Chapter 23 #3
My mind was crowded, and I had to stop and take deep breaths to clear my head and find my way back, so I fixed my mind on Renaud’s quarters, his study, the smell of his books and the parchment. The scent of iron and blood mixed into my mind, and I thought again of those keys.
As if unlocked, the forest opened before me. My path home took far less time, and as evening fell, I stepped through my little stone gate.
I knew Renaud had returned the moment I crossed the threshold.
I immediately flushed with some strange heat of guilt.
He had looked for me, I was sure, and found me missing.
I didn’t know how I would explain, and with Perchta’s shrill warnings about him in my head, I felt prickly.
I tiptoed through the halls and managed to make it to my quarters without seeing him.
But I felt his presence pressing against my skin. My chest.
A purple twilight had fallen outside, bathing my blue room in bruise-shaped shadows.
Stripping off my sweat-stained dress with its burrs and seeds and streaks of summer grass on the skirt, I threw it aside.
The tub was full and waiting with cool jasmine-scented water, and I slid in, eager to rid myself of the edginess buzzing under my skin.
I had just wet my hair when Renaud walked in, not bothering to knock. I covered my chest with my hands, but he didn’t pause for any modesty, just stalked to the side of the tub and sat in the chair beside it, long legs splayed and masterful.
“How goes the business of Death?” I asked coolly, dropping my hands from my chest. If he wasn’t going to act affected, then neither would I.
I ran my hands through the water, not looking at him.
I wanted to ask if he had delivered my letter to Dacia, but I did not want to remind him I depended on him for anything.
He didn’t answer, though I felt the intensity of his gaze settle on me. Aware of my audience, I picked up the soap and linen and began to wash.
“You were so wild when you came here,” he said suddenly.
I glanced over, meeting his gaze, dark and smoldering. The fading light had fallen and the angles of his face were a weapon so sharp and beautiful only the gods could have forged it.
“Raw and feral. Fragile,” he said.
“I was frozen when I first came,” I said. I was annoyed at his demeanor. I was annoyed at his locked bedchamber. I was annoyed that it felt like he only wanted to see me struggle.
“You were powerful when you first came,” he said with a touch of reprimand in his voice.
I hadn’t felt powerful. But I remembered the ferocity in my desire to live, and I remembered the cut on my palm from the thorns and the voice in the cold.
I remembered, too, the way Renaud had brought me back to life and had hidden his splendor until I was safely in his home as his pupil. “I became powerful here.”
He gave me a smile, slow and tinged with a terrible cruelty. But I knew he was not. For he had cared for me and taught me and been devoted to me. His cruelty was only the mask Death wore. The mask the gods gave him to wear.
I alone knew the man beneath Death.
The fires were banked in my room from the heat and no candles or lanterns had been lit, yet his dark eyes somehow seemed to hold the last of the evening sun over the mountains, glinting in the moody blues of the darkening room. “And you have only just begun,” he murmured. “We have only just begun.”
A thrill raced down my spine, making gooseflesh on my arms and shoulders.
He seemed to always know exactly what I needed most to hear.
I didn’t care even if he had destroyed more powerful women than me, as Perchta had accused.
He was not going to destroy me. We were doing this together. I ducked my head to hide my smile.
“If you’re committed,” he finished.
I kept my smile pinned and busied myself with scrubbing all hints of that lightning and dirt magic out from under my fingernails. Why did he continue to doubt me? “I’m committed,” I said firmly, quietly.
“How can you be?” He shrugged and looked away from me, out the three-paned window that overlooked the dark forest. The cut of his cheek flexed in the shadows. “You never stay focused on your tasks. You wander away.”
“Am I a prisoner that I can’t leave? That I can’t enjoy the forest?” I asked, thinking I might trap him.
“You are free to go.” He swept his hand toward the last bit of purple light touching the tips of the firs. “You are no prisoner. Leave me. Return to whoring, if you wish!”
