Chapter 22
Lilias
YOU KNEW
Iwake in the darkness to the sound of a man’s voice.
Panic wraps its cold fist around my chest. I freeze. My head throbs, and I swear I can still taste that horrible ale in the back of my throat.
“Shit,” the man hisses.
Zarek’s voice. The bed shifts beneath me. There’s a rattling sound that I recognize as the curtains around the bed being pulled back. A moment later, there’s rustling, a scratch, and a soft, golden light flickers over my head and dances across the curtains.
“Godsdamn motherfucker,” the snake whispers.
Curiosity wins over caution, and I open my eyes. Zarek is standing next to the bed, looking down at the sheets and shaking his head. He’s wearing a loose, dark shirt and shorts.
I don’t remember him coming to bed last night.
He promised to take me on a tour of the city after we left the little pub where I stupidly let myself drink too much, but I can’t remember anything about the actual city.
Most of what I remember from our walk is the feel of his arm in mine, the sound of his laugh, and the slowly dawning realization that my husband wasn’t going to send me back to my father in Marion.
I sit up in the bed, pulling the blanket up to my chest.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
And then I see blood on the sheets. I gasp, and Zarek growls. He’s holding something against the inside of his leg.
“Sorry,” he mutters. “It’s nothing.”
“You’re hurt,” I say.
The inside of his thigh is streaked with blood. It’s from the cut he gave himself on our wedding night, I realize. The one that made it look like he’d taken my long-absent maidenhead.
He shrugs. “Six days on horseback. It keeps opening up.”
I frown as I crawl across the bed.
“Sit down,” I say.
He opens his mouth, like he’s going to object.
“Sit,” I say.
He sits on the edge of the bed. I reach for the bundle of cloth he’s holding against his leg. It looks like the shirt he was wearing earlier today, which I’m guessing is not exactly clean. I pull it back, then hiss at what I see.
“This is infected,” I say.
“Not badly,” he replies.
I stare at him just long enough for him to read the you’re an idiot message I’m sending with my eyes, and then I stand up.
“Stay there,” I say.
I grab the candle and turn toward the bathing room without looking back to see if he’s followed my instructions.
Most of my crates from Marion have been delivered, but I haven’t finished unpacking them.
I expected to have less space but more storage in this strange place.
Yes, the windows are lovely, and the bath is massive, but where are the shelves?
Maybe princesses in Vsenrog don’t own things. The thought makes me shiver. I try to ignore it as I pull a roll of bandages out of a crate and a tin of ointment out of a drawer in my little dressing table.
Zarek hasn’t moved when I walk back to the bedroom, the ointment in one hand and the bandages tucked under my arm.
Or, no, he’s shifted a bit further onto the bed.
And he’s holding a pillow in his lap. I set the candle on the table, frown at the cut on his upper thigh, and try not to think about the pillow.
“You didn’t even bandage it,” I say.
He makes a sound in the back of his throat like he’s trying to argue with me, but he can’t think of anything to actually say. I shake my head.
“I thought you were clever,” I mutter under my breath.
He opens his mouth, then hisses when I touch his skin. The area around the cut is warm and red, which isn’t a good sign, but it’s not as bad as I feared. I pull the lid off the tin, then dip my fingers into the cold goo inside.
Zarek sucks in a breath when I bring my fingers to the cut. I ignore him. His hands tighten around the pillow shoved between his legs, and gods, I try to ignore that too. I dip my fingers into the ointment once more, then spread another layer on the sides of the cut.
I’m so close to the edge of that pillow.
I could slip my fingers up his thigh, feel the rasp of fabric on the back of my hand, and reach for the hard press of what I saw on our wedding night.
My hand shakes. I pull away and sink my teeth into my lower lip as my heart races. Zarek said there is no such thing as the stopping point, that men can stop anytime they want no matter how hard they get.
Why in the gods’ many names do I want to push him and find out?
I step back, then grab the roll of bandages in both hands.
“Do I even want to know,” Zarek says, looking up at me, “why my wife has a roll of bandages in our bedroom?”
“It’s for horses,” I admit.
“You thought Vsenrog didn’t have horse bandages?”
I frown. “It’s my recipe,” I confess in a low voice. “The ointment, I mean. I mix it myself.”
