Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
W e ate together in happy silence. Or at least I was happy. Master looked like the dark in him was working to swallow him up whole and Cassius was distracted, glancing towards the door and frowning so much that it made his face all scrunch and furrows appear in his brow.
I didn’t need food to survive, but it had been such a long time since I’d had my pick of what to eat or experienced all the tastes each thing truly provided, so I just couldn’t help myself as I moaned and sighed while we ate.
I grabbed a little ball of gooey chocolate deliciousness and moaned loudly as I placed it between my lips, closing my eyes and bathing in the pleasure of that taste.
All the time I’d been stuck in the coin, I’d only eaten food I’d conjured from memory, and it had never tasted like this, or looked this good, or filled my stomach in such a real and satisfying way.
I’d forgotten so much during my time in the coin that in recent years I’d only really eaten bland, grey, tasteless food and I hadn’t even done that regularly.
The taste of hunger had become so normal to me that I often didn’t even notice it.
But here, in the real world where such delicacies existed to tempt me and an explosion of taste and satisfaction rolled over my tongue with every bite, I knew I’d never forget to eat again.
“Fuck yes,” I moaned. “More.”
Cassius cleared his throat and Master coughed around a mouthful of his drink, setting it down and giving me a look which made my toes curl as I met his gaze.
“Are you doing that on purpose, little goddess?” he asked, his voice gravelly as he pinned me in place with those dark eyes, and I slowly licked the chocolate from my lips as I looked right back.
“Doing what on purpose?” I asked.
“I suggest she doesn’t eat in front of anyone else during our stay here,” Cassius muttered, and I cut my gaze to him.
You’re doing it again.
“Doing what?”
Acting like you lost your mind in that coin.
“I did lose my mind in there,” I reminded myself and my master breathed a laugh before taking a final bite of his food and pushing his plate away from him.
“Did you always talk to yourself like that or has that changed since you became a Blessing?” he asked curiously, like he was interested, not like he thought less of me for it.
He was clever and saw a lot, but he wasn’t harsh or judgemental with his observations, only more curious for them and I liked that about him.
He had an open mind even if he had closed his heart off entirely.
“I don’t remember a lot about before,” I admitted, trying for the thousandth time to recall even the simplest of details about who I had once been.
All I had left were a few facts which I couldn’t even corroborate with real memories.
I knew I had loved my sister and that the emperor had caused her death.
I knew that I had killed him and felt the heat of his blood on my flesh.
I just struggled with everything in between like who I was and if I’d ever had dreams of my own or opinions that mattered.
You weren’t like this back then. You were a force to be reckoned with before. Now you’re just a broken fragment of the Fae you used to be. A memory caught on an ever-shifting breeze, impossible to capture and return to this body.
I bit my lip, not much liking that assessment but unable to deny the truth of it either because I didn’t remember the truth.
“I’m going to take a trip to the bathhouse,” Cassius said as he finished his meal too, carefully setting his knife and fork down, dabbing at his mouth with his napkin like a proper gentleman.
I looked to my master again as he sat back in his seat, legs spread wide as he sucked the last of his chocolate dessert from his fingertips and gave Cassius a taunting look.
“May the Fallen help us if you are required to dine in royal company,” Cassius muttered, rising and nodding to me in farewell, like I was someone important.
I flushed at the attention, offering him a bright smile and he almost smiled back, making me wonder if he was still planning on getting my Master to put me back in the coin, or if he might just be starting to like me a little.
I hoped he did. Then he wouldn’t want me to go away anymore, and I’d have an even better chance of staying out here in the real world.
“You worry too much, mate,” Drake replied dismissively. “Go relax in the bathhouse and make sure you have a good soak – with a bit of luck that stick up your arse will dissolve, and we can all have a lot more fun going forward.”
“We aren’t here to have fun,” Cassius replied seriously.
“Well, you certainly aren’t,” Master agreed, and I giggled at Cassius’s serious face before he turned and strode away.
As he tugged the door wide, a servant appeared beyond it, bowing her head to him before pushing an empty cart into the room and starting to gather the empty plates from our meal.
