Chapter 12 #2
She shivered, just a little, but enough to draw my attention.
I was pressed to her back as I leaned over her, and I couldn’t deny that the warmth of her stirred my intrigue.
She was enchanting in an imperfect way. Only the humans could manage this kind of beauty.
But she possessed a mortal allure that I had never witnessed in another of her kind. A part of me itched to explore it.
“The Fae are granted magic by the spirits of the sky when they reach maturity,” she said in answer to my question. “You call them Arts. Fire wielding, storm brewing, metal moulding-”
“Of course your kind would focus on the brutish Arts when whispering about the Fae,” I scoffed. “I suppose you tell tales around the fireplace of how your people have suffered at the hands of such power?”
She scowled up at me, not flinching beneath my scorn. “They aren’t tales; they’re warnings. We may have short lives but we have long memories and none of us will forget the horrors your kind have laid at our doors in centuries past.”
My lips twitched in amusement which I didn’t bother to share with her because we both held the same scorn for Fae who practiced cruelty with the Arts the spirits had granted them.
“Well there are plenty of other Arts besides flame and lightning. Like preservation.” I waved a hand at the bountiful table before us in demonstration. “Perhaps you should educate yourself further before passing judgement on all Fae based on campfire tales.”
“Perhaps I will,” she replied, surprising me again. “What Art were you granted then?”
My mocking smile flattened and I simply shrugged. “That would be telling,” I growled, ending the conversation.
She reached for her wine, but I caught her wrist, tugging her arm firmly behind her back before snaring the other one.
“Let go of me,” she gasped, trying to rise, but I didn’t let her.
With one hand, I held both her wrists at the base of her spine, then took a coil of rope from my pocket and began to bind them.
Tight. Enough to make her wince. I waited for a murmur of fear to pass her lips but it didn’t come and I couldn’t deny my disappointment.
I rounded the table, taking my own seat and lounging back in it, my knee bumping hers while my gaze fixed on her face.
Yes, there was a flicker of uncertainty in those unusual eyes, but when her lips parted on a plea or perhaps some desperate questions, she snapped them shut again and pressed them into a tight line.
Interesting.
“You’ll eat and drink without your hands, I’ve decided.” I smirked, lifting a sharp knife from beside the bread and leaning back in my seat again to toy with it.
“How will I do that?” she scoffed, all anger instead of uncertainty.
I shrugged, then stabbed a wedge of cheese hard enough to pierce the table and she flinched at last. I yanked the blade free of the wood and brought the cheese to my lips, taking a bite of it. She wetted her lips. My hungry little beastie.
“What game are you playing?” she hissed.
“You’re the one who started it, lightwing. I’m just making up a few rules of my own.”
“I only asked for dinner,” she said innocently.
I barked a laugh that made her spine straighten, the sound entirely unfriendly. “You asked for more than that when you played dress up and made demands of me. You’re either a halfwit or brave and I can’t work out which one it is yet.”
She glared at me.
“Come on, eat up,” I insisted. “I didn’t prepare all of this for it to go to waste. You don’t want to displease me, I assure you. Those who displease me tend to end up choking on their own blood and this food will taste far better than that.”
“How?” she growled again.
“You know how.” My smile dropped to a callous taunt as I took another bite of cheese.
Silence.
Dawning comprehension.
Anger.
Yes, she understood now.
“You want me to ask for your help,” she sneered.
“No, lightwing.” I leaned across the table, knife speared with cheese a little too close to her throat. And still, she didn’t quake. I could tell her what I was, tell her the darkest secrets I knew and then she’d cower. She’d run too. But there would be no escape. “I want you to beg for it.”
I slumped back in my chair, grabbing a loaf of fresh bread and tearing it in two with my hands.
“Is this how all Fae eat?” she goaded, watching the crumbs fly as I tore into the bread with my teeth.
I swallowed and shed the cheese form my knife onto my plate, dropping the lump of bread onto it too. Then I tapped the infinity mark on my temple with the tip of my blade. “See this?”
She nodded, a frown creasing her brow.
