Chapter Five
It took more time than I’d expected to move Fabian and adjust the placement of the blood and wine. I’d assumed, foolishly, that Benedict would simply follow my instructions and assist.
But I should’ve known better. He examined the room first, much as I had done, while I stood shifting from chilled foot to chilled foot, finally giving up and going into my dressing room—which Benedict then rushed over and insisted on inspecting before I could go in, despite my protests that I’d already done that—to shed my damp dressing gown and pull on a pair of trousers and a wool tunic.
By the time I found my slippers, he’d knelt down by Fabian’s body, sniffing the wine goblet and frowning, leaning far closer to Fabian’s face than I’d have wanted to. He put a finger in the wine and went still, magic crackling around him.
“It is poisoned,” he said after a long moment.
“Yes, of course it is,” I snapped. “And Fabian looks just like—he did.”
Benedict glanced up sharply. “Like your father,” he said, in a tone I couldn’t begin to parse. “Is that what you mean? No. It’s not the same. I mean, I don’t think it is. Stop distracting me.”
Of course it was most likely to be the same—which confirmed, to my grim satisfaction, that Fabian had died due to his belief that I’d murdered my own father—and I’d argue with him about it later, but he’d gone back to his magic, laying a hand on Fabian’s chest and concentrating.
Finally, finally he finished, and we got on with it, Benedict making himself scarce while I called out for the guards, saying that he wouldn’t go far.
As if that would reassure me, given his threats about his perquisites.
The court physician arrived to do his own examination, and the undertakers came to carry the body away. It dragged on and on, the wind whisking away the clouds and then the moon setting through their ragged remnants, leaving the dregs of the night as black as pitch.
I stood staring out at the darkness through the window beside my bed, affecting a ducal unconcern as the doctor followed the sheet-draped remains of my valet out of the room. Yawning would go far past stoicism and into callousness, though. My jaw ached with the effort, but I managed to refrain.
Despite my exhaustion, my body thrummed with tension, with sickening dread. Benedict would be back at any moment. Presumably he’d sent Clothurn a message, hopefully not mentioning that he meant to use me as his erstwhile lover’s replacement.
You’ll take my cock and my spend and my magic’s curse as often as I tell you to. A shiver ran down my spine, and that finally triggered the yawn I couldn’t suppress anymore, my teeth chattering. A chill had settled into my bones that had nothing to do with the thickness of my clothing. I wrapped my arms around my torso, giving in to weakness for a moment while I had no one to witness it.
“Doctor Serrano may have had his suspicions, but I think he’ll keep them to himself,” Benedict said from behind me, and I startled badly and banged into the window frame, spinning around with a curse on my lips.
“You could have knocked,” I snarled.
“The door was open,” Benedict said with a shrug, and prowled into the room, moving the way he did in the palace training yard when he circled his opponent, sword in hand, confident and focused.
I resisted the urge to edge away from him, even though my heart thudded against my ribs. All my nerves lit up, right down to my tingling fingertips. He’d catch me before I made it to the door. Besides, where would I go if I bolted?
The doctor had wanted light to examine the body, and three-branched candelabra blazed on the mantel and on the table by my bed. The fire Fabian had lit before he went for my wine added a flickering red to the mix, and Benedict’s eyes glinted unsettlingly as he moved closer.
Too close. Almost near enough to touch, as I stood there rooted to the floor, mute and with my head growing dangerously light.
Benedict had always looked at me like this: as if he could see something no one else could, the real man beneath the high rank and the fine silks and the arrogant dignity I clad myself in like armor every morning before I faced the world.
And he’d made it clear he thought that man amusing at best and contemptible the rest of the time. Not to mention in possession of a too-flat ass.
The very first time we’d met had been when he returned from a northern campaign, where he’d at the time been serving as a middle-rank officer, on the occasion of my father’s betrothal to Benedict’s mother. He’d stared at me for a long moment, smirked, and bowed not quite deeply enough, his pale eyes glittering like polished quartz in his bronzed face and his gaze never wavering from mine.
I know your secrets , his eyes had seemed to say. And I’m not impressed .
