Ravenous (Taint of the Gods #1)

21. RHYDIAN

21

RHYDIAN

T he train arrived at the station at exactly midnight. The surviving passengers all lugged their sacks over their shoulders, thoughts likely on the events that led to that moment passing across their glazed expressions. One such survivor turned out to have been Rieka’s bunkmate, the dark-haired one with the brightly coloured tattoos. He’d arrived at the station at ten to midnight covered head to toe in Kensillan Hunters Armour, a pair of short blades strapped to his back and a long gun in his hand.

Hiding from the eyes of The Core on the opposite side of the tracks, I watched from afar as Rieka barely registered that her friend too had survived. A friend I would have to tell Jordry and Mal about. They would be very interested in his particular skill set. He had roped nearly thirty collars to the belt at his waist along with the insignia of every hunter he’d killed. Twelve in total.

Rieka said nothing more after her reunion, her gaze occasionally falling back to her clean hands, the gloves now somewhere in her coat, urged to hide them when her bunkmate’s gaze had fallen to her hands.

I boarded the train in secret as I always had and headed straight for MedCom knowing I’d find Rieka there. She was standing silently beside her bunkmate, eyes unfocused.

After being informed of Peia’s death, Sal gave herself no more than half a minute to grieve knowing that come sunrise, the mourning celebrations would begin. Having shed those initial tears, Sal saw to those too desperate to wait before she worked her way through the non-immediate cases. Rieka’s bunkmate appeared confident enough in my concern for my "wife’s" wellbeing, that he fled soon after being examined. When she arrived at us, Sal’s hands moved to touch Rieka and she flinched. Sal didn’t notice. No one noticed but me.

The Organic found the wound in Rieka’s shoulder within moments and after requesting she bare her shoulder, Sal cleaned away the topical treatment I’d applied to treat the wound. She placed her hand over the broken flesh and started to mend it. It took several minutes but when Sal had finished, the pink had returned to Rieka’s fair cheeks. But it hadn’t rid her eyes of their ghostly glaze.

As Rieka began to refasten her shirt, I suggested she might like to go wash. Hoping hot water might wake her from her stupor, but not entirely confident. Rieka simply stood from the cot and silently picked up her coat.

She appeared to not even notice we were walking in the wrong direction, heading towards the front of the train. I stopped outside a familiar door in the private sleeper carriage and listened. The room was vacant. That was good.

I opened the door and went straight for the tub. One of only four on the entire train, I knew this time of day it would be free. As I turned on the faucet, I heard slow cautious feet enter the space.

“Whose room is this?” Rieka asked sombrely.

I deigned a glance at her over my shoulder and found her walking further into the room, her eyes taking it in. “My sister’s.” I didn’t bother explaining further knowing she’d already met Lily yesterday. And she didn’t ask why Lily wasn’t in her room after midnight. An explanation for another time.

I walked over to the closet as the water began to fill the giant tub and pulled a towel, sponge and soap from it placing them on the stool Lily used as a tea station, then I retrieved the Kindling Orb from the bedside, twisted it and dropped it in the water. When I turned back around Rieka was standing in the middle of the room, already stripping off her clothes.

Staring at the tub, she unbuttoned her pants and pulled them down uncovering the exquisite mound of ink black between her long-toned legs. Beneath the singlet she discarded on the floor, nipples hardening in the crisp air, she revealed two perfectly sized breasts.

Rieka didn’t wait for the tub to fill, nor did she check the temperature. She just approached the tub and climbed over the side, the water rising as she seated herself.

“I’ll leave you to it then, ” I said, turning the water off when the tub had filled and headed for the still-open door.

“Stay.”

Hand gripping the door handle, I peered over my shoulder. Rieka had her knees up under her chin, arms hugging her legs. And she held me with such a gaze I found myself immobile, incapable of moving so long as those stormy clouds held me in their grasp.

There was a part of me that wondered if this was part of the plan to seduce me, the same part that kept me on my path, kept me focused on my goal. The rest of me wanted to stay.

The rest of me won.

“If you wish it.”

The door closed with a soft click and I moved to sit on the end of Lily’s bed. Four feet from the tub.

Her voice invaded my thoughts once again. “On the stool?”

I obliged her. As I did, Rieka began to untie the fastening in her hair, her hands trembling with every move. I found myself reaching towards her hands, the compulsion to help her overtaking my better judgment. I should have pulled away, should have left the room. Instead, I found myself asking permission.

