Chapter 31 Orteslux #2
She obeys. He pulls her dress up over her hips, exposing her bare skin. Cool air brushes over her, making her keenly aware of the wetness that is already dripping between her legs.
“Fuck,” he whispers behind her, awestruck and desirous. His hand is braced at the small of her back and guides her down.
She shivers when he runs his hands gently up the back of her thigh, over the swell of her hips, settling on her backside.
His fingers circle softly upon her skin.
When he lifts his hand, a rush of cold air washes over the warm spot where his palm had been resting.
His hand swings back down with a forceful, stinging, deliciously earned slap.
She looks over her shoulder at him, eyes wide.
“More?” he asks. His face is stoic and neutral, but his eyes are wild.
“More.” This brings exactly what she’d hoped for—a feeling of atonement.
He doesn’t speak. He keeps his eyes on hers and raises his brows, waiting for something.
“Please,” she adds. She needs him to keep going. She needs to be absolved of so much guilt—for killing her father, for selling her soul, for hurting Cassius.
He smirks as his hand comes down, delivering another hard slap. Claudia’s gaze snaps forward. She winces.
Another spank sounds sharply through the air, almost like glass breaking.
“Count them out loud,” Cassius commands.
“Three,” she whimpers.
“More?”
“Please. More.” More for blackmailing Lamour into teaching her. More for betraying him anyway.
His hand swings down even harder this time.
“Four.” More for having no idea how to save Cassius and ruining any chance she had of figuring it out.
Slap.
“Five.” More for falling for a dying man. More because maybe this will hurt more than losing him. Maybe she can get all the pain out now.
Another.
“Six.” More because it feels good. More because it feels fucking great.
Another.
“Seven.” That one is so unbelievably hard it makes her shriek. It feels like his hand is made of fire. Her body feels burned.
He unleashes the final slaps in rapid succession.
Another. Wince.
Spank. Moan.
Slap. Growl.
“Eight, nine, ten,” Claudia cries out, her breathing hot and heavy. She trembles with his handprint tattooed in red on her backside. It hurts so much that she imagines the wound will never disappear. The pain is truly punishing, which makes it all the more pleasurable.
She deserves to hurt. It makes all the other bad feelings seem so small, so bearable.
This is what true pain is, and she’s strong enough to not only know it, but enjoy it.
Here, now, it’s like she’s watching it from above, leaning into her own ear and whispering, Look at how far you have come because of what you can endure.
See how your love for pain has brought you to power.
Pain makes her feel like a soldier who is about to become king.
Cassius releases a harsh breath and kisses the red spots on her skin. Pulling back, he says, “That’s enough.”
Her grip tightens on the desk. “I need more,” she protests.
He makes a sound of disapproval. “You’ll bruise.”
“I know. Bruise me. Make it worse.”
He hooks her shoulder and spins her around to face him, her bare backside pressed against her desk. Nose to nose, the rise and fall of their chests matches in rhythm. “No.”
Anger burns in her eyes. “I. Need. More.”
He lifts her away from the desk and curves his fingers around her hips. “Listen to me, Claudia Jolicoeur: When I tell you that you’ve had enough, you will listen. You will not beg for more pain than you can take. Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then allow me to clarify. The time for pain is over.” He pulls her dress down and rubs her back. “Let me look after you.”
She’s tense in his arms. Hot tears pool in her eyes, from either the pain or the guilt or the existential dread or some other horrible thing burning in her body right now. “I don’t—”
His eyes dip down and his brow furrows. “What is—”
Before Claudia can look down, he’s ripped off her robes and torn through the laces in the bodice of her dress.
Her wound reopened. It bled through.
The soaked bandages fall away, revealing the wet, oozing gashes between her breasts.
“Claudia…” His body is trembling with worry, then rage. “Who did this to you?”
“What?”
“Tell me the name of who clawed you like this and I swear to the gods I will make them suffer.”
“It’s not what you think.”
He stares at her wound, as if the sight of it is fueling a raging fire inside him. “If you don’t tell me who did this to you, I’ll pull every single student at this school into the chapel and burn them with the fire of Malevimus until they confess.”
Dorian’s name is on the tip of her tongue, but Cassius can’t do anything to punish him.
If anything, telling Cassius anything at all about her bargainer would only speed up the clock of his life.
For reasons Claudia doesn’t understand, Dorian already hates Cassius.
What’s stopping him from dragging Cassius into a nightmare and killing him then and there?
“I can’t,” she whimpers.
His eyes flare. His fists are shaking at his sides. “Claudia. Give. Me. The. Name.”
Biting her lip, she wishes so badly she could tell him the truth, but all she can say is “I did it to myself.” Tears well in her eyes when she watches sorrow spread over his face.
His eyes well with shock and horror. “Why?”
She shrugs and cries, “Punishment. I deserve so much worse than this.”
“Are you mad? You have done nothing to deserve this kind of pain.”
Laughing weakly through her tears, she says, “You don’t know me, Cassius. I am rotten.”
