Chapter 14 #3
Not that I could have truly left. A deal is a deal after all. Especially one sworn on the back of the stars.
I looked down at the clothes which I’d dropped from my claws and found only my trousers had made the journey back to the ground.
In hindsight I likely could have just left everything here but I’d been planning on landing in the city and finding a tavern – the problem there had come with the lack of open spaces available for me to land in and the small rooftops which I’d doubted would hold my shifted weight.
So now I had returned to the palace and would have to traverse it in nothing but my trousers.
I supposed it beat having a shirt and wandering the halls with my cock out.
I strode through the ballroom, my stomach growling over the banquet I’d missed, then I passed the guards who were still manned at the door, the flickering sconces offering the only light to the wide corridors.
I wasn’t hugely familiar with the castle yet but I knew which way was east so it didn’t take me long to find my way to that wing and as my chambers lay at the top of the highest tower there, it wouldn’t be difficult to locate those either.
A door on my left clicked open and I tensed for an attack but instead slender fingers grasped my wrist and Vesper tugged me inside.
“You took your time,” she griped, releasing me as she closed the door and flicking a silencing shield up over us.
A fire was burning low in the hearth illuminating a sparsely furnished chamber in a dim orange glow.
Vesper’s chambers held as little of her personality as they possibly could, the place which should have been her haven seeming more like a cell than my own rooms. There was a rack of weapons to the rear of the space, an armoire and a chest which I assumed held her clothes, a small table with a single chair and a bed.
No trinkets, no paintings, nothing hanging on the walls aside from the drapes which were closed over her window and they couldn’t have been more bland if they’d tried.
Which left me with little else to look at besides the traitorous wretch who had led me to this place.
She’d changed out of the lavish dress, her petite figure clad in a linen shirt which looked to have been made for a man, though it hung almost down to her knees.
Her feet were bare, pale pink hair mussed from sleep and the rumpled sheets confirmed the suggestion.
“For someone who claims to have been awaiting me, you clearly took the time to rest.”
“I set magical alarms keyed to your signature to wake me when you passed. Don’t flatter yourself into believing I’d allow myself to lose sleep over you,” she said but there was something in those words which didn’t ring true.
I folded my arms and leaned back against the door, tempted to simply turn and leave. I had nothing to say to her. Nothing kind anyway.
“Out with it,” she demanded.
I arched a brow.
“I can feel what you want, Bastian, so I know you’re biting your tongue against all the curses you wish to hurl at me. So go ahead, say them. I can take it. I know what I am.”
“You’re a fucking liar,” I spat, shoving away from the door and prowling towards her.
“I’m all the bad things,” she agreed without flinching. “And I never claimed I wasn’t.”
“No,” I scoffed. “You just do this, don’t you? You take all the labels like ‘witch’ and ‘liar’ and ‘heartless cunt’ and you wear them like badges of honour.”
“That last one is new,” she said, stepping forward to meet me, refusing to back down from my glare.
“I can see what you’re doing,” I growled, my blood heating with the ire I felt towards her.
“What’s that?”
“You make yourself the target, offering yourself up like a punching bag so that you can take all the insults, all the judgement, all the hatred, and forge armour out of it. You wear it like a second skin and you think there isn’t a Fae alive who can see through it, especially in the face of all that grief you carry around with you.
But you can’t hide from me, spectre. You let that armour crack when we were out in the wilds and I caught a glimpse of who you really are beneath it. ”
“And who’s that?” she asked scathingly. “Because I’ve spent my entire life trying to figure that out.”
“You’re just a lost little girl who no one ever loved yet can’t stop herself from craving it, even though you do everything in your power to make yourself unworthy of it.”
My words hit her like a slap, her grey eyes brightening and her fist curling at her side.
“Come on then, spectre – hit me. Hurt me, punish me, shove me away and prove your point all over again. You want everyone to hate you? Well done, you succeeded. You want me to yell at you? Then here you go. But I know you. I’ve seen you.
