26. Chapter 26
Chapter 26
I was left there for what seemed like days. Twisting and exhausted. In that strange black limbo that no light could ever penetrate, not even twisting shapes of shadows could be picked from the depths of the darkness. The sound of something wet dripping, far off behind me, drove me nuts. Its consistent splattering against the dark, dank stone was all that broke the unbearable silence.
The grinding of stone against metal sounded like angelic trumpets every time he came and went. And he came and went often. Always the same pattern, an endless cycle of him asking me questions about the King’s assassination, which led to personal questions, which then led to him fucking me senseless all under laced with the exquisite viciousness of his knife carving pieces into me.
He would never just touch me, though. He would never hold me. He would never kiss me. His words buried themselves deep into my heart and dug thorns into it to prevent them from wriggling loose.
I could watch you come for me for hours.
Nothing looks better than your pussy split wide for me.
Perfection.
I’ve waited for this longer than you can imagine, little bug.
Every single time I came undone for him was the same as before. He wouldn’t let me simply come once. It was part of his sweet torture by now. The same thing over and over again. He would push me to the brink of pain and dance me there along its edge until I begged him for reprieve. Sometimes, he would grant it, sometimes not. I never knew which I would get more of, the knife or the leather gloves, but they had become synonymous with each other. Even the sensation of the flat of the knife gliding against my arm could kick my heartbeat up and send throbbing precursors to a tidal wave of orgasms skittering through me.
I had become Pavlov’s dog, barking and drooling at the sound of stone grinding against metal and braying to the unseen moon when he even touched me.
I was also aware that though I existed in limbo, torn between the heaven his fingers ripped from me and the hell his knife drew out, I would eventually succumb to the wounds that must litter my skin. I imagined myself a twisting and intricate web of slashes and cuts. My whole body felt fiery and icy at different intervals from each slice of a blade that was no longer there.
My wrists had become mangled wrecks. I could feel the mushy grinding of the chunks of my flesh every time I moved. The teeth had, long ago, stopped biting, though I wasn’t sure anymore if that was because I had severed the nerves that fed the skin that they munched on so happily or if it was because The Raven had stopped asking me questions I didn’t want to answer honestly.
I would tell him anything at this point. He barely needed to bribe me with the crook of his fingers or the kiss of his steel. Those had become rewards. Whenever I answered a question, regardless of its answer, I was gifted with the lavish touch of one or the other, and I moaned and begged for each of them. Anything to feel him again. Anything to hear him panting with need for me.
My body shivered with exhaustion and need whenever he left me. I longed to feel his touch. I longed for a time when my blanket was not my own blood leaking down my back and into fresh wounds. I longed for a time when I could lie down, even if it were on dank, moldy stone.
“Little bug.”
The steady thunder of his voice filled the chamber, rousing me from one of many times I had lost consciousness .
I had stopped being concerned by them and lost count of how many times. Eventually, they, too, bled together with the dark around me. What was the difference between the blackness of my prison and the blackness of my mind? There wasn’t much of a difference at all unless I had slipped into the liminal space between there and dreams. Color only existed in dreams for me now, and it was always the same dream, dawn breaking over a dark evergreen forest.
“Raven,” I replied.
The flat of his blade found the meat of my ass, pressed into the globe of it, and traveled down to press the round pommel to the rim of my asshole. I made a sound that was half whimper of need and half moan of anguish. He played with me, the iciness of the metal teasing every nerve that had not yet been burned away into cinders.
I wanted to move away, wanted to resist him. I wanted so bad not to give into the frenzy that we had created with each other in this strange place, yet I was powerless to prevent my hips from thrusting back into the intrusion, begging for more of his sweet, sweet tormenting.
“Are you hungry, little bug?” he asked as he dragged a leather-gloved finger up the bend of my arching back.
“For you.”
I’d lost all semblance of shame or reservation sometime around the fourth or fifth time I came so hard my entire body shook and flooded his palm.
“Mmmm, I’m sure you are. But I meant for food.”
“I probably should be.”
“Yes, you most certainly should be. Though I could feed you again if you need me to.” His breath was hot on my ear, clawing a shiver from me. “You don’t need to beg me to feed you, little bug. Know that I can’t wait until I can stuff you full again.”
My whole body shook with the power of my whimpering as the ice of the metal fled me and without warning the cuffs that had held me aloft came undone, and I was falling.
I never hit the floor, though. Instead, I was cradled into the heat of his embrace, my head pressed to the fire over his heart, where I listened to the strong solid thuds of his heartbeat as he picked me up and carried me a few feet away.
“For now, I’ll be satisfied with you sharing a meal with me,” he purred, setting me down. “You will want to cover your eyes. You’ve been in the dark for almost a week. It will take some time for your eyes to readjust.”
