Chapter 6
LEORA
Fourteen days.
I have counted them by the rhythm of the rain against the single pane of glass and by the slow, agonizing erosion of my own will.
Fourteen days of being a human shield. Fourteen days of being a filter for a man who is terrified of his own mind.
I stand by the window, pressing my forehead against the cold glass.
Below, the estate of House Imas is waking up to another gray, weeping morning in Lliandor.
The stone walls of the courtyard glisten like wet bone.
I am exhausted. It is a fatigue that sleep cannot touch, a heaviness that has settled into the marrow of my bones.
Keeping Lord Imas calm is not a passive act. It requires a constant, grueling exertion of the muscle I didn’t know I had. I have to find the silence within myself—that small, gray room in my mind—and hold the door open, forcing my own peace to bleed out into the room like incense.
It leaves me hollowed out. Scraped clean.
Behind me, the scratch of a quill against parchment stops.
"Wine," Imas says.
It is not a request. It is a statement of fact, delivered in that low, modulated voice that slides over my skin like cold silk.
I turn. He is sitting at his massive mahogany desk, surrounded by towers of scrolls and maps. He has not left this room in two days. He sleeps in shifts of three hours, and when he wakes, he demands I be awake too, sitting on the rug or the chair, anchoring him.
He looks… different.
The frantic, jagged energy that vibrated off him in the slave market is gone.
The darkness that usually wreaths him like a second skin has settled.
He looks sharper. The lines of his face, chiseled and arrogant, are no longer tight with suppressed rage.
His platinum hair is pulled back severely, revealing the high arch of his cheekbones and the cruel slant of his brows.
He is undeniably beautiful. It is a terrible, poisonous kind of beauty, like a flower that blooms only in the dark and kills whatever touches it.
I hate that I notice it. I hate that when I look at his hands—long-fingered, ink-stained, powerful—my stomach twists with something that isn't quite fear.
It is confusion. Because when the dam breaks and I feel him, I don't feel a monster. I feel a man standing on the edge of a cliff, desperate for someone to pull him back. And I am the rope.
"Leora," he prompts, his violet eyes lifting to meet mine.
I jolt into motion. "Yes, My Lord."
I move to the side table. My hands tremble slightly as I reach for the crystal decanter. It is filled with Paquir, a bright red vintage from the southern vineyards. The scent of it fills the air as I unstopper the bottle—floral and fruity, a jarring note of summer in this tomb of winter.
I pour the wine into a goblet. The liquid sloshes, threatening to spill. My grip is weak.
I carry it to him.
He watches me approach. He always watches. He dissects my movements, my breathing, the way I hold myself. I am not a person to him; I am a mechanism he is trying to reverse-engineer.
I stop beside the desk and place the goblet near his hand.
"You are pale," he observes. He does not sound concerned. He sounds like a craftsman noting a flaw in his material.
"I am tired," I say, the words slipping out before I can check them.
He leans back in his chair, steepling his fingers beneath his chin. The gesture draws my eyes. I watch his knuckles, the smooth, charcoal skin. He is not wearing the gloves today.
"Fatigue is a price of utility," he says softly. "You serve a purpose, Leora. A tool does not complain when it is used."
"A tool breaks if you use it too hard," I counter.
His eyes narrow, a flash of violet fire. For a second, the air thins, the pressure dropping as his temper flares.
Instinctively, I push back. I don't even have to think about it anymore. I find the well of empathy inside me—the part of me that remembers what it’s like to be frustrated, to be misunderstood—and I project a wave of patience toward him.
It costs me. A sharp ache pulses behind my eyes.
Imas inhales sharply. His shoulders drop. The tension bleeds out of his frame, replaced by that unnerving, unnatural stillness. He really looks at me, and his expression shifts. It isn't gratitude. It is hunger. Not for food, and not for the pain he used to crave from The Serpent.
He is hungry for me. For the silence I bring.
"You are learning," he murmurs. He reaches for the wine, but he doesn't look at the goblet. He looks at my mouth. "The servants are whispering, you know."
I stiffen. "Whispering?"
"They say the Lord of Pain has gone soft. They say the screams have stopped coming from the west wing." He picks up the goblet, swirling the red liquid. "They wonder what sort of witch I have locked in my tower."
"I am not a witch," I whisper. The lie tastes like ash on my tongue.
"No," he agrees, taking a sip of the Paquir. "You are something else."
He sets the goblet down, but his hand lingers near the base. He beckons me closer with a single crook of his finger.
"Pour more. My mind is… thirsty."
It is a command, but there is a vibration in it that makes my skin prickle. He is testing me. He is always testing.
I reach for the decanter again. I have to lean over the desk to refill his glass.
The proximity is suffocating. I can smell him—the sharp, clean scent of ink, the fruity tang of the wine, and beneath it all, the smell of rain and nature that clings to his skin.
It is a scent that shouldn't be appealing.
