Chapter Twelve #2
“The way you behaved toward me while being entirely yourself is much more responsible for any unflattering opinions I have than any of your playacting! I couldn’t possibly have underestimated your character any more than I did!
” He couldn’t quite meet my eyes, and his jaw had set tight.
“I’d have been honest with you if I’d thought I could trust you not to tell him I hadn’t done what he wanted from me,” I went on, when he didn’t speak.
“He told me that if I didn’t please you, or contradicted what he’d told you about me, my sister would pay the price.
I have been as honest with you as I could, anyway. ”
“Yes, and look who raised me and how I’ve spent my life,” he retorted.
“Nothing could possibly seem less likely to me than the possibility of honesty. Remi, you have my—gods, truly. My. Fuck. Most sincere, ah—” He stopped, clearly unable to quite spit it out, his face turning a fascinating shade of pink as he tried.
“If you can’t even say the word apologies, Stefan, then you can’t possibly expect me to accept them.” To my disgust, the little flutter in my chest at—what? Honestly, at what, exactly?—made my tone a bit less severe than it should’ve been.
“I don’t imagine that you would,” he said flatly, simply stating a fact.
I blinked at him, taken aback by that hint of bleak unhappiness.
More than a hint came through as he went on with, “Especially after tonight. There aren’t many lines I won’t cross when necessary. Forcing myself on you has to be—”
“Oh, stop feeling so sorry for yourself,” I snapped, pushed beyond a line I hadn’t known I had, myself. “Lord Benedict was right when he called it self-flagellation.”
He shoved off the door. “I beg your—feeling sorry for myself? You’re the one who’s in need of pity—”
“No, I’m bloody well not! Don’t insult me by thinking it.
I’m uncomfortable. And I want a bath!” How much I wanted a bath hadn’t quite dawned on me, but as I said it, the sensation of open squishiness between my legs came to the forefront of my mind and made me want to cry from sheer embarrassment.
I’d never even imagined a sensation of open squishiness between my legs.
“But I’m not really hurt, like I told you already, and I’m not dead, which I would be if you hadn’t done—that.
Anyway, that’s one of the few things I’m not angry about.
And you’re not worried about that, anyway, you’re worried about how you feel about it, and dwelling on whether you’re in the wrong or not, which is obnoxious in the extreme! ”
I subsided, breathing hard, and he stood there frozen, not seeming to breathe at all.
“I’m glad you’re not afraid of me anymore,” he said at last, with a short laugh.
“Fuck me. Very well, I’ll stay home tonight, if it distresses you to be left alone, and make inquiries tomorrow.
My informants won’t go anywhere. You can take your bath and go to bed in the serene consciousness that I’m downstairs getting into the brandy. You have my word. All right?”
“All right.” My horrid flutter had come back, a response to that rough tone that I now knew covered a sincerity he didn’t like to show.
How far did his guilt and his remorse extend, though?
My heart pounding, I tested the limits. “When you send in Aldrich, I also want a pot of tea. And something light to eat. And tomorrow, I need the carriage. I’m going out to—do whatever it is that lords’ consorts do during the day, I suppose. Aldrich will know.”
“You’ll have a proper escort,” he said, with a twitch of the lips that suggested he knew precisely what I was doing.
“And no, I don’t mean to preserve propriety, I mean the kind that knows how to kill anyone who looks sideways at you.
But I support the impulse to go out and spread confusion to the enemy.
I’ll speak to you about it in the morning.
That and a great many other things we need to discuss. Good night, Remi.”
The threatening tears had risen in my chest and up, like a suffocating tide through my throat and nose, and as he turned the doorknob and began to open the door, my magic protested violently, stretching toward him, feeling like something that had been attached under my ribs would snap—
Stefan opened the door and stepped through, and that invisible something yanked, and I burst into a storm of weeping, curling over into my lap, everything all muffled and exhausting and dim and shaking.
Running footsteps approached the bed.
“My lord!” Aldrich’s voice, more angry than I’d ever heard him. “What have you done to him?”
“Nothing! I didn’t—nothing this moment, he simply—Remi?”
Gentle hands landed on my shoulders, and even if I hadn’t recognized them as Aldrich’s, my magic would’ve; it wanted Stefan, and Aldrich’s touch, obviously meant to comfort, didn’t work, damn it to hell.
“My lord, you’re all right,” Aldrich said, and then, “My lord, please go!”
The change in his tone as he addressed one lord and then the other made me laugh through my tears, which transformed into a grotesque-sounding hiccup.
“Listen to him! He’s distraught! My lord, I must beg you to remove yourself, and allow me to—”
“You can’t possibly think I’d, I’d, fuck,” and he sounded more flustered than I’d thought it possible for Stefan to be. “You can’t possibly—”
“My lord, get out.”
“Fuck me,” Stefan muttered. “Send me word once—”
“Out!”
The door shut. I tried to choke down the hysteria, but I’d lost the plot, and my magic’s dismay at Stefan’s departure bloomed into despair as his footsteps faded away.
It took some unknown, indefinite, miserable span of time to run out of energy for more, and to be able to focus on being calmed by Aldrich’s soothing voice and the way he patted my back. My magic settled enough that I could breathe again.
Someone tapped on the door. “Lord Remigius’s tea and supper are here in the corridor,” said a servant outside.
“I’ll bring that in and run your bath,” Aldrich said, patted me one more time, and went.
The odd, heavy knot under my ribs and the faint stirring of my magical senses, reaching out toward the corridor and the stairs and Stefan’s study, suggested that part of me wished he’d be the one to pet me and cosset me and run my bath.
No one had told me that my potion suppressed insanity along with my powers and my curse.
The moment this poison wore off, I’d drink my potion and be grateful for it. Stefan might be my husband, and perhaps he’d taken my virginity, and he’d kissed me until I moaned and climbed him like a tree, and he might also have promised to protect me.
But he meant nothing to me at all. Absolutely nothing, no matter what my magic seemed to think.
Damn it. Dromos and Ennolu could both go jump in a river.