Chapter Twelve #3
Instead, he steps closer. The space between us shrinks until I feel the pull of him like a change in pressure before a storm.
"Why do you think that is?" he asks quietly.
His voice has changed again, threaded with something dark that makes the air feel heavier in my lungs.
"Did you never feel his gaze upon you?" he continues.
My throat tightens.
"Did you truly believe," he murmurs, "that your soul required such constant tending? That you alone had to be summoned again and again to confess what others were permitted to forget?"
The memories stir whether I will them to or not.
The frequent calls. The private instructions. The pride I felt at being chosen for greater devotion, at being seen as especially in need of guidance. Especially worthy of correction.
He watches the movement of my throat as though it answers him.
"I did not take his eyes as punishment. I did it to silence them."
The clearing seems to shrink.
"He could not cease looking at you. He made you bow your head so he might stare down the hollow of your bodice and called it devotion."
"No," I breathe.
But the denial lacks force.
"I tore the eyes that watched you bathe with a rosary clenched in his fist," he presses, voice vibrating in my bones. "Prayers on his lips while his thoughts wandered where they ought not."
My lungs falter.
Images shift—small details I never held long enough to examine.
"You lie," I say again, but the words lack force.
His expression darkens.
"Tell me, enchantress," he murmurs, his voice dropping to a velvet rasp that curls along my spine, "did it feel holy when he pressed that rosary to your lips and bade you to repent?"
The ground tilts. My body remembers before my mind can refuse—the hard beads against my mouth, the command to kiss them, the warmth of his fingers near my skin, the confusion coiling in my chest that I had called shame as I was made to speak the prayer again.
Again.
Again.
I cannot breathe.
"You begged forgiveness," he says softly, mercilessly, "while he imagined the very things he forbade you to feel."
He bends closer still, breath brushing my ear.
"You called it holy," he whispers.
A pause.
"I call it filth."
His gaze darkens, something molten moving beneath the surface.
"He wanted you silent," he murmurs. "Ashamed. Bent beneath prayer until you forgot the sound of your own wanting."
His presence presses against my very senses.
"I want you crying out," he continues softly, "knowing precisely what I am."
The words strike somewhere deep, somewhere I have kept locked behind obedience and fear.
I feel the cool brush of him against my throat, the awareness of proximity that makes my pulse leap wildly beneath skin.
"He wanted your soul caged in guilt," he whispers again. "I want it spread wide beneath me, singing."
A tremor runs through me before I can stop it.
Heat gathers low in my body, unfamiliar and yet achingly known, answering something in his voice that feels older than reason. My fingers curl against my skirts. He circles me slowly, then comes to stand before me again, close enough that I must tilt my head to meet his eyes.
"He worshipped a god that taught him starvation," he says, and there is contempt in the words now. "I would worship you as flesh was meant to be honored."
His voice drops further, almost reverent.
"On my knees. With blood on my mouth and your name upon my tongue."
My breath shudders. I cannot look away from him. I do not want to.
"You confessed to a man who stripped you bare with his gaze," he says. "Confess to me now."
My heart pounds so hard it hurts.
"Tell me you loved it when I took his sight."
I cannot confess.
But I cannot deny. The truth he asks for presses at my bounds, frightening in its clarity, but I cannot shape it into sound.
He studies my face for a long moment, as though he hears what I cannot say.
Then his hand lifts. Slowly—so slowly I could pull away if I wished—his fingers come to rest against my cheek.
The touch is impossibly gentle. His thumb brushes the faint tenderness along my skin where Mama’s blows struck me, tracing the edge of the bruise with care.
"Perhaps," a shadow passes through his eyes, "I ought to break the hand that dared leave its mark upon you."
The suggestion hits me like cold water.
"No—"
My fingers close around his wrist instinctively, and the contact freezes us both.
His skin is smooth, firm beneath my fingers, colder than any living flesh should be, the tendons shifting subtly under my grip.
But it is not lifeless. There is a strange solidity to him, a tension beneath the surface like coiled strength waiting.
For a suspended heartbeat, nothing moves.
My fingers remain curled around him, though I no longer recall when I decided to hold him.
