Chapter 12
Deep Inside Your Grandiose and Naughty Castle
Tugged along by the Rillis rope, Baz was in a freefall he feared would never end.
When he finally smacked onto a padded surface in the darkness, he landed in a crouch that rattled his knees.
For a heartbeat he experienced tremendous relief—until his lumoons caught up with him to illuminate the bottom of a pit with smooth and shiny walls.
Dark as shadows, they reminded him of gum tissue, or perhaps of a monstrous vagina.
He saw no exit to the circle that was the diameter of two men.
When he touched the walls, they were cool but not cold for once, and his fingers glided across them, coming away the slightest bit moist, adding to the sense that this plunging pit was somehow alive.
“By the Ethers and all the Fuerin,” he muttered as he glanced around. “This cannot be good.”
Never had Baz had cause to wonder what it was like for prey to travel through a predator’s guts.
He drew his shortsword and stared at the Rillis rope, stretched taut and still tied tightly around his wrist. It disappeared into the tissue-like wall.
Experimentally, he yanked on it. It lurched toward him.
When he released it, it slid back into the wall.
This next time, he pulled harder, and was rewarded with a thud and a yelp from the other side of the wall—or from inside it, maybe, who knew?
The usual laws of nature didn’t hinder Mauldrene.
The rope appeared to be … absorbed. There was no hole for it, no disturbance in the tissue.
From the wall came a muffled, “Dammitall, is that you, Alobaz?”
Relief at hearing her voice surged through him in a warm wave, leaving him grumbling and shaking his head. His friends were right. He’d lost all perspective. He should be whipping the woman who’d attempted to murder him, not pining after her, for dragon’s sake!
When an image assailed him of her nude and prone on his bed, with her smooth, beautifully round ass up in the air, he behind her with a whip pulled back and ready to smack, she with eyes pleading for him to do it, he understood with complete clarity.
So long as he remained on the same island with the woman, he was in grave danger.
Remaining tethered to her so that he couldn’t distance himself from her more than a few feet made him a monumental dumbass.
Had any of his soldiers left themselves so blatantly vulnerable to their assassins, he’d have locked them in a cage and lost the key—for their own damn good.
“Of course it’s me,” he snarled at the wall. “Who the fuck else would it be?”
Who else would be stupid enough to follow the contemptible woman into the bowels of a cruel, magical castle? No one, obviously. He squirmed at the renewed sensation of being stuck inside Mauldrene’s digestive tract, hoping fiercely that she didn’t actually have one.
You’re linked to her via the Rillis rope. You had no choice but to follow. That’s the point of it.
The lie that popped into his mind, ever so conveniently, only made him angrier.
No matter the circumstance, there was always another choice, another way out—one just had to search for it, think it through and find it.
Wasn’t that what he taught his soldiers?
Never to settle, always to spot the better move, the win concealed behind fear and weakness?
Baz was bound to her, and the Rillis rope was no toy. It was a powerful magical object. Its enchantment had never been broken by the person who was bound by it.
But Baz was the one doing the binding.
“I guess it had to be you,” she said on what sounded like a sigh but was a bit garbled by the tissue separating them. “You’re the only ogre around.”
“What does that even mean? You’re going to drive me crazy, woman.”
“It means whatever I want it to mean.”
“Which actually means you don’t know what you said, you just said it.”
“I know what I said,” she snapped, her words coming through crisper thanks to their sharpness.
He scoffed. “Okay, then. But you don’t know ogres.”
“Of course I do. I’ve met ogres.”
With no immediate threat that he could sense at the bottom of this pit, he sheathed his sword and began patting the wall for a way to reach her—so he could throttle the infuriating female.
“I bet you haven’t met actual ogres,” he said while he prodded the wall. It gave a little, as if he were pressing against Velle’s abdomen, or her thighs.
“Why wouldn’t I have? How do you know whom I have and haven’t met?” Soft palming sounded from the other side. She was exploring too.
“Are you trying to remind how little I know you, and how much less I should trust you?”
He shouldn’t trust her at all. Your would-be murderer, Baz, remember?
She hesitated. “No.”
“It just comes naturally to you, then, it would seem.”
“So it would seem.” Pat, pat, then squelch, squelch.
He found a groove concealed within slick folds of the wall, sucked in a breath, then slipped his hand inside it, every one of his muscles tense. When nothing bit him or sliced him, he wiggled his fingers, then cringed.
“Really like a vagina,” he mumbled under his breath.
“What’d you say?”
