Chapter Twenty #2
He wrapped the middle of my right calf between both hands and pressed. I hissed at the touch. “That hurts.”
He looked at me. “If it didn’t, it wouldn’t work. Breathe with the movements. Inhale,” he commanded, pressing in.
I obeyed.
“Good. Now, exhale.”
I exhaled as he held the spot before releasing. When his fingers moved, shifting lower on the muscle, the muscle felt better. Looser.
“That’s it. Inhale again, just like before,” he instructed.
I drew a breath through my mouth. When he commanded me to exhale, I did so. The process repeated. He murmured the quiet commands over and over, and I no longer had to think to obey. There was a lull to it, the repetition.
“Why am I”—inhale, exhale—“doing this? Vampires don’t”—inhale, exhale—“need to breathe.”
He switched legs. “It’s closer to habit.
Vampires won’t asphyxiate, even if there’s no air.
But young vampires tend to keep with the movement out of habit, the way you have been.
Controlled breathing like this is comforting.
Your body knows to tense and relax with the movements, which lets me adjust the muscle. Inhale.”
He continued on my other leg. His movements were unhurried, each press steady, assured.
Bit by bit, I relaxed into the lumpy mattress.
Tension eased, not just from my calves, but my shoulders.
I hadn’t realized how badly everything ached, not until Raphael had spent twenty minutes working through the knots in my muscles.
His fingers moved in a slow, hypnotic rhythm that was soothing.
He was all the way by my calves. Yes, it was…
improperly close. But not so bad. That’s what I told myself.
Until he set my calf down, having finished massaging both sides.
I swallowed as he rose onto his knees and straddled me. Oh, no. On reflex, I tried to pull my legs back to put distance between us. He caught my thigh before I could move.
“The deal was the entire leg,” he reminded me.
I nodded. And I flopped back, no longer willing to look at him as he pressed the heels of his palms around my thigh, just above my knee. Not when I knew he was going to work his way up.
The ceiling was made of three hundred and twenty-eight wooden planks. I knew because I counted them. Then I counted a second and third time, as if they could distract me from the fact Raphael—Raphael—was kneeling on the bed, hands around my thighs.
Worse, he didn’t just tell me to inhale and exhale. He added little comments—Good, you’re doing well, just like that, I know you can handle this, little viper, that’s it, so good, another one now—and each one made my core twist tighter and tighter.
“Relax, little viper. You’re tensing. Just keep breathing. You can do this.”
Yes, because he was straddling me, holding my thigh in his hands, now mere inches from my hip, while he praised me for something as basic as breathing. Still, I fought to relax, because I didn’t want to explain any of that.
After centuries, he moved to the other side, and the torture started anew. In, out, I breathed. And damn him if he wasn’t good at this. By the time he finished, I felt leagues better than when we’d started. His hands lifted off, the familiar pressure gone. Finished? Gods, this had nearly ended me—
“Turn over.”
My head flew up. “You have to be joking.”
It was a mistake to look at Raphael. He was still straddling me, knees pinning me in place while he stared down at me.
It was like the times he’d pinned me on my back in the sparring ring…
only then, I usually had the wind knocked out of me.
Now, I was breathless because he’d just spent almost an hour working his hands over my aching legs.
“Want to bet?”
It was a bet I would lose, his eyes said. He saw the surrender in my eyes and gave me room. I turned over, unconsciously running a hand over my throat as I did so. It was so scratchy. Was the room dry?
I didn’t have time to ponder. Raphael went right back to work, hands by my ankles, rubbing around the tendons. The muscles were already loosened from the first round, some of the ache gone.
This time, when he ordered me to breathe in and out, it wasn’t just relief that swept through me when the tension eased from my muscle.
Pleasure mounted with every press of his palms, every squeeze into the back of my calves.
He hit one spot that just was begging for his touch, and I cried out in a sharp gasp before I could stop myself.
Raphael’s fingers paused. I stopped breathing, wanting to die all over again by smothering myself with the blankets. But after a moment—one second, two, or a century, I couldn’t tell—he began to touch again.
There were no wooden planks to count now. I shut my eyes, but that just made it worse. There was only Raphael’s touch, and the ache of my body that alternated between sharp pain and release.
“There you are,” he murmured as I pressed back against his touch. With the way my body felt under his control, the words slammed into me.
Distraction. I needed to grasp at something. What could I use as a wedge between this feeling and me, between us?
“Why did you say not to tell another vampire I took your blood?” was what I finally landed on. I’d been too focused on fighting against this boon to notice the words before.
Not that I was sure what a boon it was for Raphael. I was the one getting her sore legs massaged.
Raphael was silent, shifting to my upper thighs now.
“Is it because you’re king? A status thing?” I guessed. Perhaps it was a signal of weakness. With how brutal the vampire world was, it made sense.
Of course, anyone who thought Raphael was weak was a complete moron, but this was a society that adopted human children to turn them. Things weren’t always logical.
Gods. There. He stroked the back of my thigh with a slight caress upon releasing. Not expecting the extra touch, I gasped.
I shoved my face into the blankets. There was no way he’d missed the sound. But he didn’t miss a beat in his movements, and finally put me out of my misery by answering.
“It is about status, in a sense. But it doesn’t matter.”
I clenched the blanket under my fingers. “Why not?”
“You won’t ask someone else for their blood.” He said it confidently, like it was a simple fact.
He wasn’t wrong. But there was something about how he said it, while I couldn’t look at him because my legs were turned over in his lap. “What if someone offered their blood to me?”
“Who.” The word came out as a hiss, his movement stopped. But his grip didn’t loosen, just stayed stone-still, fingers digging into my thighs. “Whose blood do you want, Samara?”
While I stayed silent, Raphael stayed still, digging into my tender thigh.
“Raphael, let go,” I wheezed. “It hurts.”
At once, the warm press of his hands disappeared. “I apologize.”
“It’s fine.” The bit of pain had done the job to cull the heady feelings working through my body.
Whose blood did I want?
His. But I’d cut the answer off, disturbed it came so easily. I’d let all the flames in the eighth hell burn me before I said that.
He finished my other leg quickly, and I was grateful, because by the end, I had more in common with a puddle than a person.
“Finished.”