His hand cradles my face. Our eyes hold, searching, as though each of us has stumbled into something neither expected to find, my mind now uncertain of what it was looking for—danger, hunger, cruelty.
What I find unsettles me more.
He softens.
"I would never," his thumb drifts against my cheek, not quite a caress, but near enough that my breath trembles.
"I would never hurt you so, enchantress."
A breath.
"You would not?" I ask, barely above a whisper.
His eyes hold mine.
"I would not."
The certainty in it feels immovable. Something inside my chest shifts.
The place where our skin meets burns with a strange awareness, every pulse of my blood answering the stillness in him.
"You came offering yourself," he says, his voice lowered until it seems to move through me rather than across the distance between us. "Yet not for the salvation of those who wound you. That is the falsehood you cling to."
My lips part. Denial rises, quick and instinctive, yet the words falter before they reach my tongue. Something in his gaze holds them there, suspended, fragile.
He lifts his hand from where I still hold him and lets his fingers drift upward, hover near my throat. "Tell me, witch," he murmurs. "What is it you truly want?"
The forest holds its silence around us. Moonlight pours through the branches, laying silver across his face, across my hands where they rest against him. I hear my own breathing, uneven, too loud, too aware of the way his eyes hold mine without demand.
Every prayer I have ever learned presses faintly at the edges of my mind, then falls away like smoke. The truth rises instead, terrible.
"I want you."
The words leave me on a breath. They hang between us, trembling.
His gaze deepens, heat flickering through the darkness of it.
"Then I shall be yours."
He closes the distance without hesitation. One arm gathers me against him, firm at my back, the other cradling the back of my head as his mouth finds mine.
The kiss strikes like flame.
Cold floods my lips first, then a sudden, burning pull that spreads through my chest and down into my stomach, tightening everything low in my body. I gasp against him, and the sound only deepens the contact, his lips parting mine, drawing me closer until there is no space left between us at all.
My hands clutch at him blindly, fingers tangling in the fabric at his chest, feeling the solid strength beneath. He tastes of night air and something darker, something that makes my pulse race harder.
Heat spills through me, blooming in my chest, my stomach, the space between my thighs. A sound escapes me—small, helpless, alive. He swallows it, mouth softening for a fleeting instant before the hunger returns, deeper now, drawing me with it.
He moves along my jaw, slow at first, before his fingers slide to my throat, tracing the curve there with careful attention, feeling my pulse leap beneath his watchful gaze.
My head tips back before I understand that I am letting it, throat arching open beneath the night.
The air cools the skin he leaves behind, each place his mouth worships burning brighter in its wake.
My hands slide upward, finding his shoulders, holding him there, offering what he seeks with a surrender that feels less like falling and more like finally standing where I was meant to be.
I am still holding him, fingers tangled in the dark fall of his hair, when he lowers himself.
One moment he stands over me, the next he is sinking to his knees, arms sliding around my waist, pulling me close until I feel the solid line of his body against every part of me.
My breath leaves me in a startled rush. He is tall even like this—so tall that when he bends his head, his face comes level with my chest, his mouth brushing the rise of my bodice.
My fingers clutch at his shoulders as sensation ripples outward from the contact, spreading through my ribs, my stomach, my throat. He does not hurry. His lips move again and again over the curve of my breast, while patient hands rise to the laces holding the garment in place.
I freeze when the first tug loosens the fabric.
My breath falters, heat rushing to my face as cool night air slips beneath it, brushing skin no man has ever seen.
Instinct tells me to cover myself, to turn away, to hide what has always been kept hidden.
I feel the old lessons rise—modesty, humility, the danger of vanity—but they tangle with something stronger now, something that wants him to see.
The contradiction holds me still.
Each knot is loosened slowly, deliberately, the tension easing one loop at a time. I feel the faint tug as fabric gives way, the whisper of linen shifting against skin before it finally parts.
For a heartbeat I cannot breathe at all. My arms remain at my sides, caught between the urge to shield and the strange, aching desire to remain open beneath his gaze. My pulse hammers with the sudden awareness, every inch of myself laid bare before him.
But he is looking at me with a kind of wonder that steadies me. His expression softens, his hand lingering above the skin, not touching yet.
"Look at you," he murmurs. "Moonlight was made for this."