“That’s the mark of an outcast. A Fae like me doesn’t attend balls and dinner parties.
Not anymore. I’m one of the black sheep of Rivenspire.
A Fae who pissed off the Coterie. So when I want to eat, I eat with raw abandon, because when you’re called a savage long enough, you tend to start acting like one. ”
“Are there many outcasts among your kind?” Her eyes narrowed, suspicion rising like the tide, and I realised what might just be stirring in her mind.
“Hundreds,” I lied dismissively. “We’re not all honey and sugar, sweetheart.”
I moved to take a bite of my food when I was halted by a sharp command.
“Feed me.” She stared at me, hard and unblinking. Her tone wasn’t a plea as I’d requested, but I found my hand moving toward her lips in offering all the same.
She took a bite and I watched her mouth move as she chewed and swallowed.
“Another,” she demanded.
“Ask nicely,” I growled, holding the food out of reach.
Quiet.
One second.
Two.
Three.
“Please.”
My pulse hitched, that word a sin on her tongue. It didn’t sound submissive though, it sounded mocking. She was playing me and spirits help me, I offered her the bread and cheese once more. But this game wasn’t won yet.
I offered her the wine next, watching how her throat bobbed as she drank it and liking the show she was putting on for me. She was a more seductive thing than I’d realised. Every movement demanding I study her. And like this, with me in charge of every bite and every sip, I could.
I fed her grapes next, one by one, and slowly too.
Her lips brushed my fingers on the fourth one and a low growl rolled up my throat.
When I offered her another, her eyes met mine and she did it again, just for a moment, perhaps unaware of it, her lips skated against the pad of my thumb and sent a ripple of potent desire through me.
My gaze slid to her soft lips and that ache grew, my body shifting closer to hers without me telling it to do so. Then I offered her another grape.
“I’m done eating,” she said.
“You’re done when I say you’re done.”
Ferris bit me, her teeth digging in hard, and my other hand flew out to fist in her hair.
She released me and I yanked to force her head back and expose her throat.
I could practically see the thrumming pulse in her neck and I lunged forward and sank my teeth into that very spot, giving her a taste of her own medicine.
She gasped, arching against her chair, but into me instead of away.
She tasted like life itself, a heady concoction of wants and endless yearnings.
I leaned back, my hand still in her hair as I stared at her, almost nose to nose. Her breath fluttered against my lips, ragged and fearful at last, but there was still that defiance there. A hatred for everything I was.
“Why do you really hate my kind?” I asked with grit, giving no heed to her personal space.
“Because you take what you want. You take and take because you think you’re above us. You think because we’re mortal that we’re expendable.” The wrath in her voice was tempered with pain and at last I saw the crux of her. This was personal.
“So what is your plan, lightwing? You seek the forest’s boon to destroy my kind for good?”
She laughed coldly. “As if I’d waste the boon on revenge. I have deeper desires than that.”
“Then we are not so different after all,” I muttered.
“I am nothing like you,” she hissed.
I considered that and nodded. “You’re right, I am a hunter and you are prey.
” I shoved the chair she was sitting on and it collapsed to the floor, my hand moving from her hair to grab her waist and force her to her feet so she didn’t fall with it.
The clatter stirred up a tempest in her eyes and I smiled that villain’s smile I was so used to wearing.
I cut the rope from her wrists, tossing it aside.
“Run, lightwing. Run and hide. Because I am in the mood to hunt. And perhaps if I find you, I won’t feel so merciless. Perhaps I will change my mind on keeping you alive.”
I released her but she didn’t run, so I turned and flung the entire table over, sending food and cutlery flying everywhere. I turned back to her and bellowed, “Run!” and she stumbled away from me, nearly tripping over the chair behind her before she raced from the room as fast as she could go.
I stared after her with vitriol coating my heart, my throat soaked in it too.
I wasn’t going to follow her. I just wanted her out of my sight.
Because I hated her. Not for who she was but for what I wasn’t.
For the mirror she held up to me. I wanted her to fear me as all others did, not look at me with those infuriating eyes which never dropped from mine in submission.
And yet… and yet, and yet… how I didn’t want that too.