Chapter 10 #3
Murmurs ripple through the hall. The crowd’s focus shifts, its weight settling across my shoulders.
“It’s all right,” I say slowly. “It wasn’t you out there. Not really. I could tell by the way you looked at me.”
“No, it wasn’t.” His whisper is broken, his expression wrecked. “It was my body, but not me. But I still need your forgiveness. I think I’ll die if you don’t give it.”
A few heartbeats pass in silence. “Then I forgive you,” I say.
“No. Words aren’t enough. I need to earn it.”
A frown tugs my eyebrows together. “Earn it? How?”
The Shadow’s look turns pleading. “With blood.” Then he drops to all fours. And crawls to me.
The crowd’s murmuring intensifies. My stomach wobbles as he draws closer, but I remind myself that this is not the same goblin who charged me in the forest. I know, in a place too instinctual for language, that this version of him would never hurt me.
The Shadow makes his way through bloody puddles, his knees painting purple trails across the floor. When he reaches me, he sits back on his haunches.
We face one another, silent, both of us bloodied and bruised and beaten.
And it strikes me, then, that I’ve had both my mates on the floor tonight.
Both of them kneeling before me. Now this moment blurs with the one in my room, because the Shadow looks so much like Amriel that for a second, my vision wavers, unable to separate the two.
Then the Shadow gropes for his dagger, and the illusion shatters. He tugs the weapon free and offers it to me, hilt-first.
I eye the blade. Pink light collects along its silver edge. “What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Hurt me,” he says in a low, harsh rasp. “Hurt me like I hurt you.”
My throat tightens, the mere suggestion kicking up some instinctual horror. “What? No.”
“Please. It’s the only way to make things right.”
Silence binds my tongue. I look around, searching for guidance, only to find a dozen heads nodding along. As if it makes perfect sense for me to dig a knife into my mate. As if brutality like this is completely normal.
A soundless exclamation rises in my throat and dies there. Ishanna help me, but I’m truly lost in this place. None of this would ever happen in Aethrolia. No man would ever beg a woman to repay his debt using pain as a currency.
And yet I can’t ignore the plea in the Shadow’s eyes. Nor can I stop myself from squaring my shoulders, or from reaching for the knife. The moment I take it, the Shadow turns his attention to his armor, yanking at the buckles, freeing himself of the shaped leather.
His breastplate hits the floor, then his shoulder plates, his vambraces. A linen shirt waits underneath, and he tugs at that, too, pulling at the ties before shucking the fabric. He waits, bare from the waist up, his fingers resting on his knees.
“Hurt me,” he begs, as much with his voice as with his eyes. “Carve your forgiveness into my skin.”
I trail a glance over his naked torso. The same violet patterns that curl down his cheeks crawl over his chest, shifting with every tense of his muscles.
Scars crisscross him already—one across his left pectoral, another down his right biceps.
Maybe from the war, maybe from some other fight like this one.
My eyes return to his, my fingers slippery around the dagger’s hilt. I’ve never cut anyone on purpose. I’ve never hurt anyone at all.
Then again, I’ve never invited a fae brute to stick his hand up my dress, either. Or gorged myself on food while in the middle of a forest.
Calen coughs softly, somewhere to my left. The whole hall holds its breath.
I tell myself to drop the knife. Just cast it onto the floor and walk away.
But my whole life has gone topsy-turvy in the last twenty-four hours. I’ve been stolen from my home. Forced to make an impossible choice. I’ve been laughed at, abandoned, ridiculed.
I’ve almost died. Twice.
What’s more, for the first time in my life, I’ve indulged. Lusted. I’ve sinned.
And maybe a touch of that corruption still festers, because something compels me to raise the blade. The Shadow tracks its approach with naked hunger.
Goddess help me, I shouldn’t do this. And yet, in begging for my mercy, this goblin has granted me control for the first time since I set foot in Velindra. For the first time in as long as I can remember.
In this moment, I’m no longer Sariah the magicless, the outcast.
No, I’m Sariah, mate to the king. To the Shadow, too. He kneels before me, the immensity of his power contained, and I hold in my hand the means to condemn him or absolve him, as I see fit.
“Make it hurt,” he whispers. “Please.”
His plea dances along my skin, driving shivers into my marrow. I don’t relish the thought of inflicting pain, and yet I know, with sudden surety, that the princess who emerged from the Wildwood is not the same as the one who first stepped in.
The tip of the dagger comes to rest against the Shadow’s shoulder. He shivers, so forcefully the metal pricks his skin. Glowing blue blood wells just below his collarbone, and a single drop slides downward, hugging the curve of his chest.
