Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
B eaufort
This time I’m waiting by the door at eight o’clock.
If the little brat isn’t knocking at our door exactly on time, I’ll be keeping my promise and marching right over to find and drag her here.
I can tolerate a certain amount of disobedience. I can even find it a turn on. But this has gone too far.
Luckily – or maybe unluckily – was the idea of dragging her here turning me on? As the clock in the lounge chimes eight, there’s a light rap at the door. Even though I’m standing right there, I don’t answer the door straight away. She kept me waiting. Now I will keep her waiting too.
I count to one hundred in my head, then step to the door, pull it open and immediately my hackles are rising, the shadows inside me hissing.
“Who the hell did that?” I boom, staring straight into her messed-up face. Her nose is swollen and dark bruises circle under each of her eyes. It looks fucking painful.
“Who said anyone did it?” she says, frowning. “I fell over.”
“Onto your nose?” I spit in disbelief.
She shrugs.
“Were you pushed?”
“No, I tripped.”
I take her wrist and yank her into the hallway. Immediately her head tips back and her bruised eyes widen.
“This is your room?” She gasps.
“This is the hallway,” I tell her, wondering whether knocking her head has messed up her mind.
Her brows wrinkle. “There’s more?”
“Of course there is more,” I say, pulling her into the kitchen.
“This … this belongs to you?” She swears under her breath.
I glance around at the room again. There’s nothing particularly special about it. In fact, I’ve hardly been in here since we arrived. “Yes.” And then I understand. “This entire tower belongs to us. All of it. Every single room in it.”
“Us?”
“Me and my brothers. The three of us.”
“I–”
“Sit down,” I say, pushing her into one of the velvet-covered chairs that ring the walnut table in the room. “Why didn’t you come and find me to fix your face for you?”
“It’s already fixed,” she says, eyes still taking in the room.
“Doesn’t look fixed to me,” I growl, hooking my forefinger under her chin and lifting her face to mine. Her skin is soft against my fingers – soft and fragile and from this angle I can see the pulse leaping in her throat. I can imagine our collar wrapped around that throat.
Her eyes – a deep green – meet mine for a fraction of time, then dart away.
“Are you going to tell me what really happened?”
“No,” she says.
“Was it that loser again?” I growl lowly and I swear the sound makes her shiver.
Fuck, I like that. Could I make her shiver in other ways too?
Her eyes narrow. “Did you–”
“Yes, and this ends now. I will hurt anyone who hurts you. In fact, I will fucking kill them. If anyone tries to hurt you, you make that abundantly clear to them.”
As usual, she says nothing.
“So tell me, who did this to your face?” I say.
She clams shut her mouth. The girl is fucking stubborn.
“You realize I will find out?”
She glares at me.
“Fine,” I say, unable to help but glide my thumb along her jawline. Then I’m closing my eyes and urging the shadows from my veins, along my hands and my fingers to her face. I shiver myself when my magic connects with her skin, a tingling manifesting along my flesh.
I swim the shadows up to the injured tissue, calming and soothing it, returning it to normal. It must feel good because the tension in her jaw lessens and a soft sigh issues from her lips, her breath whispering across my face.
When I’m done, I open my eyes and examine her face. The bruising and swelling have gone and the color has returned to her cheeks. I keep holding her face in my grip and she stares up into my eyes, her pupils blowing wide.
It would be so easy to kiss her now, to drag her onto my lap. To take everything from her. But for some crazy reason, I want her to want this. I want her to want me.
“Better,” I whisper. It’s only now that my gaze meanders its way from her face and down to the rest of her body. She’s wearing a thick winter’s coat that I don’t recognize from before.
With some reluctance, I let go of her face.
“Take off your coat.” Alarm radiates across her features. I huff. “I’m not asking you to undress, sweetheart. But it’s warm in here.”
She swallows and I watch as she undoes the large buttons and shrugs the heavy garment from her shoulders. It’s erotic, like she really is stripping.
What the hell is wrong with me?
I’m acting and thinking like some inexperienced virgin.
I’ve had girls strip for me. Really strip for me. This isn’t the same. And yet I’m fucking turned on. Even more so when I discover what’s under the coat.
No, not lacy underwear. No stockings or corsets.
Not even the fucking awful academy uniform or the clothes that were no better than rags that she showed up in five days ago.
No, just a plain blue dress. Nothing special, not like the slinky things the girls wore to the common room party.
But it still has my blood heating. It’s the way it hugs her frame, revealing curves I had no idea the girl possessed – fuck, tits I had no idea she possessed. I realize she’s not as skinny as I thought. She’s lean. Muscle and bone. An active girl.
The dress is also short: a strip of bare thigh flashing my way.
