Chapter 11 #4
“You ran,” he countered.
She gulped.
Audibly.
He felt the bite of his own belt cut into his aching flesh.
So he went on, to torment both of them: “You wanted me to chase you.” Moving his hand closer to the juncture of her thighs. “You were trying to make me jealous, you dirty little tease, and I gave you exactly what you were asking for.”
She breathed out unsteadily. Then her hand shot out and she gulped down the shot of sake, squirming in her seat like a witness on the stand.
He leaned in closer, trailing his free hand down the side of her cheek. “If we were in court, I’d have you for perjury, Nadine. And then I’d have you again for no reason at all. I still might.”
“What if someone saw?” She sounded petulant now. Provocative.
“Why?” He tugged at her necklace and she gripped his wrist, not quite pushing him away. He allowed this half-hearted attempt at restraint, whispering, “Did you want them to?”
She blanched. “Your father said some things. It sounded like he’d seen—or like someone else had and told him.”
His desire swirled away, like blood down a drain. He became aware of the air conditioner, in that moment, and its stark currents playing upon his prickling skin. The raindrops splattering against the window seemed to grow louder. “What did he say to you?”
“He said that there are eyes in the shadows. He said I c-could imagine. Just like you did.”
Fuck. Odessa had been trying to warn him, after all. “He didn’t see us. But you should stay away from him.” Closing his eyes, he made himself say, “You should stay away from me, too.”
“In the car—” She hesitated. “You said you were dangerous.”
“I am.”
“You don’t seem dangerous,” she whispered.
He looked at her mouth. She gripped his hand even tighter, as if she needed to test her ability to temper his might.
He flexed his fingers, severing contact.
“I thought we’d dispensed with lying,” he said quietly, and something dark and predatory coiled inside him when she leaned helplessly closer, her eyes intent on his.
She reached for him again and he caught her hand, fast enough that he could tell she was unsettled. “What am I going to do with you?”
How am I going to have you before I go mad?
He nearly longed for the time when she rebuffed his advances, holding him at a distance with a mulishness that had, at the time, felt nigh insurmountable. A willing Nadine tested his restraint in ways that found his fortitude wanting and made him perilously close to losing control.
“When’s your birthday?”
Cal paused, unsure that he had heard her correctly. “What?”
“Your birthday. When is it?”
“March thirteenth.” He took a drink of sake from the bottle and grimaced. It was not as strong as the spirits he was used to, and nowhere near as bracing. “Why?”
“Just curious.”
“When’s yours?”
“October. Just a few days before Halloween.”
“The scorpion.” How very unlike her.
“Scorpio,” she said. “Yes. You’re into horoscopes.”
“No. Odessa is.” She liked the predestination of it, the way it fringed on the occult. Mostly, he suspected it gave her a way to terrorize others with knowledge they didn’t have.
“You seem close to your sister.”
“As close as one can be in our family, yes. I suppose I am.” It was nothing like what Nadine had seemed to have with Noelle, if that was what she was suggesting.
Despite her terror, she had made the journey to this place, willing to stand up to his father if it meant finding her older sister.
Loyalty like that could not be extorted or bought, and it did not come cheaply out here in the mountains.
“Did you ever hear that story? Of the frog and the scorpion?”
“No.”
“It goes something like this. There was once a scorpion and a frog. The scorpion wanted to cross a river and asked the frog if he could ride across on the frog’s back.
The frog replied that she was afraid the scorpion would sting her.
The scorpion argued that that would be foolish, because if he did, they would both drown. ”
He paused, to make sure she was listening. She was.
“The frog decided this sounded reasonable and ferried them both across the stream, but halfway there, the scorpion lashed out, piercing the frog with its sting.
“As the frog and the scorpion were both dying, the frog asked, ‘Why did you do that to me? Now you’ve killed us both.’ And the scorpion replied, ‘I’m sorry; it’s my nature.’”
“What a terrible story,” she said emphatically. “No, nobody ever read me that at bedtime.”
“Mm, well, I can’t say it was ever my favorite either.”
“What’s the point of it?” she asked. “Or is there one?”
In his distraction, he had nearly cleared his plate.
All that was left was one rubbery piece of uni.
He looked at it dispassionately before consuming it without tasting it.
“I suppose it’s meant to be a cautionary tale.
