Chapter Seventeen #3
“Yes, but you can imagine, surely. You must have imagined someone saying your name, soft as fur against your skin. ‘Mina,’ they might whisper. Over and over—‘Mina, Mina, Mina,’ like something they were forbidden to speak, and so now they must say it a thousand times,” he said, low enough that she could hardly hear him.
She almost took a step forward just to get every word, every use of a name he had never spoken aloud, as he spun this strange little scenario.
And only stopped herself at the last second.
She stepped back from the edge, instead.
“That doesn’t seem like much for someone trying to convince me.”
“Well, it depends what you want to be convinced of. If it was just the idea of someone liking your delight, a name might be
enough. But if you needed to know that they craved your pleasure, I can imagine it would be more. A simple let me make you feel good. A soft sigh of bliss, when they do. When they watch your eyes grow heavy, and your lips part, and—”
“Okay, stop.”
She didn’t mean to say it so frantically.
It just happened, the second she saw what was coming. Something terrible, something she couldn’t stand. Words she could never
let him speak—not while she was like this. Caught in between the possible danger, and all the ways he didn’t seem dangerous
at all. The whispered words in her ear holding one side of her good sense, the countdown to the chase, in the other.
There couldn’t be anything like that to tip the scales.
Nothing seductive. Nothing that made this surge of something go through her.
Not even when she already knew what it had done.
She felt it, even before she looked down at her hands.
The silvery wash of magic filling her body.
The bloom of it in her hands, without her even having to cup them.
Like he had been right, about the forms and the wands and the beads just being a thing to focus and shape.
Unneeded if you could focus and shape with a feeling.
If you could call magic to you, just by letting it in.
It was just unfortunate that letting it in involved him.
“There,” he said. Voice suddenly flat and normal.
That shaky, exhausted look back, quick as a flash.
It made her throw up her hands.
“You said all of that just to make me spark?”
“Well, I certainly wasn’t trying to seduce you.”
He rolled his eyes.
While she tried to be angry, instead of dying inside.
“I didn’t . . . I wasn’t imagining . . . It was just a lot to say to me, all right.”
“It worked, though, didn’t it? Now you can do whatever you want with it.”
“I told you what I wanted to do. To make a set of manacles. For you.”
“Even though you’re incredibly close to doing more. A knife would be so easy now.”
He touched his tongue to one sharp incisor.
Like a different type of temptation altogether.
See how dangerous I am, it seemed to say. Big teeth, seductive words.
Not that teeth and seduction helped him, in this sense. “And what would I do with one now? Stab a defenseless man? I want
to be able to make weapons so I can fend you off at your full and rabid strength. Not get you when you can barely keep your
own head up. Now, shut up and let me concentrate,” she said—as if she really needed to.
When she didn’t at all.
It took almost nothing.
She put her arms together, to signify something defensive. Then down, hands forming two circles, thumbs and forefingers touching.
Before finally, she pulled them apart. Fast and without letting herself think about it too much.
And there they were.
A set of manacles, so ghostly looking she could hardly believe they had a thousand times the strength of any metal. But she
knew beyond a shadow of a doubt they did. She could feel the power in them, built out of all those far too intense things
he had said. They still sung in her, as she held them out to him.
Though the worse part was, he seemed to know.
“You can’t, under any circumstances, make contact with me,” he said. As if he thought things were so conflicted inside her
that she might be tempted to touch him. That she might like to or enjoy it when she did.
“Don’t say that as if I want something like that.”
“I would never think you do. But the thing is: I might persuade you to.”
“As we’ve already established, thralling really doesn’t work on me.”
“Yes, but I wasn’t talking about thralling. I was talking about you, and the way you react when I do certain things, and talk
a certain way, and look at you like I’m looking at you now. When I make it sweet and good, when I seduce you, so you can just
slip into your own magic, easy, easy, easy.”
“That only works because I let it.”
“Are you sure?”
No, she thought. Yes, she answered.
“Of course I’m sure. You mean nothing to me. None of this means anything to me. I see it as nothing more than a means to an end. And
this will be, too. It’s just a medical matter. Practical. Businesslike. Part of our deal. I’ll go about it with all the professionalism
of a doctor, lancing a wound. And that will be the case, no matter what you do,” she said, so sure sounding about it that
he only hesitated a moment longer. Those dark eyes drank her in, as if looking for cracks in the facade.
