Chapter Twenty Seven
I am drowning.
My lungs burn as I try to stop myself from breathing, but all the air escaped me on a startled shout when my feet were ripped from beneath me. I try to shake loose from the tentacle’s grip, but it holds me firm. I can’t swim to the surface, anyway; my gown is too heavy now that it’s wet.
Through a haze of bubbles stirred up by my own futile thrashing, I see the creature that holds me. I cannot put a name to her, for I’ve never seen anything like her. Translucent white skin on a human-like upper body fades into a flush, throbbing purple-red that unspools into a jumble of the fearsome tentacles. She has no hair, but her head ends in a hanging sack of the same visceral crimson, and her face...
She would be beautiful, if her eyes did not glow like coals, if her smile was not a gaping maw of needle teeth. I cannot scream at the sight of her, and it is the worst kind of torment.
The tentacle she grips me with releases, and I flail to the surface, gasping. Arcus stands over me, no emotion on his handsome face. I open my mouth to plead with him, but I’m pulled down again.
This time, the creature reels me in to her, face to face, and scrapes my cheek with her terrible teeth in a crude imitation of a kiss. My blood fills the bright blue water in a muddy violet cloud, and she runs a forked tongue through it. Her human hands grip the front of my gown and she pulls with remarkable force and speed, considering the fact that we’re underwater. I am no match for her strength. I am in her element, totally at her mercy.
Surely, Arcus won’t let her kill me. He said I’m to learn a lesson. That what I did before won’t happen again.
Those words sound less like a guarantee of safety now that I reflect on them.
My body begs for air, and, as if the creature can sense my need, she pushes me back to the surface. The cold stings the cut on my cheek. And still, Arcus merely watches. He doesn’t seem pleased or aroused or even interested. He’s simply...watching.
I have never overestimated my importance to him. But I have deeply underestimated how dangerous he is.
The horrible creature strokes my face with the tip of one tentacle. Small, muscular rings line the underside, and they stick and pop against my skin as they roll across it.
Perhaps I should beg for mercy. Perhaps that’s what Arcus wants. Not to feed me to this creature, but to know that I’m afraid, that I respect his power.
“Please,” I whimper. “I’m so sorry. I would never have done it if I had known—”
The tentacle slaps across my face.
“You will not speak to your king that way!” the creature hisses. Her voice is strangely melodic. As quickly as she slapped me, she moves to soothe me. She uses her hand to caress my cheek and runs her thumb across my bottom lip. “You will not speak at all.”
I don’t know if she’s forbidding me or if she’s done something to silence my voice. My fear is too great to test it.
I am so distracted by her hand on my face, I don’t see the other tentacles beneath me until one brushes against my sex.
There is no mistaking what she plans to do.
I shake my head, open my mouth to scream, and nothing comes out. Still, I cannot tell if it’s magic silencing me or my own horror. The tip of the appendage touches me, finds my opening, and thrusts inside.
There is no enchantment upon me, making me silent. My wail rings off the dirty walls of the room. The small, sucking cups on the tentacle pull and release against my inner walls, a sensation too strange and disgusting to comprehend. She stuffs more and more of it inside, curling, twisting, while I sob in revulsion.
She lifts me so that I am impaled on her, and her penetration of my body is fully exposed to Arcus. Another tentacle prods my ass, slips between my cheeks. I fight, but she is stronger, and I scream as she forces her way inside.
My eyes roll toward the ceiling and find it is a tarnished mirror. I see myself, spread and violated, and my memory jolts.
Luthian’s pet.
The image stirs my blood. It’s easy enough for me to ignore the sight of the horrible creature holding me, easy for me to imagine that I’m being held by Luthian’s vines, ravaged by them. I relax in her hold.
I’m supposed to be scared. I will not give Arcus that victory.
“The slut enjoys it,” the creature hisses. “She grows wetter even now.”
“You will not speak of your future queen in that manner,” Arcus warns her. “Get on with it.”
Get on with what? I think. Will the beast rend me limb from limb? Drown me? Devour me?
It is the last one, I realize, when she drops her mouth to the space between my neck and shoulder and sinks her teeth deeply in.