And you can run from that all you like but it doesn’t stop it from being the truth. ”
“There isn’t anything to see in me,” she hissed, her body tight with tension and I could tell she was fighting the urge to strike at me with all she had.
My feral little creature. “I am precisely what I claim to be and I want nothing more than what I have always told you to be the truth. I am still breathing because I have a life to end before I give up on my own. I’m going to hunt the man who called himself Cayde Avior and take great pleasure in his agonising death. That’s it. That’s all there is–”
“That’s all?” I scoffed. “So you don’t hear your name whispered in the dark now then?”
“No,” she ground out but it was a lie and we both knew it.
“And I suppose you felt nothing at all when you saw me flying into battle with that bastard on my back?” I pushed.
She shook her head defiantly but I saw the way she swallowed back her truth.
“Liar,” I growled again, stepping forward so that she had no choice but to step back, my chest knocking against her, my bulk crowding her in. She wanted to run but fuck that. She hadn’t given me the courtesy of doing that, so I wouldn’t be offering it to her either.
“Why should I care what you do?” she hissed, her eyes a raging vortex of emotion which she couldn’t hide from me.
I took another step and she was forced back once more, then another and another until she was flattened against the wall and still she didn’t strike me, still she didn’t push me away because she knew as well as I did that I could see straight through her bullshit.
“You care that I flew. You care that he shackled me to his will and you fucking care about me too which is precisely why you did what you did. Because you’re scared.
You’re terrified of this and so you wanted to sabotage it but that doesn’t stop me from seeing you.
I can hate you, but it doesn’t make me blind. ”
“There’s nothing to see,” she protested angrily, her hands finally coming up between us, her palms flattening to my chest as she shoved me back.
I conceded a step, barking a bitter laugh as I turned for the door and stalked away from her.
“Fuck this,” I muttered, reaching for the handle.
“Fuck you,” she breathed in reply and I whirled, fury lighting inside of me because she was still lying.
She’d summoned me here, she’d wanted me to come and then she’d run scared again, baited me, begged me to tell her all the worst of herself and was about to get her wish.
I’d leave here and she could break on her own terms, wallow in her own self-assured sense of wickedness and get precisely what she’d wanted.
But I wasn’t going to let her use me to validate her own self-loathing.
She could stare right at the truth of herself before doing that.
I crossed the room in six powerful strides, taking hold of her and turning her back to me before shoving her against the wall.
“What are you doing?” she hissed, trying to fight me off, but I caught her wrists between my fingers and pinned her hands to the wall above her head. Her breaths grew ragged, a curse slipping from her lips and I fisted my free hand in her pink hair, forcing her to turn her head and meet my gaze.
“Shift,” I growled at her, and she stilled, her eyes widening before going blank.
“I don’t know what you–”
“My cousin was a Succubus. I know well what your kind are and what you’re capable of. I know every secret of your Order and most of all, I know that you can shift. But you never do. Why is that, spectre? What is it you’re so desperate to hide?”
She tried to fight me then, really tried, but it was too late for that. She’d let me capture her and I had her pinned exactly where I wanted her.
“Shift!” I bellowed in command, and a tear slipped from her eye as she shook her head, sagging in my hold, fighting the urge with all she had.
I let my fingers move through the silken strands of her hair, leaning in to speak against the shell of her ear.
“You won’t ever stop lying to the world and yourself if you keep hiding the worst of what you are in the shadows.
So why don’t you stop hiding and show me something real for once?
You asked me here because you want something, not because you felt moved to let me curse you out and name you every heinous thing you work so hard to embody. So stop being a coward and shift.”
She panted in my hold, her muscles bunching against the command, head shaking in refusal but another tear slipped down her cheek.
I pressed even closer to her, the heat of my Dragon fire enveloping us both as I let my fingers fall from her hair and skim down her spine through the linen shirt she wore.
She shuddered at the touch, and I fisted my fingers in the fabric before tearing it open, revealing the bare skin of her back and the words which she’d inked there.
I ran my calloused fingers back up her spine, splaying them wide to caress the edges of her shoulder blades, the command on the tip of my tongue once more, but she gave in before I had to say it again.