That some people are simply doomed to go through life hurting others, even if it’s against their own interests to do so. ”
“That sounds like a warning.”
“Perhaps it is.” He set down his chopsticks. “Let’s get back to town.”
The sky was nearly black as they walked out of the restaurant, the clouds bloated with heavy rains.
They were mammatus clouds now, hanging down from the undersides of the bruise-colored cumulonimbus in egg-like sacs.
They would likely get hail. They could get as large as golf balls up here. He could almost smell the lightning.
“Oh!” Nadine said, when they were halfway back to the house. “I left my raincoat under the table.”
“There’s no going back for it now. We have plenty more.”
She folded her hands on top of her purse, and said nothing else. His story had dragged down her mood and he should not have felt sorry for that but he did. God help him, he pitied her, which made everything he’d done and still needed to do that much harder.
If she was trapped here, he would be forced to make a choice. And so would she.
Either way, blood would spill.
Cullraven brides always bled on their wedding night.
His mood mirrored the sky by the time they got back to the carriage house. Cal locked the doors, already thinking of the long, grim night ahead. She grabbed him as he attempted to pass her, the gesture so uncharacteristically aggressive that he was nearly startled into flinching.
“Yes?”
“I—I think . . . your family might be, um, trying to . . . set us up?”
No. Had they told her that?
“I mean, I don’t know for sure,” she was saying shakily, “but your sister said—”
“That’s not what they’re doing.” It came out harsh, dredged in the guilt of a boy who had never gotten over being forced to watch a woman slain at his feet.
“But—”
“Whatever they told you to do,” he said fiercely, “don’t do it.”
“L-like wear a dress for dinner?” She sounded fearful. “That’s what your sister said.”
“No.” Relief trickled through him, its icy fingers indiscriminate from the residual chill of the poorly ventilated room. They hadn’t been preparing her for the festival, after all—not yet. “Not like that.”
“Then what—”
“You should leave,” he said. This, too, surprised him, because that was not what he had intended to have come out of his mouth. The words sat between them like stone blocks, immobile and solid. “I’m sorry to say it, but fuck your sister. Fuck the festival. Fuck everything and just leave.”
She flinched back from him but he was still holding onto her hand, and the recoil of that gesture was like a small slap. “W-what? Leave? But I thought—”
Nadine blinked. When she looked at him again, her eyes were shiny.
“Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“But that’s what you’re doing.” Tears slid down her face. He watched them, fascinated and appalled in equal measure by his own inaction when she began to sob. “You used me. And now—what, it’s not convenient anymore to have your family know?”
“This isn’t about them.”
It sounded like the lie it was.
She looked at him in disgust. “But it is. You act strange when they’re around, Cal. Like you can barely stand to be seen with me.”
He should have let her believe that. But somehow, that felt like a cruelty too far.
He wanted her.
But his wanting would be her undoing. And his.
“Goddamn it.” The word left his lips on an explosive burst. “Fuck. This is why I don’t sleep with sparrows.”
Thunder rattled the windows with a loud boom that made Nadine jump. He saw the terror on her face lit up in bas-relief as lightning cracked through the gloom like a lash.
“What did you just say?”
“Nothing. Forget I said it.”
“No!” she said. “Noelle mentioned sparrows. So did Odessa and Ben. So did you. What the fuck is a sparrow, Cal?”
He took a step closer, no longer caring if it looked predatory. It was, and so was he, and when he gripped her by her other arm to cage her into an embrace she could not break free from, he saw her fear of him eclipse her confusion and desire until it was all he could see of himself in her eyes.
“If you know what’s good for you, Nadine—” his fingers bit into her shirt like talons “—you’ll never ask that again.”
“You’re hurting me.”
It was the tone of someone who had never been hurt before. She sounded stunned. That he would want to. That someone even could.
He released her quickly, putting space between them. He thought his hands might be shaking. They were buzzing, as if some of the lightning from outside had gotten into his fingers and burned there still.
“I do like you, Nadine,” he told her wearily. “And that is not my nature. Remember that, later: I tried to spare you this.”
Without another word to her, without even so much as a single look back, he gathered the candles from the back of the car and marched into the house without her.
Curse Odessa, he thought. Curse the whole wicked lot of them, himself included.
And then, as if some passing devil had heard his thought, the whole house plunged into darkness.