that refuses to allow her to continue denying him. She'd blame it on the moon hiding in the sky somewhere.

Release comes soon enough. Wrists are drawn into her chest, buttons unfastened just enough that he can see the milky white mounds of her modest breasts.

The wind is cool. He speaks and Victoria's eyes drift closed, lazily. The breeze is like the fingers of a lover through her blond locks, pushing them back off her face. Constantine doesn't care who might be spying on this unexpected, intimate, moment. Victoria doesn't much seem to mind either.

She'd rather he push her away that kiss her knuckles. Anything would be better than that edge of hesitation in his voice when he says, You could be mine. And just like that hitch in his voice, there's a stutter to her movements. Hips wiggle and knees guide her back - then stop. One high heel presses to the floor, the other in the seat next to his hip.

She'd rather he throw her over the rail like he did the silverware than make her want to look at him that way.

"Would that of mattered? That it was male? How he was stolen from me?" She stands, finally. Finding her resolve she clings to it, hands smoothing down her skirt. Fingers attempting to set her hair straight.


ConstantineThe shake of his head is slow.  Something about that is animal too.  Feral -- as though sometimes his humanity gets away from him.  As though sometimes, faced with someone like her - who calls to him in a way he could never have anticipated, who coils into the marrow of his bones like poison, like memory - he can't even remember how to pretend.

"It doesn't matter to the world," Konstantijn answers.  There's just enough volume to reach her ears.  A faint furrow to his brow, as though he doesn't understand this himself: "It matters to me."

She stands.  His hands rest on the arms of his seat now.  He sprawls quite at his ease.  Kingly.  Savage.  But there was a moment when she was slipping out of his touch, a twitch of his fingers like a reflex.  He breathes evenly because he makes himself breathe evenly.  She strives to set herself back into order.

"Stay with me."  He hadn't meant to ask that of her.  He thought about having her; fucking her; taking her.  Of course he thought about it.  Look at her.  But he didn't think he would ask for this: stay.  Don't go.

Softer now: "Stop running from me."


VictoriaHer shirt is in such a state of disarray that she couldn't leave his loft without borrowing one of his. Still. She makes an attempt of drawing the ripped edges together around her body. Chin to chest she looks at the designer shirt, lifting her gaze to his face just in time to watch him shake his head in that slow, nearly feral manner.

It matters to me, he says.

Slender fingers push silky hair away from her face so that she isn't hiding behind a curtain of pale gold. He sprawls, owning that chair and the ground it resides on. The balcony it's settled on. He could own it all and burn it down with all of that Rage writhing insistent and demanding beneath his skin, shades darker than her own.

Stay with me. Stop running from me. His words roll around in her head. Mix and jumble up - but they always mean the same thing: Too much, too little, too late. Victoria looks unsteady on her feet. She looks like she might scream at him. Throw something at him. Curse his entire lineage for saying such things. How dare you, her eyes say. How fucking dare you.

The palm of one hand lifts and covers her mouth. This is important. It keeps whatever was threatening to come out, in. She looks like she might laugh or cry or rage. Maybe all of them. Eventually though, that hand turns and it's the back of it (those delicate knuckles, soft skin) that presses to her lips. Opposite hand finds purchase on the curve of her hip. Eyes roam out over the city. The soft rumble of his voice a faded memory.

"This means nothing." She says as her hand falls away from her mouth and her eyes leave the cityscape to find his face. "Nothing." And everything.


ConstantinePerhaps he deserves some of that recrimination she casts his way.  How dare he.  How dare he assault her like this: come storming into her life like he owns it.  Demand her hand, her body, her submission -- and so insultingly, telling her he wouldn't love her, he wouldn't ward her, he wouldn't even care if she fucked another man or ten.

How dare he do that, and then turn it all on its ear.  How dare he corner her at that wetbar; on his rooftop.  Serve her a meal he doesn't even let her eat before he has her on his lap, tearing at her clothes.  Tear at her clothes only to leave her flayed, naked, truths spilling into the air only to find him not disgusted by her history, not repulsed, but

looking at her like that.  As though he has never seen her before.  As though he has never seen at all, before.

How dare he: after everything she's been through.  Where was he when her child was cut out of her?  Where was he when she was shared by wolves not of her blood?  Where was he when she was shamed before a Sept, marked like errant cattle?  Where was he, this glorious beast, this solar son, this creature that has the audacity, now, to say:

it matters.
she is his concern.
she could be his.


He stares at her as she holds something in.  He thinks for a moment she might shout.  Or cry.  He thinks if she weeps I am lost but he watches anyway,

and she doesn't cry; of course she doesn't.  She's Victoria Anne Wilmington.  Her blood is sterner stuff than that.

She lies to him instead.  His face stills.  Then he's up on his feet, he's surging out of his seat in a storm of motion, closing on her position.  She sidles aside; he doesn't let her; perhaps she flinches when he reaches for her again.

"You're a liar," he says.  She might resist.  She might not.  It doesn't matter; his hands are on her arms, her shoulders, it's a wrestling match in slow motion, it's not a contest at all.  He draws her inexorably closer.  His hands are on her face then.  He holds her still; he holds her face tilted to his, close, and he tells her again, "You're a liar.  Stop running.  You're already mine."


VictoriaHer body is angled toward the city. Prying eyes - should there be any - would quite easily see the pale skin of her chest and stomach that peek out from between the torn and tattered sides of her shirt. It wouldn't be hard to read the shuddering ache that has settled so comfortable in her bones. The woman on his balcony bears an amazing amount of internal fortitude. She can bear his eyes and his touch better than most, but the tenderness of his words threatens to drive her mad.

He's up. Moving. She jerks to the side, he denies her the movement. She flinches as if expecting to be struck (it'd be better than ...) but it's just his hands and they're just gripping her shoulders to steady her rather than break her.

Liar. Liar. Liar. She's tugging away from his grip, he's not letting go. You're already mine. She pauses in her denial of him. Let's his words settle deep into her mind and bones.

"Take me to bed." Is her counter. So simple. So honest, for once. Take me to bed, Konstantijn.