Chapter 22 #2
"The last person who touched something of mine," he said, his voice dropping into a register that vibrated the silverware, "was a Krenari dealer on Voss Station who decided my newest acquisition looked lonely in her transport cell.
" He paused. Let the silence do its work.
"I found him four days later in a storage bay on Deck Nine.
I started with his hands, because those were what he'd used.
I removed the fingers individually — two joints per finger, ten fingers, twenty cuts.
Took about an hour. He was conscious for most of it.
Then I moved to the parts of him that had motivated the touching in the first place.
" He smiled. His fangs caught the light.
"I'm told they never did get all the stains out of that deck.
Something about the sealant being porous. "
He reached for his wine and drank. His hand was steady. His voice was pleasant, conversational, as if he were discussing the vintage.
"She paints for me. She exists for my purposes. She breathes at my discretion. If any of you find yourselves confused about whose property she is, I'm happy to provide a personal tutorial." He looked directly at Voss. "The curriculum is hands-on."
Voss held his gaze for a long moment. Then he laughed — the warm, genuine sound of acknowledging a superior play. "Point taken, old friend. I meant no offense."
"None taken."
Conversation resumed. The silverware moved.
Glasses refilled. Beneath the table, inside his gloves, Skarreth's claws had extended to their full length and buried themselves in his own palms. Blood pooled in the leather.
The pain was clarifying, almost welcome — a physical sensation to anchor him against the alternative, which was to stand up, shift, and tear Rheth Voss's throat out in front of sixteen witnesses.
Behind him, Octavia's breathing had not changed. Not one beat faster, not one degree shallower. She'd heard every word of his grotesque performance and absorbed it with the same unshakable stillness she'd brought to everything since he'd closed the door between them.
He didn't know if that steadiness was courage or the evidence that she'd stopped caring what he did. Both options carved him open.
The corridor after dinner was dark marble and low lighting, designed to guide guests toward the entertainment hall where music played and deals were struck in shadowed alcoves.
Skarreth walked three paces ahead of Octavia — the prescribed distance between owner and property — and her footsteps behind him were the careful tread of navigating hostile terrain.
She drew alongside him at the junction where the corridor branched toward the hall and the residential wing. Her path would take her back to her room. His would take him into another three hours of smiling and swallowing knives.
She brushed past him. Her arm came within an inch of his and didn't make contact. But her scent —
It hit him like a fist. Fury, layered thick and hot, the sharp mineral edge of someone whose anger had calcified into something structural, rage that held a person upright when everything else had been stripped away.
Beneath it, the acrid bite of betrayal — the wound of the corridor when she’d touched his arm and his eyes went cold, reopened and salted by tonight's performance.
And underneath both, buried so deep she probably didn't know it was still there, fading like the last ember in a dead fire: want.
The ghost-trace of desire her body hadn't finished purging despite everything her mind had decided.
Her fury hit him first, then the faint buried want she hadn't finished purging, and the combination detonated through him before he could build a wall against it.
Heat flooded his core. His pulse surged.
Every nerve ending oriented toward her like iron filings toward a magnet, and he stopped breathing.
His hand moved toward her arm. It wasn’t a decision; it was an instinct. Muscle memory from the night in the studio when reaching for her was still permitted, when her skin against his was something she chose rather than something he stole.
She sidestepped without breaking stride.
"Don't."
One word. Quiet as a blade drawn from a sheath. She didn't raise her voice. She didn't look at him. She kept walking — spine straight, footsteps even, burgundy silk disappearing into the dim corridor — and the wake she left behind smelled of fury and endings.
He let her go.
His hand hung in the empty air where she'd been.
He closed it into a fist — felt the claw punctures in his palms reopen, fresh blood soaking the inside of his gloves — and stood in the dark corridor listening to her footsteps fade until the only sound was the distant music from the gathering hall and the wet, rhythmic drip of his own blood hitting the marble floor.
He returned to the gathering. He smiled. He drank. He negotiated with Solke about shipping routes and complimented Maeven's latest acquisition figures and tolerated the Ghannet Twins' competition to impress him. He was Lord Skarreth. He was flawless.
From across the hall, through a gap in the crowd, he saw her.
She'd returned. Standing along the far wall where the other displayed acquisitions waited — not required here, but present, because Nadir must have told her the protocol demanded visibility through the evening's end.
She stood with her hands clasped, her spine vertical, her eyes forward, and she was doing what he'd asked: being invisible.
Except she wasn't. Not to him.
He knew her body the way he knew star charts — every coordinate memorized, every line committed to a navigation he could perform blind.
The set of her shoulders when she was angry: pulled back, blades flat, a quarter-inch tighter than her neutral posture.
The position of her fingers when she was suppressing emotion: right thumb pressing into the palm of her left hand, a self-soothing gesture so subtle that only someone who had watched her paint for weeks would recognize it.
The angle of her chin: up, always up, because Octavia Tate met the world head-on, even when the world was a room full of monsters and she was dressed as a possession.
But the artist who had built her life on seeing truth was looking at him and couldn't find it.
He saw it across forty feet of crowded hall, through the shifting bodies of slavers and their entourages, past the noise and the music and the strategic laughter.
Her gaze found his for one second — no more — and in that second he recognized the expression.
Uncertainty. She was looking at him and could not tell the difference between the man and the monster.
His performance tonight had been too good.
The graphic threat, the cold possessiveness, the clinical reduction of her to property — he'd delivered it with the conviction that seven years of practice demanded, and she had stood behind his chair and absorbed every word, and now she was looking at him the way everyone eventually did.
Unable to find the man beneath the monster.
The realization struck him with the force of a physical impact.
His vision tunneled. The room narrowed to the forty feet between them and the expression on her face and the knowledge, absolute and devastating, that he was losing her.
Had perhaps already lost her. That the woman who had painted his hidden self with trembling hands and kissed him with the ferocity of someone claiming territory and pressed her body against his in the dark, that woman was disappearing behind the same fortifications he'd spent a lifetime building, and this time the walls were aimed at him.
Eight hundred and twenty-four. The number that justified everything. The number that made the knife-swallowing bearable, the performances necessary, the loneliness a price worth paying.
For the first time in seven years, it wasn't enough.
Across the hall, Voss refilled his glass and watched him with patient attention. He had all the time in the world and knew it.
Lord Skarreth smiled his perfect, terrible smile and raised his glass and drank, two people standing forty feet apart in a room full of monsters, burning alive in each other's silence.