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I’ve been practicing it in the car and in the shower until I can say it right. Keep this.

“Again.” His voice is rough and shaking. “Paige. Say— I cannot—”

“Mora’kel. Bite me.”

“Paige.”

His voice cracks, and then his mouth comes down. He bites.

Suddenly I hear a note in my ears, filling my entire body. It’s inside me, and it’s warm. The warmth spreads from his mouth, down my spine and straight to my pussy. I come a third time, harder, my back arching while he stays connected to my shoulder. Rapture pours through me on the note, and it gets louder. I feel it in my sternum and my fingertips. Then voices flood my mind. It’s sixty people around one fire.

I hear the first keeper, whose name I wrote on page one, and the elder with the bad hip. Three hundred years of Emberhold storytellers, and every one of them is saying what happened so the clan would keep it. My voice is in there with them. It’s me at the county board, saying I’m almost done when I wasn’t. He’s been telling the orcs at Whitaker House about me every night, and I’m part of what they keep now.

Then it morphs into what he feels. It’s every fire and every feast. People thank him and leave him alone. Nobody has ever stayed for him once it’s over, so he thinks he’s only good for his stories.

And then there’s a woman at a table with ink on her fingers. She asks what the memory-keeper remembers about himself. I’m a part of him, and he’s glad that his mate is a woman who talks too much and writes too fast. I’m crying, and I don’t know when that started.

He groans as he orgasms. It’s long, hot pulses while the note holds and the glass windows sing. He’s filling me with so much cum that I can’t hold it all, and I shudder around him in ecstasy.

The pull under my ribs has been pointed at him since the first day. It was always supposed to be him.

I’m wordless. Struck dumb again, and I don’t go looking for words. For a minute, I had three hundred years of his people in my head. Then the voices faded, and now I can feel him instead. It’s fine. It’s better than fine.

He pulls his teeth out of my shoulder slowly. He licks the mark, then covers it with his mouth and holds it there. The mark pulses, but it doesn’t hurt.

He gets his arms under me and lifts me off the cold table. He’s still inside me. He holds me against his chest and presses his forehead to mine. It’s a while before he lifts his head and looks down at me. His ears are down as far as they go.

“Kel’mora,” he says. It is kept.

I nod. That’s all I’ve got.

“Mora’vol,” he says, into the mark. The implant doesn’t translate it. I don’t have the brain cells to ask what that means right now.

He stays inside me, half-hard, with his arms around me. His cum is starting to leak out around him. I like it there. The petition is on the floor under the table with two hundred and six names on it. There’s a mark on my shoulder, and the whole town is going to see it tomorrow.

“Tomorrow I would like to tell your story to the town,” he says.

I can feel his need through the mark. Everyone will be in this room, and he wants to stand up and tell them about me the way he would tell the hall.

I nod. I want him to. My whole life I’ve been the one who talks. Before him, nobody ever wanted to tell my story to anyone.

My hand goes to his braid, and I pull his mouth down to mine. The words still aren’t there. He can feel the rest.

I drive us to my place with unsteady hands. It was my parents’ house, and I took it over when I came back from Portland. It’s the first time I’ve had a guy over, and it feels weird to have him in the house I grew up in, but it also feels right. He has to duck under the kitchen doorway, and then he stands in the middle of the room and looks at everything, the way he looked at the library the first day.

We don’t have sex again. We snuggle in my bed with my head against his chest while I listen to him breathe. My feet don’t reach his knees. We’re going to need a bigger bed, and I can’t afford one. The mark on my shoulder is warm. I can feel him through it, and I lie there a long time without saying a word. I don’t need to.

Chapter 6

At seven, the town meeting starts, and every folding chair is full. Ivy refused a chair, so the story-hour kids are on the alphabet rug up front. Fran is at the near table with the gavel somebody gave her as a joke. Phyllis Grubb is by the door with a stopwatch.

I’m more nervous than I was at the county, and my hands are sweating. These are my people. That makes it worse.

My collar is open, and the mark on my shoulder is visible. People kept looking at it as they came through the door. The only one who commented was Gundrik. He took one look at it and then told Yorrel, “You took long enough.” I had to hold in my snort.

Yorrel is standing next to me. He’s calm, one steady note, and he hasn’t wavered once. That’s what the bite gave me. I can feel what he feels. I don’t know what he knows. I tried to remember year fifteen on my own this morning, and I couldn’t. He still has to tell me the stories.

Fran taps the gavel, and everyone quiets. She reads the county’s offer and the numbers. When she says the floor is open for comment before the council votes, she looks right at me, along with everyone else.