My head swims. She laps greedily at my blood, draws on the wound, her tentacles working in and out of my ass and cunt while I writhe in her arms. Another tentacle lashes across my breast, those sucking rings finding my nipples. I cry out at the shock of sensation, feel another tentacle girdle my hips. The tip pushes between my labia, attaching to my clit with impossible force. I kick my legs, not certain if I’m trying to escape or if I’m simply overcome by the feeling.
Luthian said that pain, that fear made things more pleasurable. His lesson serves me now; if I did not know this about myself, I would be ashamed, mortified by my body’s enthusiastic response to this attack.
Instead, I’m angry. If this were not intended as a punishment, I might have truly enjoyed it. I suspect, though, that the creature delights in my fear and pain, and would have caused them, anyway.
The creature’s mouth on my neck is its own kind of pleasure, warm and obscene as she revels in the taste of my blood. The tentacles inside me alternate their movements, and I rock my hips with them. It takes barely seven breaths before the suction on my clit is too much to bear, and I come, screaming, back bowing, hips pumping.
“Enough!” Arcus shouts, and the beast drops me into the water, withdrawing from my body and gliding off on a cloud of blood-red ink.
I cannot swim, but some instinct pulls me through the water, to the ledge where Arcus stands.
“This was but a taste of what will happen should you disobey me again,” he warns, his boot crushing my fingers where I clutch the stone lip of the pool. “Next time, you will not enjoy it.”
That’s why he’s angry? Because I climaxed when I was supposed to be suffering? Because I ruined the horror he meant to punish me with?
I wince as he grinds his foot down harder, and finally cry out with the pain.
“Next time, I will let her drink as much as she pleases. To have you any way she chooses,” he goes on. “I will allow that because I will it. I choose your partners, Cenere. And if I tell you that you will not cavort with other members of my court, with my sons, you will not.”
He crushes my other hand, and I sob.
“Be ready for this evening. I’m announcing our engagement to the court.” He turns away. “I’m finished with you.”
“Don’t leave me here!” I scream. There is a flash of white.
“Cenere!” Luthian is beside me in a moment. “Don’t leave you where? What’s happened? What did he do to you?”
“He... He...” I’m in the great hall of Luthian’s house, naked and crouched in a puddle of water. I blink in confusion. “I was in a... I was...”
Firo appears over Luthian’s shoulder. “She’s bleeding.”
“I see that she’s bleeding,” Luthian snaps, and conjures a wide strip of bandage from the air. He presses it to my neck. “This isn’t her only injury. She’s covered in bruises.”
I look down at my arms and legs. The marks aren’t bruises, but rings left behind from the creature’s tentacles.
“Heal her,” Firo says, and conjures a blanket to wrap around me.
“What has he done to you?” Luthian demands.
“There was a... some kind of monster. I don’t know where we were.” The pain in my neck is gone when Luthian takes the bandage away, and the blood upon it pulls from the surface, suspended as droplets that disappear into the air.
“I know this monster,” Firo says grimly. “I’ve heard it spoken of at court.”
“I know it, too.” Luthian’s eyes are hard and far away.
“A Cephalopire,” Firo says quietly. “He uses it to punish his enemies.”
“Not just his enemies.” Luthian drifts in some horrible thought that I cannot discern but snaps quickly back to the present. “Did he tell you why he did this?”
My limbs are cold, and I tremble. “I’m to be his queen. And he doesn’t want his queen to...display herself. He was angry about the mermaids, about his sons...”
Luthian curses under his breath and takes me into his arms, almost crushing me with his fierce protectiveness.
It’s only then that I can feel truly afraid. “I only did what you told me I should do. I thought—”
“I know.” He kisses my forehead. “I’m so sorry. I should never have brought you here.”
But that was our bargain. I knew this would be dangerous. Perhaps, not this dangerous, but I did not enter this arrangement thoughtlessly.
Who could have imagined such a horrible possibility?
“Do you see now, ambassador?” Luthian asks, his voice sharp with recrimination. “Do you agree now that something must be done?”
I lift my eyes. Firo stands helplessly beside us, his face awash in regret.
“I see now,” he says. “Arcus must die.”