“Hold still,” I say. “Until I finish.”
He swallows noisily. “Of course. I’ll hold still forever, if that’s what you want.”
A hard smile bends my mouth. “No, you won’t. Only until sunrise. Then you’ll lose yourself again.”
Desolation claims his features. “That’s…true. But only because—”
I dig in the knife, silencing him. Shallow gasps echo in the hall, but I ignore them.
It’s hard, cutting him. Harder than I anticipated. Not only does it feel fundamentally wrong to disfigure someone, but the blade meets with resistance. The Shadow’s flesh fights my efforts, parting with reluctance against the sharpened blade.
But I don’t relent. I just dig deeper, one hand laid against his shoulder for leverage. The Shadow stays motionless, allowing me to carve my mark.
But my touch awakens the bond. Of course it does. This time, it comes on slowly, a crescendo of feeling that swells and swells and swells.
My knees wobble as I bear myself up beneath the onslaught.
The Shadow’s emotions pour into me, a torrent of regret and self-recrimination, of the need to atone.
And beneath that lies something bottomless—desire, almost, but so deep and wide that I can’t actually call it that.
It’s as boundless as the space between stars. As eternal as the moon.
The more I let myself feel it, the easier the carving becomes. My knife charts a blazing path, pain flowing from the Shadow to me and back again, an endless circuit thrumming between us. But I don’t fight it. It feels…right.
His lips part, as do mine. His breath is my breath is his again. Our hearts beat a singular rhythm, but unlike with Amriel, fear leaves no footprints across my soul.
This feels too pure. Enough that the knife seems to guide itself, and when I peer down into yellow eyes, I glimpse the furthest corners of the universe.
My work concludes with a twirl of the blade. Blue blood slicks the Shadow’s chest, dribbling down his abdomen and staining his waistband. Sticky warmth coats my fingers.
I shake the excess away, the sigil I carved burning in my vision.
SV. Sariah Vandenore. My initials.
It’s presumptuous, maybe. But this goblin belongs to me now, in some small way. In the same way I’ll carry his brand across my thigh, long after I leave this place.
“Thank you,” he says, his voice husky, though its roughness carries only a fraction of the need cascading into me. My gaze strays to where my hand rests against his shoulder.
The point of contact is a window, granting me access to the storm that rages inside him. I understand, now—finally—what he meant in my room. A goblin is just a need come to life. I’m my fae self’s darkest wish, the one that lives at the very center of his heart.
Because beneath that indigo skin, constellations wheel, each one blazing with a different need. Hunger, possession, devotion, lust. They spin and orbit, governed only by the common point around which they revolve.
The bond. His desire for his mate.
His desire for me. To protect me and possess me.
Our gazes tangle. I don’t know how he can stay so still like that. How he can keep from doing anything but chasing me across this hall and pinning me to the floor. Consuming me until there’s nothing left.
He wants to. He needs it, so badly I can feel it in the roots of my teeth.
A wan smile lifts his mouth, exposing the tips of his fangs. “Do you see now? How difficult it is?”
My voice no longer works, so I simply nod. If this level of desire consumes him at rest, I can only imagine what he must battle in those moments when he’s straining toward me.
With a lick of my lips, I peel my palm from his skin.
The soul-crushing need ebbs from my blood. I shiver at its loss, and yet I don’t know that I ever want to feel that again. It’s too much, too absolute.
And I know now why I can never turn my back on him. Why doing so would invite my ruin.
I cast the knife aside. It clanks against the mossy stone. When I step back, footsteps shuffle, the crowd parting to allow my retreat.
I hobble backward on my burning leg. Dried blood pinches my skin while my tattered skirts tangle around my calves, but I keep going until I hit the steps. I feel my way up with my heels, never turning, hardly even breathing.
The Shadow watches the whole time. I wonder if he’ll spend the night like this, surrounded by his castoff armor.
If he’ll kneel until the sun peeks over the horizon and whisks him away to the Wildwood again, where he’ll spend his daylight hours hunting me, if in a very different way than he wants to here.
I reach the top of the steps. The fae watch from below, their faces upturned.
Calen’s companion catches my eye. I pause just before the lip of the stairs obscures her. She nods once. A clear approval.
I blink and step back, cutting off my view of the hall. But as I turn toward my room, I can’t help feeling as though I’ve just been tested.
And failed miserably, no doubt, in Ishanna’s eyes.
But as far as the fae are concerned, I think I might have passed.