15. Aldric
ALDRIC
Ihaven’t gone to my substitute bed in the turret. Instead, I pace the great hall like a man awaiting execution.
Share my bed. I said it aloud, in the stairwell, like a drunkard shouting at a tavern wench. We were civil the entire day, and I torched it with a single sentence because she dared to speak of hope.
Hope. I rub my sternum over the useless crystallized organ still desperately pumping blood through my ruined body.
With a sigh, I climb the grand staircase without a candle. I need none. Darkness and I are old comrades. My portrait watches me pass—that smug fool from 1817 who still believed the servants’ children would keep coming, generation after generation.
I’m halfway down the corridor toward the turret stairs when I hear it.
A whimper.
I stop mid-stride. The sound comes again, muffled by the master bedroom’s door. High. Distressed. My eyes narrow before I remember that I’m the only threat to her in this castle. Still, my feet carry me to her door.
I press my palm flat against the oak and push, gentle as a confessor. There’s no barricade tonight. She either forgot or… she trusts me enough not to blockade herself in anymore.
Schmetterling flounces out between my boots with his tail hoisted like a battle standard. He casts a glare over his shoulder that says, plain as speech, she is exhausting and now she’s your problem.
“Coward,” I whisper after him.
Clara lies before the fireplace on a nest of blankets and pillows, curled toward the low flames. Not in my bed. She dragged half the bedding onto the floor rather than sleep in the bed of Lord Blackthorn, as though the mattress itself might claim her.
She whimpers again.
A nightmare, I think. Perhaps dreaming of that man she mentions like her own curse—Marco. I cross the room to wake her, already composing what a decent man says to a frightened woman at the witching hour, when she moves.
Her hips roll. It’s slow, and it’s unmistakable. A wave passes through her body from shoulder to thigh, and her lips part around a sound that doesn’t sound like fear anymore.
I know that sound and I should leave. A gentleman would leave. I agreed to her terms—no touching, no cornering, no growling, no pressing of undead anatomy against alive anatomy—and I have kept them for one entire day, which for me constitutes a moral triumph worthy of sainthood.
Then she moans a word.
“Aldric.”
My name. In her mouth. In her dream.
My cock goes from half-hard to iron between one heartbeat and the next. Whatever remains of my conscience packs its bags and departs for the orchard.
I was never a gentleman. I was a warlord who dressed himself in a lord’s manners the way one drapes a banner over a battering ram. I will not pretend otherwise, alone, in the dark, with the first woman in hundreds of years to moan my name against my pillow.
I lower myself into my chair by the fireplace without a sound.
Firelight moves over her. The blanket has slipped to her waist, her peaked nipples press against her thin shirt, and her hips keep rolling in that slow, seeking rhythm, chasing a phantom.
Chasing me.
I unfasten my pants and take my cock in hand.
There is no shame in me for this. Shame requires an audience of one’s peers, and my peers are dust. There is only the throb of seven centuries funneled into flesh, and the woman before the fire moaning like the answer to a prayer I dared not utter.
“Aldric—” She turns her face into the pillow, brow furrowed, mouth open. “Please.”
My fist tightens. I stroke myself slowly, matching the rhythm of her hips, because if I let myself go faster, this ends in seconds.
I will not survive that humiliation twice in one lifetime, endless as it may be.
Slow. Root to crown, the ladder of piercings on the underside of my dick massaging my palm.
My thumb drags over the head, and I have to clench my teeth, else I’d moan.
What does dream-Aldric do to you, little intruder? Does he pin your wrists above your head? Does he kneel between your thighs and feast until you weep? Tell me what he does. I will study his methods like scripture.
Her hand moves.
It slides down her belly as she kicks the blanket lower and settles between her legs. Through the thin cloth of her underwear, she pets herself with soft, tight circles.
I nearly erupt.
The sight of it—Clara touching herself to a dream of me, of this ruin, this scarred and hollow-eyed thing—hits me like a war hammer to the gut.
My hips jerk. Heat gathers at the base of my spine, and I clamp my free hand around my balls and squeeze until the tide recedes, breathing through my teeth like a man hauling himself back from a cliff’s edge.
Not yet. Not before her.
The room fills with our breathing. Hers, soft and hitching, tangled with small broken moans.
Mine, harsh and ragged, greedy for anything that carries her scent.
Elderberry. Basil. Warm woman and firelight.
The fire pops. Her fingers circle. My fist works my cock in long strokes slicked by my own arousal, and I watch her like I once watched besieged cities—patient, ravenous, certain.
“There,” she breathes, to no one. To me. “Right—there—”
Her rhythm quickens. So does mine. Her heels dig into the blankets, thighs tensing, hips grinding up against her own hand, and her head begins to toss, silver hair whipping across the pillow.
I lean forward in the chair, elbow braced on my knee, jerking my cock hard and fast now, chasing her, pacing her, my whole body strung tight as a drawn bow.
Come for me, Clara. Come for the monster in your dream. He is right here. He is watching. He is yours, God help you.
Her body seizes.
Her back arches off the blankets, head kicking back, her throat exposed. I stop fighting. The climax shoots up my shaft, and I come over my fist in hard pulses, softly growling through clenched teeth.
She sighs. Her hand goes slack between her thighs, her body melting back into the nest of blankets, and her face… it looks so peaceful now.
I sit there, chest heaving, my spend cooling on my fingers, and I don’t clean myself. I don’t leave. I watch her sleep. The rise and fall of her breathing. Her face burrowing deeper into my pillow. Hours pass.
This is not how you woo a woman, some long-dead advisor mutters in my skull. Sitting in the dark like a gargoyle, soiled and staring.
Perhaps not. But for the first time in living memory, I am wanted. Even if only in her sleep.
Gray light seeps through the window, and somewhere below, the rooster gathers his miserable little breath, ready to announce the dawn.
With a deep sigh, I rise, fasten my pants, and slip out the door before he sounds, leaving behind the only thing I have ever truly wished to conquer.