At twenty, I’d found battle-hardened twenty-six-year-old Benedict intimidating in every possible way, and I’d resented that feeling, and him, with every fiber of my being. Eight long years of his mother trying to maneuver him onto my throne later, neither the resentment nor the fear that underlaid it had lessened in the slightest.
Benedict took a final step, bringing himself close enough to me that I could feel the heat of him and my eyes were level with his stubbled chin. My height had always been comfortably average, and I lived in the hopeful conviction that my willowy build made me look taller—but Benedict had always been able to make me feel small and vulnerable. That alone might have been enough to earn my wariness and dislike even if he hadn’t worked hard to ensure it.
When I forced myself to raise my eyes, I found his fixed on my face intently enough to make my breath catch.
If he hadn’t been close enough to prevent me from leaning forward, I might have doubled over from the sudden stabbing tightness in my abdomen.
I couldn’t do this. I simply couldn’t, no matter what I’d tacitly agreed to earlier in the evening. Benedict frightened me as a general and a councilor and a stepbrother, but as a man…he terrified me.
“It’s not too late to keep your assignation.” My voice quavered betrayingly, and I shoved my hands behind my back and balled them into fists to square my shoulders. “You don’t want me. You said so. There’s no pleasure here for either of us. Surely you’re honorable enough to do your duty without—this.”
Benedict shifted his weight, and an instant later his huge hands had slipped behind me and caught my wrists in their iron grip, pinning them at the small of my back. His expression didn’t change at all as he pulled down, tugging my shoulders far past square, forcing me to arch into him. Shifting my feet only put me off balance enough to stumble back and hit the wall.
I let out a gasp, and Benedict crowded into me, with the even harder wall of his body pressing against me in the front.
And getting harder still. He rolled his hips, and the impossibly thick bulge of his cock dug into my stomach.
“No. We’ve been over that,” he said, and squeezed my wrists, thumbs digging in, eyes flashing as I bit my lip and squirmed in his hold. The motion rubbed me against his erection and sent a new flash of heat through me.
Damn it.
“I didn’t mean to—I’m not trying to—”
“Climb on my cock like a needy little bitch?” Benedict put in smoothly, voice so low it vibrated in my chest. “Not to worry. I’ll let you.”
“ Let me? You—let me go!”
To my utter shock, he did. The painful tug on my shoulders released as he stepped back and away, leaving my wrists stinging and me swaying against the wall.
Benedict crossed his arms, fingers flexing as if my skin had left the same burning mark on him that he had on me.
“I’m not going to force myself on you,” he gritted out, jaw tight. “But you know damn well I’m the only man in Calatria who can protect you. That’s why you came to my door. And I get something in return. That’s how this works.”
“Because you say so?” I demanded, fists clenched. “Because you’re going to chain me to my bed and rule through me the way you threatened you would before you went away?”
The words hung in the air between us, far more than I’d intended to say. Because if I’d remembered every word he’d spoken to me that morning, that might give him the impression that he mattered to me.
And he didn’t. Not as a man. Not as anything but a potential rival for my throne.
Slowly, ever so slowly, some of the tension that had been rolling off of Benedict in nearly visible waves started to dissipate.
“Lucian,” he said, with a shake of his head and something that almost could’ve been a laugh, “if I’d meant my threat, I could’ve done it then. I would have. Believe it or don’t, but the last thing I want is to rule Calatria. As its duke, or as the duke’s puppet-master husband. Why the fuck do you think I left? It sure as hell wasn’t because I was afraid you’d carry out your own threat to put my head on a spike. Which you seem to have conveniently forgotten, since you’re so determined to be high and morally mighty.”
High and morally mighty? I had the right to put his head on a spike if I wanted!
Not that I did, really, although it stung that he hadn’t been the slightest bit intimidated.
But the last thing he wanted… Why the fuck do you think I left? Gods, he had to be lying. He had to be. Everything he’d said to me, all of the power he’d gathered into his own hands, the taunts and the arrogant way he flaunted his control over my own army. All of it. It pointed in one direction only.