Then he took the manacles she tossed to him, satisfied.
Though she imagined he wouldn’t have been, if he had seen the inside of her head. Her thoughts raced wildly, as she watched
him snap one of them around his wrist. And not just because of the way it looked, once he had—like a piece of brutal jewelry,
against his suddenly tender-seeming skin.
No. There was also the sudden understanding of what he would have to do here. The second manacle wasn’t just going to go around
his other wrist. Of course it wasn’t. He had to thread the chain around something first. A sturdy something—like say, the
obviously iron frame, at the head of his bed.
Still, though, she didn’t expect him to really do it.
She imagined a metal hoop somewhere, drilled into the wall.
Some sort of pipe that wouldn’t buckle under his strength.
Then was forced to watch him, as he laid down on the bed. As he arranged the chain and spread his bare arms above his head.
Not lewdly, she told herself. Not purposefully, like something suggestive.
But the problem was, the effect was suggestive all the same.
She could see the exact perfect curve to his biceps, when he held his arms like that. How oddly thick they looked, in a way she could never see in his shirts and sweaters. And that thickness was in him elsewhere, too. There was something almost heavy about his chest, his shoulders.
Like a man who didn’t work out.
He just did things that made him strong.
Or more possibly: had done things. He had grown into this in Calabaraia, most likely. Shaped himself on mountains made of glass and hunts that
had no horses. Everything just about how fast you could run. How high you could climb. What you could do with your bare hands.
A lot, she thought, as he shifted on the bed.
And every muscle in his body moved.
They all rolled beneath his honey-pale skin, in a way that was almost hypnotic. Certainly she felt hypnotized, when she walked
over to him on legs that felt half hollow. And then she was looking down at him, and the sight did nothing to strengthen her.
Because true, he still had those trousers on.
It was just that the trousers weren’t particularly modest.
They hung very low on his hips—low enough that she could see the trail of dark hair leading down, below the waistband. And
the material seemed very tight and very thin. It pulled taut over his thick thighs, when he spread them—which he did, immediately.
For comfort, she imagined.
But in the moment, it didn’t really feel like it.
It felt like he was doing it on purpose.
Like some part of him had taken that hate comment as a challenge. And when she forced herself to look at his face again, the expression on it only backed that assessment
up. There was something . . . watchful about it. Something sly. Like the person she was starting to almost like—or at least
understand—was no longer in control.
Instead, there was this demon.
Eyes dark, tongue curled up to touch one tooth.
Just waiting for her to make a mistake.
This whole thing is, she thought. But she touched the knife she’d found to her palm, anyway. She pressed, thinking it would be difficult to draw
blood. That she would be timid, too queasy to hurt herself, that it wouldn’t be like it was in the movies. Yet red welled
up the moment she did it. It spilled down her hand and wrapped around her middle finger, like a ring.
Then dripped onto him.
Only a drop of it, but apparently a drop of it was enough.
He bucked, to feel it. A sound came out of him, so close to a moan of desire she couldn’t have split the two with a razor.
It made her heart jolt in her chest, and that hollow muscle feeling increase tenfold.
Though it wasn’t either of these things that really got her.
It was the way he turned his head, and then pressed his open mouth to his own upper arm. Right over the swell of pale muscle,
teeth breaking skin almost immediately. As if he could quell the hunger with the taste of his own body.
And when he realized he couldn’t, his gaze slid to her. Heavy, lustrous, full of longing. He murmured words, so low she almost
didn’t hear them—or maybe didn’t want to. Because now they were in her head, running over and over on a loop: You are my every torment, you are my every torment, you are my every torment.
It was the reason she wanted to stop.
It was the reason she couldn’t.
She let the next drop spill over his lips.
His closed lips that parted the moment the red kissed them.
He let his tongue dart out to catch it—quick at first, as if to get it over with.
But then once he’d tasted it, once he had that salt inside him, his eyes rolled closed. And he licked again, long and slow.
Sensuously, her mind suggested.
Because her mind was a traitor. It was already turning on her, before he’d even tried to talk her into something terrible.