I felt the light hit my skin like a physical blow. Felt it skitter over my broken flesh and seep into each slice as I squeezed my eyes shut. Even the amount that bombarded my eyes from behind the curtain of my eyelids was too bright. It hurt like a raw wound being cleansed with lemon. A hollow, sharp pain that sank deep and rattled around in my head.
I could hear The Raven moving about, could hear the scuff of his boots along the stonework. The slight creak of his leather pants was too loud. The swish of his linen shirt as he moved was an assault to my ears. The rattle of dishes of some sort against wicker pounded like a drum. It was all so fucking loud after next to nothing for almost a week. But the knife was quickly dulled, slowly blending into a soft kaleidoscope of richness I appreciated like fine music.
The light was the same. Slowly unclenching my lids allowed me to adjust. Until finally, I could open them again. I found the brilliant sun I suspected had been dragged into the cell with me was only a collection of what looked like fireflies dancing in the air and casting a warm yellow glow over a tiny barrel table. A candle would have been brighter, even a rushlight would have been ten times brighter. But it was enough for me to see the glint of silverware next to a ceramic charger plate The Raven was slowly filling with all manner of small morsels. It was a bounty to be sure, a few bites of almost everything he probably could have gotten his hands on.
The last to join the pile were six slices of dripping milúll that made my mouth water with delight.
“I wasn’t sure which would be your favorite, so I got a little of everything.” That soft, steady rumble I had once been so familiar with filled my ears and was the silk my harried brain needed. He was moving still, even though the plates had been filled to the brim and crystal-clear cool water had been poured into two wooded mugs. “With your wounds, I didn’t think you’d want a blanket, but I do have a spider silk shawl if you’d like to try it?”
I looked from the plate back up to him and stared. “Spider silk?”
“It’s what we use for field dressings, sick bed linens and, for the wealthiest of us, silk velvets to wear in the summers. It feels like ice on the skin. Ice that never steals your heat and is light as air. It helps with healing, too. Something about the venom of the orchard spiders on the webbing. Well, at least it does with Fae. I’m not sure about humans. I think you might be the first human to have ever had their blood even touch spider silk, let alone their wounds draped in it.” A large square of nearly translucent fabric was stretched out before him and folded into a triangle.
I like that he never apologized for what he was not sorry for. We had both enjoyed his slicing of my flesh. Even when I hadn’t, we had. It felt right that he not apologize for it. Any apology he would have offered would have been hollow and insincere, and I wanted to always imagine my Raven as the beacon of trust in the battering hurricane of obfuscation I was mired in.
I gave him a nod, and he wrapped the shawl around my shoulders, letting the soft breeze of it settle about me. Though he was right, it was but the suggestion of a whisper of weight on my body, the chill of it rapturous. It felt like an ice melt fed river in the dead of summer. All around me was the cool rushing of the water and, beyond that, nothing but sweltering heat.
“Thank you,” I purred luxuriously as I hunched into the shawl. In the dim light, I caught the hungry look in his forest eyes and the way his chest rose and fell while he watched me. “Are you going to join me?”
“Would you like me to?” he asked with a devilish tilt to his head.
“Yes.” I paused and looked him dead in the eye. “Please.”
His pupils blew wide with lust, and his fingers clenched in their black leather gloves before he gave me a stern, crisp nod and folded his enormous body down onto the stool across from me. He looked absurd, a giant mountain of a man bent and crouched over what would suffice for a little girl’s tea set table. But he seemed to find himself a comfortable spot with a few wiggles and a sip of the cold water.
I took a moment to scan my surroundings but found that, beyond the two feet of warm glow, there was nothing but blackness. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the light, I couldn’t see further than that.
The Raven’s gaze followed mine. “Would you like me to describe it to you?”
“How is it you can see into the darkness, and I can’t?” I returned my attention to him, and he shrugged easily.
“Because I am this place’s keeper. It bends to and adheres to my whims and only my whims. It reveals its secrets to me and only me.” He took a sip of his water and turned fully to stare into the darkness. “The room we are in is called the Maw. Behind me and to the left, about three feet, is the jaws of the Maw—the bars of this prison, that is. They are shaped like the jaws of a beast and reinforced with iron. The room is hewn straight from the bedrock of the castle, similar to the warrens, but we are several dozen feet below the warrens’ level. Everything is solid rock. From the ceiling, which I think is about fifty feet or so up, hangs two sets of chains. You are familiar with the dragon. That’s what you have been in. The other is the hobble meant for your ankles.” He slid wicked eyes to me. “We haven’t sampled those just yet but perhaps soon.”
My heart skipped over three hurdles and fell to my lap as he went on.
“Aside from that, there is nothing in this room you cannot already see. It has but one purpose.”
“Torture?”
He nodded and pointed to my food. “Eat.”