“May I?”

Rieka silently moved, turning her back towards me and leaned against the wall of the tub.

I deposited my jacket on the bed and shifted so I could pull at the leather strap I’d given her, several strands falling loose as I did. With tentative fingers, I began unravelling the thick strands that hours earlier I’d seen her create. I separated them from one another, attempting to pry apart the white strands that had been fused together in scarlet clumps.

As the final strand fell loose and I combed my fingers through them, I pushed down on the feeling that clawed at my chest. That I had crossed some invisible line I couldn’t return from.

I used the wooden jug Lily had borrowed from The Bathhouse and poured water over Rieka’s hair. Her scalp darkened under the water, as though black roots were growing beneath the white. As I rubbed at the strands to remove the blood, the clumps having softened under the water, Rieka finally spoke.

“I was nineteen when my brother abandoned his post.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “I’d finally received my civic duty orders. Since I had become the responsibility of the Celestial Offices, he no longer felt I was a danger to our parents.”

I poured the water over her hair once again, unsure how to answer.

“I was so young when I hurt my mother that I have no memories of the event.” I caught myself hesitating, my grip momentarily failing on the jug’s handle at her words. My own mother’s face came to mind, the last smile she ever gave me.

Then quite casually Rieka added, “Sundering isn’t uncommon in Deos.” I knew that much. It was voluntary in fact. Self-inflicted by the most elite of society to show their devotion to The Celestials.

“No one knew that I was the one who hurt her so badly no Organic could heal her.”

I turned my attention to soaping the strands, my voice nowhere to be found.

“A Brute without control over their blessing is not something one speaks of in civilised society.” She let her hands float to the water’s surface absentmindedly. “A shame without a name,” she lamented as her thumb rubbed at the black tattooed dots on her wrist.

Rieka leaned forward as I poured the water over her soap-lathered hair. When she leaned back again, her voice became soft. “The first person who died at my hands was a friend.”

Unexpectedly, Rieka took my hand from her hair and pulled me forward, forcing me to leave the stool and kneel on the floor where we came face to face. With my hand still firmly in her grasp, she pulled it down to her neck. To beneath the collar where I knew there to be a long scar that stretched the width of her throat. “Her dying gift to me,” Rieka said.

I felt the raised skin of the scar beneath my fingertips. A clean cut. Perfectly mended. Whenever this had happened, she’d been tended to with care.

She held my hand flush against her warm skin, her voice resonating under my fingertips. “You know what I am don’t you?”

“Well, you’re certainly not Stilled.” I was unable to say the word aloud just yet.

Tears welled in her eyes. Rieka dropped my hand, her stare becoming unfocused. “I’m a monster,” her inner voice lamented.

My self-control abandoned me. Or perhaps I fled from it. Before she could slink away in whatever sea of loathing she had created for herself, I reached for her hand and squeezed. “You’re no monster, Rieka.”

Her voice quivered. “Rhydian, I bespelled that man and then tore him apart!”

I leaned in close so she would understand me, scent me, and know that what I said I meant. “And he deserved it. Worse probably. A Hunter like that, he was soaked in the blood of our kind, Rieka.”

The gaze which had been so fixated on our hands, snapped up at my words. “And that makes it right?”

“It makes it justified,” I replied, my voice steady in my resolve. “They kill us for sport. We kill them for survival. What you did was no different.”

Her voice was barely above a whisper. “Opinions are subjective.”

“So are monsters.”

I knew what I did next was stupid. Ridiculously dumb. But Apexes were tactile, especially wolves. Touch meant more than words, and I needed her to hear me. I needed her. She was the only thing in this world that could help me save my family. But in this moment, this was what mattered.

And if telling myself I would have done it for any of my people hushed the warning in my head then so be it. I lifted my hand and placed it against her cheek and left it there. Instinctively, Rieka leaned into the touch, and perhaps thoughtlessly, or by some instinct of my own, I began stroking her cheek.

Rieka held my gaze. An eternity passed in her eyes. An alarm could have rung for another Hunt and I would have kept staring, only looking away when she was ready. She finally leaned in, her forehead coming to rest on my own, a form of contact I’d only seen a few times from Brutes I knew to be intimate.

She sighed heavily as her hands slid up my arms, hands that had ceased their trembling and came to rest on the nape of my neck. With my hand still on her cheek, Rieka turned her head and gently kissed my palm.