It should smell like death. But my treacherous body reacts, a flush of heat rising up my neck.
He is too close.
My hand shakes. The heavy crystal lip of the decanter clinks against the rim of his goblet. A single drop of red wine splashes over the edge.
I gasp, reaching out instinctively to catch the droplet with my thumb before it can stain his scrolls.
My hand brushes his forearm.
The contact is instantaneous and violent.
It isn't like touching skin. It feels like touching a live wire buried in snow. A jolt of freezing cold shoots up my arm, seizing the muscles in my shoulder. My breath locks in my throat.
But it isn't just cold. It is need.
A torrent of his emotions crashes into me, bypassing my walls entirely.
I feel his possessiveness, dark and heavy as oil.
I feel his fascination, sharp as a scalpel.
And buried under layers of arrogance and calculation, I feel a pull—a magnetic, undeniable attraction that terrifies him as much as it compels him.
He wants to break me, but he also wants to keep me whole. He wants to devour me, but he is terrified he will starve without me.
The sensory overload is blinding.
My vision tunnels. The room dissolves into gray static. The only thing real is the burning cold of his skin against mine.
I gasp, trying to pull away, but my body won't obey. The connection flows both ways. I know he can feel me—my exhaustion, my fear, and the treacherous, sparking heat that answers his own.
My eyes burn. The pressure behind them spikes, agonizing and sharp.
I know what is happening. Rina warned me about the signs of magic flaring in humans, the myths of the Purna. The eyes.
Don't look, I scream internally. Don't look at me.
But Imas is looking.
He freezes. His arm goes rigid under my hand. He stares up at me, his face inches from mine.
I can see my reflection in his violet irises.
My pupils are blowing wide. The sapphire blue, the only thing about me that is mine, is being swallowed by an encroaching tide of absolute black. It spreads like ink in water, devouring the iris, turning my eyes into twin voids of endless, starry night.
It is the mark of the Purna. The mark of the witch.
"Leora," he breathes.
I yank my hand back, the decanter nearly slipping from my grasp. I stumble away, hitting the edge of the bookshelf.
Imas rises. He moves with a predator's grace, rounding the desk before I can even draw a breath.
He grabs my wrist.
His grip is iron. He doesn't squeeze to hurt, but he anchors me, pulling me out of my retreat and forcing me back into his orbit. He pins me against the shelves, his body shielding me from the rest of the room, blocking out the light.
He stares down at me. He is searching my face, his gaze darting from one black eye to the other.
"I knew you were not ordinary," he whispers, his voice rough, stripped of its usual polish. "I knew you were a dampener. A catalyst."
He lifts his free hand. His fingers brush my cheekbone, a touch that burns.
"But this..." He traces the skin under my eye. "This is not human magic, Leora. Humans do not have magic. Humans are mud and water."
My heart is a frantic drum against my ribs. I cannot look away. The blackness in my vision is fading, the sapphire returning as the connection breaks, but it is too late. He has seen.
"Please," I whisper. It is the first time I have begged him.
"Please what?" He leans in, his lips brushing my ear. I shiver, a violent tremor that has absolutely nothing to do with the cold of the room. "Please let you go? Please pretend I do not see the abyss staring back at me?"
He pulls back, looking me in the eye again. His expression is unreadable, a mask of Khuzuth calculation, but his eyes are burning with a fanatic’s light.
"You are Purna," he says.
The word hangs between us, heavy and lethal. It is a death sentence. The Purna were hunted to extinction on the surface. They are myths. Monsters. Enemies of the Dark Elves.
If he knows what I am, he knows he must kill me.
He slides his hand from my cheek down to my throat. His thumb rests against my pulse, feeling the frantic, terrified rhythm of my blood.
"I should carve your heart out right now," he murmurs, his voice devoid of emotion. "I should offer it to The Serpent and beg forgiveness for harboring a parasite."
I stop breathing. I watch his hand. It is steady. He could do it. He could snap my neck before I could even blink.
But he doesn't squeeze.
Instead, his thumb strokes the hollow of my throat. It is a caress. A terrifying, possessive caress.
"But I won't," he whispers.
He leans his forehead against mine. The contact is electric. I can feel the conflict raging inside him—the duty to his god warring with the addiction to the silence I provide.
"You are not human," he says, and the words sound like a revelation. "And you are mine."
He pulls back, releasing me so abruptly I almost fall. He turns his back on me, walking to the window to stare out at the rain-slicked courtyard.
"Go to the bed," he commands, his voice strained. "Do not speak. Do not move. If you try to run, Leora... I will not have to kill you. The city will do it for me."
I sink to the floor, my legs finally giving out. I touch my throat where his hand was. The skin still burns.
I am not dead. But as I study his rigid back, at the way his hands are clenched into fists at his sides, I realize I might have traded a quick death for something far slower, and far more dangerous.
He knows what I represent. And he has decided to keep me.