I picked up a slice of apple and began chewing on it, letting the flavor burst in my mouth and wash away the bitter taste of my imprisonment. “Why?” I finally worked up the nerve to ask.
He looked up over his bite from a chicken leg, his brows furrowing as he watched me toy with the apple slice. “Because you tried to kill the King, my oldest friend and my Liege lord. I am his Captain of the Royal Guard. This is my duty. ”
“You know I didn’t.” I let my gaze meet his, and we watched each other cycle through a bevy of silent emotions. I was the first one to break the standoff, letting my gaze go to what looked suspiciously like a loaf of the Bandrui’s bread. I tore into it and let the warmth of it melt into my tongue. “And the rest? I doubt that’s part of your usual treatment of prisoners.”
He sat back, watching me like a hawk examining a mouse skittering across dry cornstalks. He drew in a long breath and exhaled it with a sense of calm radiating from him. “I thought that was obvious by now, Sóna.”
“That you’re a pervert? Oh, very obvious.”
“You don’t seem to mind it. And before you lie to me, little bug, know that I have twenty pairs of gloves that are soaked with your truth. All of them my most cherished trophies.” He didn’t even have the good sense to try to pretend that wouldn’t make me burn from head to toe with a heady mix of embarrassment and desire. “I meant that it should be obvious by now, how I feel about you.”
“Ah.”
I didn’t have much to say about that. I wanted to forget that there might be more to the orgasms and the lust banking in his eyes. I could come for him until there was nothing left of me but dust, and that would be easy, but thinking for a moment that there might be something more made me squirm like a hooked fish for some reason.
He leaned forward, tipping my chin up to meet his eyes once more. The vast ancient forest of them pulled me in and surrounded me with the crisp scent of cedar. “Sóna Mac Raith, before this had to happen, I was prepared to betray all my good senses to court you. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in this realm or in Human. Or any other realm.”
I wanted to deny that I was beautiful. Violet had called me that once, and it sat like razors in my ears. But I was willing to let him pass on this one just once. I promised myself never again, though. Not until I recovered my true face, if that was even possible, would I accept him calling me beautiful. I was curious though as to why.
“Why? ”
He smirked an enigmatic smirk and popped a slice of milúll in his mouth, making it clear he didn’t plan on illuminating me as to his reasons. I was as stubborn as he was, though, and waited for the inevitable swallow to ask him again, but he cut me off.
“Where did you get the boon beads?”
Taken aback by the question, I leaned away from him. I had sworn to keep them secret. That he even knew of them was a failure on my part. “You’re not supposed to know about those.”
“And so I do not. Nor do the rest of the guards because I swept them under His Majesty’s carpets before anyone could see them.”
“Thank you,” I whispered, genuinely thankful for his discretion.
I had sworn to the Bandrui and felt deeply ashamed for having betrayed her trust, even if it was only The Raven that knew.
“Do you know who gave them to you?”
“Yes.”
A mocking smirk played across his face, and he pulled a piece of the Bandrui’s loaf off and chewed on it as he watched me.
I didn’t like it. He knew something I didn’t know, but I was unwilling to ask questions lest I break my oath further. “Why won’t you touch me?”
“You’ll find the evidence of my touch all over your body if you have the stomach to look, little bug,” he parried back.
I narrowed my gaze. “You know exactly what I mean.”
“Do I?”
He was toying with me, and I both loved and hated it.
I narrowed my eyes at him. Oh, he wanted to play innocent games. I could play those, too. I could play them even harder when I was annoyed.
I slid from my chair the sinuousness of the body Rictus had crafted for me aiding me in this game. He watched me with hungry eyes as my knee notch between his thighs, parting them for me and letting me slither in close to him. My hand traveled the length of his thigh from knee to the rock-hard bulge at its core, where it stroked slow and torturously. I leaned my lips close as if I was going to kiss him .
He hesitated a single second, like he would call my bluff, before a black leather glove wrapped around my throat and slid one finger into my open mouth. “You play with fire, little bug. It’ll burn you if you dance too close.”
The vise of his other hand wrapped around my delicate mangled wrist and pressed my palm into the thick, rigid length of him. He guided me along the impressive impression of it in his leather riding pants before he pressed me back into my seat by the grip on my chin. “Now, eat, Cricket. Before you break what little resolve I have left in me to be a gentleman with you.”
God, he was huge. Not in length. I had expected more if we looked at his proportions, but the sheer thickness of him was daunting, and it made my mouth water to wrap around it. His words filtered in, letter by letter, and I snorted.
“I was unaware that included carving the woman you’re interested in up like a turkey. Perhaps I haven’t known many gentlemen in my life after all.”
He glared at me from across the dwindling bounty of our small repast. “We both know this is not what I had intended on.”
“Do I?” I tossed his words back at him. “No, I don’t think I do know that this wasn’t what you intended.”