“You understand what’s required of a thrall, right?” I say, my voice heavy in my own ears, like it’s laden with lust.
Why the hell do I find this girl so fucking attractive? Is that part of it? The reason?
I wonder if that flash of a vision was even real – if I created it in my own head simply to give myself an excuse to lay my hands on her.
“No,” she says obnoxiously, making it clear any cooperation is going to be given reluctantly. Fine by me, I can play that way too.
“It’s pretty simple really. We give the orders and you follow them.”
“I don’t want to be a thrall.”
I sigh dramatically, pull out a chair and sit myself down, leaning forward with my forearms resting on my knees so I’m eye-level with her. “It doesn’t matter. You’re ours now. And you’re going to do as we say.”
“I’m not,” she says simply.
I decide to humor her. “Why not? Why are you so dead set against this?”
I mean, we’re the most powerful shadow weavers in the academy. Not only can we offer her protection (which let’s face it given the number of injuries the girl has already picked up, she needs), by being our thrall she also gains access to privileges other ordinary kids in the academy could only dream of.
She tilts her head to one side.
“Would you want to be someone’s slave?” I sniff at the insinuation. She grins at me like she just won a point in a game. I frown back at her.
“A slave and a thrall are not the same thing.”
“Really? Because you just said I’d have to do anything you asked.”
“Slaves don’t have their faces healed by their masters. Slaves don’t get to dine with their masters or hang out with their masters. They’re not given gifts. They’re not …” I shift my chair forward and graze my knuckles against her bare knee, “pleasured.”
My magic crackles with excitement. The shadows inside me wants me to touch her more. A fuck-load more.
I slide my tongue along my bottom lip. It wants me to taste her too.
I bet she’d taste all stubborn. All stubborn and innocent. I bet she’s never even been with someone before.
She presses her legs together, denying me access further up her thighs. But is it my imagination or does she rub those thighs together?
Is she fighting this? Under all this stubbornness, does she feel it too?
“A gilded cage is still a cage,” she whispers.
“The whole world’s a cage,” I tell her. “Better to be inside a golden one than one made of shit.”
Her brow crinkles.
“You’re not caged,” she hisses, swinging her gaze around the kitchen as if this place demonstrates that. “You have everything you want.”
“Yes,” I say, “and that includes you.”
She shakes her head slowly. “Why me?” she whispers. “You could have anyone you wanted.”
“We want you.”
“Is it because …” Something flashes in her eyes. Something genuine. Something real.
“Is it because …?” I prompt, wanting to capture whatever that was.
She bites her lip as if to stop herself from saying the words.
I take hold of her chin again. “Tell me,” I say, the shadows dancing around us, enticingly. It makes it impossible for her to drag her eyes from me.
She closes them instead.
“Tell me,” I whisper again, more gently this time.
“All my life people have wanted to break me. Is that what this is? Is that what you want?”
I can feel her trembling.
Have I got this all wrong? The defiant attitude. The bratty persona. Is it all an act?
She opens her eyelids and stares at me, her gaze now steely. “Because if it is, then you can go to hell. I will not break.”
I let go of her chin and chuckle.
Yeah, it’s no fucking act.
And I’m bored with this now. I’m done with arguing.
Right on time, there’s another knock on the door. This one is more firm. I keep my eyes trained on her face as hers slides in that direction. We hear footsteps, the door open and voices.
Then Dray calls out for me from the hallway.
“Beaufort?” He comes to stand in the doorway, leaning on the doorframe chewing gum, Thorne right behind him. They both peer at the girl. A wolfish grin spreads across Dray’s face, while Thorne just glares at her with a disdain.
It’s clear while Dray is coming round to the idea of the girl, Thorne is not. He turns his head away and walks right out of the kitchen without saying a word.
She scowls at his retreating back and Dray winks at her, then turns to me. “Are you coming?”
I push back my chair and stand up.
“We have guests,” I tell her. “I’m going to go and be with them now. And you can stay here.”
“You’re leaving me here?” she says with a little outrage. “You forced me to come over here and now you’re leaving?”
“Funny,” Dray says, “I thought she’d be pleased.”
“I … I am,” she mutters. “And I’m going back to my room.”
She starts to stand up and I push her back down into her seat. “No, you’re staying here until we return.”
“In the kitchen? While you hang out with your friends? Erm, no!”
“Now,” I say, “if you were a thrall, we’d invite you to join us, but as you’re not …”
“I’m not staying here.”
“You are,” I wave my hand through the air, weaving shadows around the room that will keep her here and then I walk to the doorway.
“You’re such an asshole,” she snarls
“Ahh, you have no fucking idea, little one,” Dray says, blowing a bubble with his gum that bursts with a bang. “Make yourself at home.”