There was a long moment of silence before I finally said with as much dignity as I could muster, “I have no intention of leaving.”
“I don’t want you to leave either,” he said. “I want you to focus. To stay strong. To become even more powerful.” He stood up and took my chin in his hand, forcing me to look at him. “It is hard to escape how beautiful you are,” he said.
The compliment caught me off guard. I was desired, I knew that.
But beautiful? Desired was from the earth, from the groin, it was quickly satiated and forgotten; but beauty was a higher feeling, beauty was inspiration and longing.
Great work was created in the name of beauty, while things were only destroyed in the name of desire.
I looked up at his eyes, seeing myself reflected as a magician, powerful, beautiful, and strong.
A consort of Death. To be that reflection?
I would do anything. I would give up anything. Even my freedom.
“I won’t go anywhere,” I promised. This was the sign from him I’d been waiting for. A crack in his austerity. That glimpse of weakness made me feel as if my dreams were in reach.
He made a low sound in his throat, still looking over my face, my throat, my shoulders above the water. “Tip your head,” he instructed, meeting my eyes. He pulled away, bit the finger of his glove—those white teeth, so sharp in the twilight—and removed them both, then rolled up his sleeves.
Just when I thought I had the measure of him, he changed things.
Pulling the chair up to sit beside the tub, he leaned over the edge and gathered my long, black hair like a skilled and capable maid, carefully supporting my neck and rinsing until the locks were soaked.
I sat up with it streaming down my back and turned away from him.
But he only got the soap and lathered it in his hands.
His cool, long fingers slid into my hair and began to massage my scalp.
It reminded me of the weeks he spent tending to my wounds.
Shivers of pleasure cascaded down my body and I couldn’t help but give a murmur of delight.
The air was warm but the water deliciously cool on my skin.
My nipples rode the edge of the water, slipping in and out with his movements.
I was so aroused by his touch, by the air, by the slip of water, I didn’t care if he noticed.
How could I be ashamed? I knew he watched me, wanted me, and now he called me beautiful.
I tipped my head farther in his hands, and he moved to my neck, to my shoulders.
Between my legs grew warm and slippery. I wanted to beg for his touch.
His eyes met mine, the black even darker with a haze of violent lust—I knew that look.
It was the same in Death as in any man. He wrapped the skein of my hair around his fist and wrung the water out, twisting so hard that I was propelled into standing in a stream of water.
The cooling air hit my naked body in a chill that only enflamed me more. He yanked me by my hair into his chest. His dark eyes flicked from my eyes, my open mouth, to my hard, wet nipples.
“How depraved are you?” he asked. “How wicked?”
“Very, my lord,” I said, my voice husky with desire.
“Show me,” he ordered. Then he pulled me down by my hair.
At first, I thought he wanted to use my mouth, and I had a rush of satisfaction that I had reduced him to his need after all.
But he pulled me to the floor, laying me on my back with my hair still pulled tight.
Instead of releasing me, he placed his boot on the pull of my hair.
Keeping me pinned, he stood over me, boot holding me tight to the floor.
I moaned and arched against the floor. I laid myself out for him like on his altar, making myself an offering, edged in the blue light of dusk and the heat of summer.
I remembered what it felt like to have no say in what happened to my body, in other times and places, but in this moment I felt his equal, his consort, and brimming with unquenchable power and pleasure to make myself an offering.
I felt that heat between my legs drip out, wet and simmering.
“Yes, show me the most wicked you are,” he said softly, and I had a passing wish for the crop from the meadow to bite the softness of his words.
“Give me your glove,” I said.
Without letting go, he took one of the gloves he’d laid so carefully off the bed and lowered it to me.
I took it, and with the same carefulness with which he removed the glove, I put it on, finger by finger.
My hand was lost in it. The glove he wore every day.
The intimacy of his capable, elegant hands.
I was inside him, in a way. I wiggled my fingers and splayed them across my stomach.
The cool leather hit my skin, familiar. I would make it so that anytime he saw his own hands he would think of them upon my body.
