Chapter 2
Aster woke from a nightmare. She’d been kidnapped by a seabird and then dashed on the rocks like a mollusk, where she’d oozed and bled into the waves.
The image was gruesome and unbefitting the imagination of a council lord’s daughter, likely to earn her punishment at the back of her father’s hand.
She would tell no one of it, not even her dear nightmaid.
She rolled over in her warm bed, determined to go back to sleep, but immediately met resistance.
Hot, solid resistance. She was too distracted to investigate because at the same time, a knifelike stab to her ribs reminded her that, while the seabird had been a dream, the reality was not far from it.
She had fled the colony, but the sea had stolen her chance of escape, battered her against the rocks, nearly frozen her to death.
And someone or something had stolen her from its grip.
She had a vague memory of flying, but that couldn’t be right.
More likely she’d been dragged from the choppy waves by a dockworker.
Her broken rib complained when she tried to sit up. Aster moaned in pain, and someone stroked a hand down her back. Her bare back.
Her eyes flew open but met only darkness. She reached out and touched velvet. Immediately she knew it was not the deep red velvet of the wool skirts she’d been wearing, the ones that had nearly drowned her. It was living, breathing, warm velvet, velvet that rose and fell with someone’s breath.
The breath caught, and an accented growl warned, “Careful, female.” Though it spoke in common tongue, it was no human voice. Not a dockworker who saved her, then. A Nightborn.
She wasn’t in the colony but on the shore, she realized.
In the arms of a predator.
Naked.
She felt for her ribbons, and they were gone, too. Her ears rang with panic. “Where are my clothes?” It came out a squeak.
“Hung to dry. Too dangerous to light a fire. I had to warm you other ways.”
Heat flooded her face as she was suddenly conscious of velvet touching every bit of her front, its soft brushes against her breasts and the swell of her belly both soothing and stimulating.
She scooted back as far as the arms that clasped her allowed.
“We didn’t—? You didn’t—? My ribbons!” she burst out, unable to voice the question in her heart as her pulse swelled and choked her.
“With your clothes,” the deep voice grunted. “They were a beast to unknot. I nearly cut them with my claws.”
“They’re supposed to be!” Heat spilled down to her knees. She was so unsettled by the thought of male fingers working her ribbons, unpicking their complicated twists and bows and slowly unwinding them from her hips and thighs, that she hardly registered the word claws. “Did you ruin me?”
“Obviously not.”
Nothing was obvious. Aster dipped her fingers between her legs, testing for some telltale sign that she’d been changed by him.
A slick wetness coated them, the secret kind that sometimes came from dreams or when she read stories of husbands kissing wives.
Had he done this to her? Or was it her own wicked enjoyment at the thought of him seeing her ribbons?
Him.
He caught her wrist and inhaled, a slow, soft sound that made her skin prickle with awareness. Who was he? Her savior…or her captor?
All the stories she knew of Nightborn males were of their appetites. For violence. For females. And for blood. As this one had kept her alive and claimed to have no interest in ruining her, that left only one possibility. He’d saved her to feed from her.
An image flashed before her eyes in the pitch blackness, one of long, silvered canines sinking into the wrist he still gripped. To her shock, it was not one she wholly disliked.
“Who are you?” she asked, ears burning.
“Better if you don’t know.”
Aster knew male condescension when she heard it. On any other day in the colony she might have accepted his tone as the way things were, but this wasn’t the colony. This was a hole in the ground, judging by the scent of damp earth. The rules didn’t apply here.
She pulled her wrist back. “That doesn’t make any sense. How could it be better for me not to know something that is particularly relevant to my current situation?”
“Because it is also relevant to mine, and if, when you return to your island, you tell your council my Night-given name, it’s likely my brothers will have to light my pyre. It is not better for you if you don’t know it. It’s better for me.”
“Oh.” He meant to return her to the colony. Dread seeped through her at the thought of standing before her father and confessing everything: Slipping a powder into her mother’s tea. Tricking her nightmaid. Stealing the boat. Acting so recklessly that her ribbons were untied.
She swallowed. She was ruined no matter what. Not a single face on the council would believe that this Nightborn hadn’t touched her. No man would take such a wife. She would be locked away in the nunnery, become a sad family secret, a cautionary tale told to other girls.
“Please don’t take me back, sir.”
“Sir?” For the first time, the voice held a hint of humor. “I did not know humans held such respect for my kind.”
“Well, what else am I supposed to call you, if you won’t give me your name?”
“More often we are called monsters.” He was making fun of her still.
“Shall I call you that, then?” She issued the question like a challenge, and then quailed at her own audacity. Just because she couldn’t see his teeth in the dark didn’t mean they weren’t there. And just because he planned to return her to the colony didn’t mean he wouldn’t bite her first.
She shivered, but it wasn’t entirely out of fear.
“You can call me whatever you like.” His voice was half an octave lower, and she felt his breath rush out against her face. At first it sounded like an invitation, a shocking proposition that heated her core as she imagined closing the gap between them, pressing her mouth to his fanged one.