I tried to withdraw it immediately, but Rieka caught it. Grasping my wrist, she brought it to her lips where she began to kiss me further. Once again across my palm, then down to my wrist where she lightly sucked at the skin as she held the kiss there. My breath hitched dangerously in my throat.

It caught her attention. Wild eyes flew to mine and Rieka moved fast. Our lips collided, my sanity a casualty of her touch. She kissed me deeply as desire swept over me, as my body called to hers. She clung to me, her hands rough and desperate as they pulled at me to get closer.

Sanity surely had fled as I let her pull me into the tub, the water sloshing out around us, a tidal wave to accompany the symphony of beats her heart was conducting.

Even her inner voice was breathless. “Take me Rhydian.”

I wanted to. As our bodies pressed against one another, as my hands explored the curves of her body, the lines of her hips perfection in my hands, she begged me. “Take me now.”

Frenzied hands pulled at my shirt until water lapped at my chest. As I braced myself on the tub frame, Rieka’s dangerous lips drew every breath from me that I scarcely recalled why I’d avoided this in the first place.

“Make me forget.”

Abruptly I withdrew. “What?”

Rieka gripped my neck, desperately trying to drag me back into the water, back against her. But I refused to be pulled back under. I stared at her in shock—disbelief perhaps. I felt disgusted. Not at her. At myself. For not realising sooner what this was.

“Rhydian, I—” She hesitated as I stood, her hand clinging to mine as though it were an anchor tethering her in place. I could not become that.

I stepped out of the water.

“That’s it?” she clipped.

Water pooled at the base of my sister’s bed when I retrieved my soaked shirt from the floor, a trail of puddles left by each saturated boot as they made contact with the cabin floor as I circled the bed.

“We do all that and you’re just going to leave?” she said unabashedly, standing up in the tub, as though seeing her naked, seeing what I was missing out on would make me change my mind about leaving.

She could not be serious? “How is it I have more respect for you than you do?”

She paled, her expression turning hard. “Excuse me?”

I picked my jacket off the bed. “I’m a prick Rieka, but I’m not that kind of prick. Vulnerable women are not my thing.”

She crossed her arms over her breasts, the water dripping down those long white locks, a goddess incarnated if I didn’t hate the very idea of them. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“I want to fuck you Rieka. I made that very evident just now. I am happy to be used, more than happy on any other occasion. But not this way. Not because of that monster.” I swallowed the bile the thought of that man brought up. The image of his hands on her. I shook the thought from my mind. A man should never touch a woman the way he did, least they want to keep those hands along with their life.

I cleared my throat. “If you had not killed him, I would have. But I don’t believe myself a monster for admitting that. Proposition me again when you realise that too.”

I turned and headed for the door.

Water sloshed as Rieka moved in the tub and a moment later pain shot through the centre of my back when something hard collided with it. It clattered to the ground behind me.

Rieka had picked up the wooden jug and thrown it at me.

“You are a prick. Happy to fuck me, but only when it’s on your terms,” she said sharply.

I took a step forward, anger boiling inside me. Anger that she would think so little of herself, and anger that it bothered me so much. I abruptly stopped, my fist tightening its grip on the leather of my jacket. “And what are your terms Rieka? Only monsters should fuck other monsters? Fuck that. My pride is mine to destroy, not yours.”

She fell silent so I made the conscious choice to leave before I let either of us make an even bigger mistake than we’d already made.

“Do yourself a favour and find something else to ease the burden you carry,” I said with my hand on the door handle. “This prison is long and too unrelenting to those who fail to see their own worth.”

Tears began to fill her eyes once more, and I cursed myself for being the reason they appeared, but I could not lie to her. Would not. The arms that had once crossed her chest in indignation now braced her naked body in comfort. Her words were soft, but there was no mistaking the anger that laced them. “How can a man who can come and go as he pleases call this place a prison?”

I knew her words weren’t meant to cut, but they struck the bone regardless. Hard and violently.

“I have shackles of my own, darling wife,” I answered bitterly, reminding myself of our true relationship, of why I had left the train in the first place. “I do not plan on letting you become another.”

I closed the door behind me, the haunted expression on her face burning into my mind as I fled to the confines of my room. I pulled the arrowhead from my jacket pocket, Rieka’s blood still staining the dark metal edges and contemplated whether my desire to see her memories was out of anger or something else entirely.