I dragged the gloved hand up my ribs and gripped my breast, using the flat of the seam on his pointer finger to tease my nipple.
His eyes darkened with need, but he did not move.
Using my thumb and finger on my free hand, I pinched my nipples together and hissed at the sting.
His eyes followed the graze of his glove back down, over my stomach, between my legs.
I spread them, planting my feet firmly on the hard floor.
I was lithe and well fed all these months, sleek with lust, and as the full moon rose above the trees and bathed me in its pearlescent light, I spread myself, touching myself with his glove over my fingers.
Lifting my hips, I rocked upward so that he could not miss the sight of that heat.
When I was sure he could see, I slowly slid two of the fingers of his glove inside my body.
I did not stop. A soft, wet sound filled the darkened room.
“Yes, you’re my wicked girl,” he said, voice dry and ragged. But his foot remained firm on my hair.
I knew I should have been happy—he was mine, I could tell in his voice, but I wanted his hold on me to break.
I wanted to undo him. Abruptly, I stopped touching myself.
Using my teeth, I bit the finger I’d used on myself and pulled the glove off exactly like he’d done every single time before he had touched me.
I could remember each time. I could not stop thinking of that act.
When I twisted the glove and slid it completely inside my eager, panting body, he shuddered. His breath caught and the boot lifted, just for a moment, off my hair.
Satisfaction flooded me like my body’s own release, pounding hard through my blood.
And then I could bear it no more. With his glove sunk deep inside me, I closed my eyes and slid my bare fingers across the slit of my legs and came in hard shudders that wracked me on the floor.
By the time I finished, he had his boot firmly back on my hair.
“Are you finished, ma petite chou?” he asked.
I whimpered and nodded.
“That was wicked, indeed. Will you return my glove?”
I bit my bottom lip and slowly retrieved his glove.
He seemed stern and remote as he wiped the glove off on his leg and then slid it over his hand. But I could see the tension in his jaw and the sunken shadows of his cheeks and the studious way he avoided my eyes.
“Good evening,” he said with a lordly bow. With a whirl, he was gone and the door closed tight behind him.
I was on the floor, wrung out but not satiated. But I had won. I had undone him. I smirked and picked myself up, using the cold water of the tub to wash myself off and dive headfirst into the clean, waiting shift.
I crawled into bed, thinking of all that happened, of Death’s sharp angles and firm grip.
But then, unbidden, my mind slid to a softer place, into those molten gold memories of Dacia, the feel of her skin, her hands, and then …
the horror in her eyes as she clapped her hands over her mouth in shock, and the way she’d pulled away from me.
I shut my mind against the memory. My throat ached so deeply against the assault of longing, and yet I could not sob. I fell asleep clutching my pillow as if I could reach through the air and hold Dacia.
In the middle of the night, Schneid jumped on the bed. I woke up just enough to notice as he settled in a tight ball at my feet and was drifting off again when a scream pierced the night.
My eyes popped open.
Schneid lifted his head. We both stared at the door.
The room was completely dark, the walls and bits of furniture edged only in the waning moonlight.
I peered at the corners, but nothing moved in the shadows.
I strained my ears, but no sound came again.
I thought about looking in the hallway, or even going to Renaud’s chambers, but I could not bring myself to move.
Schneid rose partly, haunches set as if he saw something and was preparing to pounce.
There was nothing in the dark. Nothing visible.
I stared, pulling the covers tight almost up to my nose.
Then, out of the dark, a spirit rushed for me.
The woman’s ghostly face came at me, frozen in a terrible scream of soundless agony. Mouth black, filled with blood. She poured into my head, and I choked on my scream, my whole body shuddering.
And then she was gone.
It had been so long since I’d seen a spirit, especially one near me, and I screamed as much out of surprise as fear, for her face had been so dreadful.
My scream startled me awake.
The room was dark, but not unnervingly so. Schneid was sound asleep at my feet, the chateau quiet.