The fire he had called upon danced in his baleful eyes as he watched me. “Had you not decided to attempt to assassinate my Ard Rí, I would have met you in the gardens, as we were intended. I’d have had a small picnic under the stars set out. We would have drunk milúll wine and watched the stars, and I would have spent the evening getting to know Sóna Mac Raith as she was before she came to this place. And letting you know me, the me before I became The Raven of the Dawn. I’d have brought you the two ice roses that I have drying in my quarters for if you survive this. I would have given you the stars, Sóna. And then I would have asked you to meet me again the next night. And I’d have held your hand and recited you Fae poetry. I’d have taught you all about the ways of the Fae, a lesson that seems to always escape you. I’d have danced with you in the breaking rays of the dawn and carried you back to your bed. And I would have repeated that every night for the rest of eternity until your heart bloomed for me, and you let mine bloom for you.”
I swallowed hard around the bite stuck in my throat as he recounted the thousands of nights of romance that he had planned out so expertly for us.
It was romantic. It was soft. It was gentle. It was everything a much younger and much more na?ve me would have loved. It was everything I had always secretly wanted but never had the nerve to be vulnerable enough to ask for or dream of. And he had done it, planned it all out with ease. As if it had been the easiest thing for him.
“Instead, I’m trapped in the dark, in an unending cycle of you slicing me up and fucking me senseless,” I bit back at him, bitter over what I had lost without having done anything wrong.
I had been cheated, and I hadn’t even done anything to deserve it. The injustice of it all was an acrid stain across my tongue.
“Instead, I am down here, getting hard as diamonds, showing you the me that is beneath all the layers of chivalry. Tell me, little bug, was it worth it?” He tilted his head, watching me.
I opened my mouth to answer and saw the flicker of viciousness in his eye. The pieces came together, and I pushed to my feet, flinging the charger full of food at his face. “This is all just part of your interrogation, isn’t it! All that nonsense about the gardens and the stars and the dawn—that was all a fucking lie, wasn’t it? Just trying to get me to admit that I tried to kill that piece of shit? You fucking bastard. No wonder you won’t fucking touch me. I’m nothing but a dirty daoire and a dirty criminal to you, aren’t I?”
“Sóna—”
“Shut up, Raven. Not another fucking word from you. Put me back up in the fucking dragon. Get your knife out and start fucking carving because the answer is still the fucking same. I didn’t try to kill the King. I was only there because I’m required to be there. I’d rather be anywhere else. I’d rather be scrubbing out the stables with my toothbrush than picking up after that fucking pig. I almost wish I had tried to kill him. At least then, this would have been all worth it. It would have been worth it to see his look of surprise when I cut his cock off. Make no mistake, Raven, had I tried to kill the Ard Rí, the first thing you would have found would have been his cock because I’d have tossed it out the window.” I turned on my heel and walked into the darkness toward where I thought the cuffs would dangle, feeling around myself as I went.
“Sóna . . .” he whispered softly. He hadn’t moved.
I could measure myself by the angle of his voice and the warm light to my back. “I said shut the fuck up. And when you come back over here, the only thing going into me is your fucking knife.”
I heard the resolute sigh as he rose and then I felt his gloved hand wrap around my wrist and guide me to the waiting cuffs. He was quiet while locking me into them, letting his touch glide down my arm when he was done. We stood in silence, me fuming and him silent as the darkness around me.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he whispered as a means of an apology.
It was the first he had ever given me. The first attempt he had ever made to right any of the litany of wrongs he had done me.
“Just another glimpse under the sheepskin, eh, Raven?”
I wasn’t letting him win. I had let him win so many times with no apology at all. This one time he gave me one was not enough to cool my ire. I would let him choke on the smoke from my rage.
“More than you know, little bug.” His breath was hot on my shoulder as he moved my long braid out of the way. “I am not a good man, Cricket. I have tried to be a good man for you. You deserve that from me. But I am who I am. I am bound by duty and oaths as you are bound to this castle. I can only bend them so far.”
“Get fucked, Raven. That’s a fucking excuse, and you know it. If you didn’t want to do any of this shit, you wouldn’t.”
“Oh, dear sweet little bug, if only that were true.” He sighed and traced the line of one of the more healed slashes in my skin.
I bit down hard on my lip, not letting him have the satisfaction of my hissing moan that wanted so desperately to reward him. His thumbs rested on the dimples at the small of my back and massaged there for a long while. “I am who I am, Cricket . . . and it’s about time you met him. I had hoped that you would never meet him. I had hoped that you would be the balm to the beast, but you’ll have to burn with me.”
His fingers slid away from me, and there was nothing again. Even the soft lights had flickered out. Darkness swept in to stroke me like a waiting lover.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ll find out soon.”
The sound of the teeth of the Maw was the last that echoed in my mind as he left me there in the dark again.