“Monster, then,” she whispered. She shifted closer and felt something hot and hard against her thigh. She could guess what it was, even though she couldn’t see in the dark. She bit her lip to hold back the moan that threatened to give her away.
Why was she harboring these absurd, dangerous thoughts? Released from her ribbons, she was as wanton as she had always been warned. Rather than feeling shamed by it, she only heated further, desire licking between her legs like invisible flames.
He doused it in an instant. “It doesn’t matter to me what tales a half-drowned human tells about the vicious beast who clawed off her clothes.” His tone was jagged and cold and cut her more deeply than it should have.
“I won’t tell any such tales. Why would I? All I have to reveal is that I’m ruined.”
“You seem perfectly fine to me.” She felt the fingers on her back contract slightly, as though he’d started a caress and then stopped himself.
“Fine?” She scoffed. “You’ve seen my ribbons! You untied them yourself. You know their knots!”
“So?” Was he being purposely obtuse? Or did he really not know?
“So you’re not my father nor my husband, the only two males allowed to see their color and pattern.
They will believe you claimed me if you know what no man should.
” Her voice rose as she finished. She had never seen him in the light, but still she could picture his deep blue Nightborn fingers, tipped with sharp, black claws, tracing the crisscrossing blue-and-silver lines over her skin before he untied them.
She should have been horrified by the image of his alien hands on her most intimate places, but part of her wished she could’ve watched it, like it was a real betrothal night. Something she would never have now. No one would want her.
“What about a healer?” he asked.
“I could probably use one,” she admitted, testing her side. It hurt, but she couldn’t feel any breaks. Cracked, maybe.
“I mean your ribbons.” He said the word like it puzzled him. “Surely a healer has seen them when you received treatment.”
He really didn’t know anything.
“Women don’t see healers. We mark our nightmaids and send them as our proxy.” Her own nightmaid, Mithri, had recently made trips to and fro from the healer’s shop to secure powders for cramps, her pale-blue stomach dotted with seaberry-ink Xs to show the places Aster had pangs.
“Our females show their bodies in your stead?” He sounded shocked.
“Yes, of course. They can’t be compromised in the same way we can. Except during the Revel,” she quickly amended, “but we wouldn’t send them then.”
The Revel, marked by the conjunction of Manna and Corek, was the time when the nightmaids went into their yearly heat. Their wombs were sealed off except during those few days when the Nightborn males were allowed to cross the tide-exposed sand bridge to visit them in the colony.
Under the cover of darkness, the streets filled with rutting blue bodies while the humans stayed safely locked away.
The couplings Aster had observed when she peeked through the crack in her shutters while she was supposed to be sleeping hadn’t looked so terrible.
She couldn’t help wondering if this Nightborn male had been one of those she’d seen, and the folds between her legs gave a pointed pulse.
“No, not during the Revel,” he echoed bitterly. “Well, I won’t tell them if you won’t. Problem solved. You’re no longer ruined.” In a rush of movement, he sat up and moved away from her, and she caught a quiet grunt of pain.
“You’re hurt!” She sat up, too surprised to think of her modesty, and regretted it instantly when the knife in her rib twisted, forcing her back down.
“The salt.” She could hear an equal grimace in his voice.
Of course, Nightborn were allergic to the high concentrations of minerals in the Salten Sea.
That’s why the human colony was located on an island, for defense.
The waters burned Nightborn skin and, along with a few well-aimed arrows, kept them away from the city walls.
This one must have had seawater plastered all over him as he carried her to safety, and he likely hadn’t left her side since. He must be in agony.
“You should’ve washed it off.” The rebuke left her lips before she could stop it.
“You would’ve died of chill if I’d left you,” he returned.
“And you’re willing to pay in pain because you want me alive. What for? Blood? Ransom?” Her breath hitched. “Breeding?”
“No.” His voice echoed harshly in the space, bouncing off stone. A cave, then, not a hole in the ground. “I merely want you not dead and not here, so the treaty can remain not broken.”
The treaty. It all came back to the saltstained treaty. The reason she had to escape the colony was the same reason he wanted to send her back. If the Nightborn knew what the council was doing, knew what they had been doing to subvert its provisions, the treaty would be null and void, anyway.
She crossed her arms and set her jaw, blinking against the blackness that pressed against eyes as they strained and failed to focus on something, anything. “I’m sorry, but I can’t go back.”
His voice echoed so she could hardly tell where he stood. “You must. You’ll be missed, and my people will be blamed. You probably already have been missed.”
“The treaty ends in two nights. We just have to wait it out.”
“We aren’t doing anything. You are going back, conscious or otherwise,” he growled, stopping her continued protests before she could squeak them out.
“Every hour you remain on the shore is another step toward war, something neither of us can afford. What good are your precious ribbons if they’re sliced to shreds along with everything and everyone else you love? ”