And yet, if it were true. If it were, and I didn’t understand Benedict at all…
Another bitter little smile flashed across his lips. “I didn’t think you would believe me,” he said. Because my silence had spoken for me, whether I meant it that way or not. “That’s why I’ve never bothered saying it. But I’m not your puppet, either. I’ll help you. I’ll keep you alive to the very best of my ability. But we do it my way. Or I’m walking away.”
Moment of truth—for me, anyway. He’d dared me to call his bluff earlier.
And I couldn’t. It was far too likely that he would walk away, and then I’d have no one at all, not even a stepbrother who might be playing his own long game against me.
Leaning on his strength might destroy me, but at least I’d be alive. For now.
“Yes,” I said, and the word tasted like ashes. But he still stood there waiting, because he expected more than that. “I’ll cooperate.”
Surely that was my imagination, that flash of relief that passed over his face and then vanished again, leaving him hard and set.
He nodded. “Good. But you’re wrong, you know,” he added, voice dropping back to that low, dangerous register. “There will be pleasure here for both of us. I’m going to make very damn certain of that.”
My vision blurred, hopefully only from exhaustion and anger and not anything more embarrassing.
“Don’t lie to me,” I said, my voice betrayingly thick. Benedict wavered in front of me as if I looked at him through a window running with rain. “You dislike me as much as I dislike you. You want to humiliate me. That’s the only pleasure either of us will get.”
He didn’t quite flinch, and then he shrugged. Maybe that was all. I blinked to clear my eyes, and he came back into focus as implacable as ever.
“Think whatever you want. But take your clothes off while you think about how much you hate me.” He grinned, with no humor at all in it. “Maybe that’ll make it more fun.”
“Your sense of fun is sadistic and bizarre,” I muttered, but I turned away from him and went toward my bed on shaky legs—and then stopped, cold all over, Fabian’s corpse flashing before me on the carpet that Benedict had made pristine again with his magic.
I closed my eyes. Opened them. Fabian was gone.
But it didn’t matter. His ghost would be back the next time I looked, I knew it.
“I don’t think I can do this here,” I choked out, with panic rushing up to scratch at my throat and send a fresh shiver down all my limbs, so far past the ability to keep up a stoic front that I might as well have broken down sobbing after all. “I’m not even sure I can sleep here.”
Actually, I knew damn well I couldn’t. And the thought of getting fucked two feet from where my valet had gurgled his last painful breath had me ready to leap out the window.
“No, I really can’t,” I gasped, as Benedict’s hands landed on my shoulders. I tried to wrench away, but he pulled me against his chest, and he’d said he wouldn’t force me, but—
“Stop fighting me,” he said harshly, and wrapped an arm around me to trap both of mine. “I’m not. We’re going to my room. We’re going, Lucian. Come on.”
I staggered with him as he led me away, not letting me go, supporting me when I stumbled. A nightmare. This whole night, gods, and if they had any mercy at all I’d wake up panting and drenched in sweat any second now, with the murky half-overcast sun shining through my curtains and Fabian opening the door to bring me coffee and pastry and his usual side dish of passive-aggressive commentary.
The hallway was a blur, Benedict’s sitting room a slightly more cluttered blur, and then we were through another doorway. Benedict’s bedroom, a place I’d never imagined going except in the occasional fantasy where he’d been mortally wounded and I had to visit his deathbed to mouth insincere platitudes.
Benedict bundled me into his bed, pausing only to tug off my slippers. His blankets landed on top of me, warm and heavy, as my head sank into a pillow that carried the scent of him, the bright metallic spark of his powerful magic and the rich spice of his body.
“I can wait until morning, but not much longer than that,” he said. “Try to sleep off the shock, Lucian. You have a few hours before I’ll need to wake you.”
Wake me? He didn’t mean to…he hadn’t joined me in the bed. He leaned down over me, face grim, and laid his hand on the side of my neck, right over my uneven pulse.
“Sleep,” he repeated, and where he touched me, tendrils of warm darkness seeped in, as if he’d somehow pushed his fingers into my flesh, reached inside me… “Go to sleep.”
The darkness rushed up into my mind and my eyes and took me.