“I do know you, Claudia, and I know that you are good.”
As she wipes the blood from her chest, she stares down at her fingers, red and glistening. “What if I told you that you were right about me all along? I didn’t kill Odette, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a killer. I am. I am stained with blood.”
He reaches for her hands, but she jerks them out of his reach.
“Who did you kill?”
“I killed my father. He was trying to stop me from coming here, so I stabbed him in the heart. He fell in the Doorway after, but that wasn’t what killed him.
It was me.” She sinks to the floor and brings her knees to her chest. Her gaze drifts, her vision blurs.
“That day, he sold me. He sold me like cattle to a man sixty years my senior. That’s why he didn’t want me to come here—not because he cared about me, but because I was his only way out of the debt he brought on himself.
So, you know what? I would do it all over again.
I had to take his life in order to get my own. ”
Cassius drops to his knees and stares at her. It takes her too long to find the strength to meet his gaze.
“Say it,” she whispers, her voice choked. “You hate me.”
“Not at all.”
She wipes her tears from her cheek. “What are you thinking?”
He tears the sleeve off his white undershirt and pulls her close. With the strip of fabric, he cleans the blood from her wound. “I’m thinking that I wish it could’ve been me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I wish I could’ve been there. I wish the knife was in my hand. I wish I was the one who killed him for you.”
“You… you don’t hate me?”
“I never could. I never will.” He kisses her forehead. “Forgive yourself, Claudia. You were abused. You were sold. You did what you had to do to escape.”
“No,” she snaps. “I am rotten. I am wicked. I’m a killer and you shouldn’t—”
“Shh, shh, shh,” he whispers. “You’re a fighter, Star Girl. No one should ever call you anything less.” He cradles her head to his chest. Her tears drip onto his robes, darkening the fabric and dulling the silken sheen. His heart beats rapidly against her cheek. So, so alive.
A small, pathetic sound escapes from her lips. How many beats does his heart have left? She bites down hard on the inside of her cheek, squeezing her eyes shut.
“It’s all right, love.”
Love. It’s the word that breaks her. She presses her face into his chest and sobs.
He’s dying. He’s dying and nothing will ever hurt worse than that.
“I’m sorry,” she says through her cries. “I’m a mess. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Just feel. I have you. I won’t let you go.”
This is worse than a nightmare—this is an inescapable, undeniable, unchangeable reality.
She would stay in his arms forever if she could. If he would live. If there was anything she could do to keep him safe.
Cassius has become her everything. He pushes her to learn more, to create more, to be more than she ever thought she could.
He is the constant coffee in her favorite mug, the ink drying in her notebook, the candle burning on her desk through the night while she reads.
He sees her, all of her rage and desire and envy and promise, and he makes her better.
He’s the reason she’s finally met the best and truest version of herself.
She decides, now, that she will not let him die, whatever the cost. She will burn through every single star if that’s what it takes to save him.
Her decision may as well be carved in stone, inked in skin. Irrevocable, unchangeable.
Cassius MacLeod is not dying. She will not let him.
The clock chimes three times. They are now free to leave, but Cassius doesn’t move a muscle. For a few minutes, they remain perfectly still, wrapped in each other’s arms, stealing time away from everything else.
Neither of them can be the first to let go.
Claudia looks up, her lashes fluttering at his jaw. “What now?”
He pushes her hair out of her face and tucks it behind her ear. “Well, I’ll walk you back to your room and draw you a bath, and then I’ll go tell Triche that I’m choosing you,” he says.
“What? Cassius, you shouldn’t. You’ll lose everything.”
His eyes are soft and wet when he looks down at her. “I could never give you up.”
“He called me poison, Cas. What if he was right?”
He laughs. “Poison me.” He ends his sentence with a soft kiss to her lips, and Claudia feels like she’s floating. He’s so warm, so alive, and she’s going to keep him that way.
Cassius pulls back, smiling as he guides her to the door.
Claudia twists the handle, but it won’t turn all the way. She tries again with a hard pull and a quick shove, but it doesn’t budge.
“Is it jammed?” Cassius asks, trying his luck with the handle and meeting the same result.
“It’s locked from the outside,” Claudia says, her voice hollow.
He tries the handle again and kicks the door once. “Shit.”
Claudia knocks on it, testing the thickness of the wood with her fist. “I don’t think we could break it down.”
Cassius ponders, pursing his lips. “Someone will come for us soon. We’ll just wait for a little bit.
” His eyes slide to Claudia, and he offers her his hand.
He leads her to the center of the room and takes off his black robes, revealing his white shirt and black pants underneath.
He lays his robes on the ground like a blanket and sits down, gazing up at her.
“Would you like to lie here with me and pretend that nothing and no one else exists?”
Her cheeks turn red. That’s all she wants.
She slips her robes off, too, so she’s wearing only a light pink chemise. Lying down beside him, she rests her head on his shoulder and stares up at the ceiling.