Master barely acknowledged her, looking towards the window as I felt that darkness in him pooling to the surface of his skin again and a shiver tracked down my spine.
I could almost hear the screams of his past, taste the blood from his memories and feel the pain in his heart.
I wasn’t sure if that was our bond speaking or if it was just that my past mirrored his.
We had both been reborn in blood and ruin, and that wasn’t a bond many people could feel for one another.
The servant retreated and the door closed behind her, leaving me alone with the man who owned me.
Stay quiet, you know they don’t always like it when you speak too much.
I frowned because I did remember that; being punished for voicing my thoughts too often with other masters, but this one didn’t seem like that. At least, I hoped he wasn’t like that.
“Sometimes, when I was stuck sitting alone inside my coin for years and years in the dark, the only memory I could conjure was the feeling of sinking a blade into the flesh of the man who destroyed me,” I breathed.
He turned those obsidian eyes on me in an instant, leaning forward and resting his elbows against his knees as he locked me in the intensity of his gaze.
“That’s the only part of those memories I enjoy reliving,” he said slowly. “The spill of blood against my flesh, the screams which weren’t mine for once and the all-consuming feeling of finally making him pay for all he’d done.”
His eyes brightened at that memory, and I licked my lips, almost tasting the blood on his hands which mirrored my own so beautifully.
It probably wasn’t something I should have wanted to have in common with him, but I did.
I saw good in him alongside that brutality and seeing it gave me hope that there might still be some good in me too.
I pushed out of my chair and walked closer to him, my skin prickling with the desire to reach out and touch him while the fear in me held me back.
If I tried to touch him and he turned out not to be real, I wasn’t sure I could take it.
But the longer I went without feeling the brush of his skin against mine, the more I thought about it, feared it, fantasised about it.
I needed to know. Was I just a figment of my own imagination?
Or did I exist just as he did? I didn’t know and the need of that discovery was at once terrifying and intoxicating.
I hopped up onto the table in front of him, walking the length of it, his eyes trailing me like a wolf stalking prey as I crept closer, and heat blazed through my flesh.
I sank down slowly, moving to sit right before him on the table, my legs falling into the gap between his thighs so that I could feel his powerful body surrounding mine as I drew close enough to taste his breath between us.
“Does it make us bad?” I whispered, wanting my words to be his alone as my fingers curled around the edge of the table and I leaned in, needing to be closer to him while still making sure I didn’t touch him.
Master tilted his head to the side just a little, his eyes slipping over me as he considered the question while giving me his full attention, something in his dark gaze drawing me in and wrapping around me in a way I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt before.
“I never held much faith in good or bad,” he replied slowly. “But if this is what bad looks like then I’m not opposed to it. Tell me what it felt like when you killed the man who hurt you, little goddess.”
I licked my lips, tasting the sin of that memory on my tongue and knowing full well I liked it. I could still hear his screams when I concentrated on the memory of them, still feel the heat of his blood on my flesh, the ache in my arm from the force of my blows.
I leaned in a little closer, tempting fate as the space between us dwindled and my heart took off galloping like a horse bolting for an open gate as a storm rose in the distance.
My tiptoes grazed his chair, landing on the edge of the wooden seat between his thighs as I pressed my weight down and leaned in to breathe my answer directly into his ear.
“It felt like freedom,” I admitted in a low voice which scratched against my throat and left me feeling raw, exposed, shattered.
Master turned his head just enough to meet my eyes and I bit down on my bottom lip as I got lost in the galaxy which lived solely in his endless gaze.
My fingernails bit into the wood of the table as I held myself there, suspended on the edge of a fall I couldn’t come back from.
The space between us was dwindling, fading, cracking apart and I was afraid of what might happen when it was gone.
What it would be like if his flesh met with mine.
Would the heat in his soul consume the fragile ash which made up the remains of mine?
His throat worked on a swallow, that truth just sitting in the space between us, asking to be devoured. I was captured by him and my need to know more of his secrets gnawed at me as I waited for him to make the decision which was building in his gaze.