My cheeks burn. This feels almost as bad as Zarek discovering Blayne with his pants down in our bedroom. If my father ever found out I was dirtying my hands with healing ointments, he’d be furious, and I probably wouldn’t be able to sit down for weeks.
But what was it Zarek said? I’m going to be clear with you? I guess that cuts both ways, now.
Zarek laughs, low and in the back of his throat.
“I thought you just killed the horses that got hurt,” he says with a grin that makes me think he’s teasing me.
“Then it’s a good thing you didn’t break your leg,” I reply as I stretch the gauze over his skin.
I glance up at him, ready to meet his teasing eyes with a frown. But his expression has changed. Now, he’s looking at me in a way that makes me think of our wedding, the heat and the overly sweet perfume, the crush of his hands against mine as red silk tightened around our wrists.
I turn away. My heart feels like it’s trying to climb the back of my throat, and my hands tremble as I run the roll of bandages below his leg.
“You should have taken care of this much earlier,” I say.
He snorts. “Well, it’s not like I could run to the nearest healer, is it? How was I going to explain this?”
He waves his hand over his thigh. I don’t dare meet his eyes as I finish tucking the loose end of the bandage below the wrap. I step back, then wipe my hands.
“You should change it every night,” I say. “I mean, you should let me change it every night.”
“Thank you.”
His voice is soft. When I dare glance up, he’s staring at the windows behind me. The question rises so softly I almost don’t realize what I’m about to say until the words slip through my lips.
“Why did you do it?” I ask.
He laughs again, that soft, almost mournful sound. And the obvious answer comes to me.
“You knew,” I say.
It feels like getting punched in the gut. I step back, then sink into one of the chairs beside the bed.
“You knew about Blayne before the wedding,” I whisper. “You knew I wasn’t pure.”
Blayne’s words come back to me. Some primitive kingdoms look for blood on the marital sheets as proof of a woman’s virginity. He promised that Ethiria hadn’t done so in centuries; in fact, he said, that custom was on its way out in all the civilized kingdoms.
But apparently not in Vsenrog.
“I didn’t know,” Zarek replies. “Not for sure, at least. I did hear the rumors.”
My eyes sting. I blink furiously as my hands twist in the loose skirt of my nightgown. Blayne told me it wouldn’t matter. The way he spoke, he basically implied it was expected that women would have a lover before their wedding night.
Of course, Blayne also told me men couldn’t stop once their cock was hard. But he stopped when Zarek held a knife to his throat.
“I didn’t do it because of you,” Zarek finally says.
There’s a sharp edge to his voice, something I haven’t heard since he told me he dislikes drugs. I glance up, but he’s still scowling at the window. Only now, his hand is at his throat, and his fingers curl around the little metal tube he wears around his neck.
“I did it because fuck them,” he growls in a low voice. “They think they can make me dance, but they don’t own me.” He turns to me, his dark eyes flashing in the glow of the candle. “They don’t own you either, Princess.”
I swallow hard. What an absurd thing to say. Of course they own me. I accepted that long ago.
Zarek comes to his feet, then pulls the filthy, blood-stained shirt he was holding against his leg over his head. It’s only when he begins to pull his pants back on that I realize what he’s doing.
“You’re leaving?” I whisper.
He ties the laces on his pants. A strange flicker of disappointment curls in my gut.
“I don’t sleep well,” he says. “I would only keep you up. Besides, it’s safer for you if I’m not around.”
I blink, then rub my hand over my wrist, tracing the place where red silk bound us together forever. Zarek walks toward the door, then stops and turns around. He frowns at me.
“Do you know how to defend yourself?” he asks.
“Elrick taught me,” I reply.
My heart sinks. Elrick said he hoped I would never need to know how to throw a man to the ground or break free from someone’s grip.
“Good.” Zarek nods, then walks to the door and pulls his cloak over his shoulders.
Suddenly, I remember how he looked with his shirt off and the length of his cock outlined by his tight black shorts. Some insane part of me wants to beg him to stay.
Instead, I force myself to smile. My chest feels like it’s full of broken glass. Zarek walks through the door, and I hear a soft click as it locks behind him.
The snake is right, I realize as silence fills the room we’re supposed to share.
I have no friends here.