“What you’re referring to is a pygmy ogre, not a regular ogre.”
“That’s not what you said.”
“The wall between us is thick.”
“How do you know how thick the wall is? I can hear you well enough to know you said ‘vagina.’”
“Then why the fuck did you ask what I said?”
“Ah-ha! So you admit it.”
“You’re the one who just said it, not me.”
“I thought I heard wrong, ’cause why would the Razer be talking about vaginas while we’re stuck down here?”
“What I was saying was that full-grown ogres are believed to be extinct. One hasn’t been spotted in over two hundred years.”
“Wow, what wonderfully fascinating and enlightening conversation you’re offering me while we’re trapped down who knows where.”
“Don’t go giving me shit. All the dragonshit’s due to you, not me.”
Baz found another slit concealed in the wall and dipped exploratory fingers inside it. Far too much, it reminded him of gliding into his temptress. He yanked out his hand, wiping it on his pant leg.
He frowned. The lumoonlight glistened along the wall, highlighting its unnatural smoothness. “Where are we?”
“Uh, deep inside your grandiose and naughty castle?”
“You’re insufferable. I obviously mean, where in the castle are we, and why? What the fuck did you do? You’re my prisoner.”
“Like I could forget it for a second with this collar constantly suffocating me. Just ’cause you think I’m your prisoner does not mean I’m gonna act like one.”
“Of course not. Why would I expect you to make a single thing easy?”
“You expect me to make things easy for you? Do you really?” She screamed, “You murdered my twin brother, my fucking everything, you fucking son of a fucking bitch!” Even through the wall, her accusation slapped his ears like cymbals.
“May Justice pin you down while she sics Misery on you for the rest of your awful life.”
He roared, “For the last fucking time, I. Did. Not. Kill. Your. Brother!”
His shoulders were hunched upward, his nostrils flaring. When only silence answered, he smacked the wall hard with an open palm.
It shuddered and rolled like plump flesh, groaning faintly, as if the protest came from somewhere far away and deep inside.
Baz was backing away, each of his steps sinking an inch, when the Rillis rope jerked his wrist, snapping his arm upward.
He had only the time to grip the rope so it wouldn’t wrench his shoulder out of its socket before he stumbled forward—and into the wall.
With a stomach-knotting squelch that he’d never, ever forget, no matter how many centuries he lived, the tissue sucked him into its midst. As if it were a gigantic sponge and he an insignificant fleck, it absorbed him. The wall fluttered, pulsing in and out, like inflating then deflating lungs.
His own breathing was choppy and panicked, a fact he’d never admit.
Not even in the middle of the bloodiest battles had he given fear free rein.
Allowing fear inside was the first step to failure.
But this … this … all-encompassing, constricting, slimy …
flesh-like tissue that was supposed to be part of a stone-and-mortar castle?
This shit wasn’t fucking normal. This kind of shit didn’t even share the same world with “normal.”
Once again, he was yanked forward by the rope. The cool, moist tissue squished his cheeks until his mouth puckered; compressed his shoulders and hips, digging his sword and dagger painfully against his thighs; squeezed even his cock and balls, stealing his breath entirely.
When he eventually emerged from the wall several harrowing lifetimes later, he burst free with a pop, like smacking lips.
His knees wobbled, so he locked them tight.
He cleared his throat, ran a hand over hair coated in …
a dampness he refused to examine too closely, and squared his chest toward his temptress.
There she stood, clutching the offending book to her chest, bathed in the warm glow of her own lumoonlight, since his lumoons were only just then pushing through the wall at his back. A cavern made of the same dark, squelchy tissue dwarfed her, with multiple tunnels snaking away from it.
“So you can produce your own lumoons,” he said, relieved to hear his voice steady and firm. It was the only thing he could think to say as his scattered thoughts assembled. She’d remained in the dark in her cell in the dungeon.
She shook her head, her hair, damp as his was, flicking in thick strands against her face. “No, I can’t, thanks to you.” She flicked her collar. It gave a quiet jangle. “It’s dampening my fae power, remember?”
“Hmph.”
“Hmph? What’s that mean?”
“The collar shouldn’t keep you from making lumoons.”
“And why’s that? You need faithum to create lumoons, and this scorching collar turns off my magic.”
“I’m just, well, surprised, I guess.”
“You guess.”
“I figured the collar would only block the powers unique to you as an individual fae, not the basic ones shared by everyone.”
“You figured wrong.”
“Hmph.”
She tsked and yanked on the rope, just to tug on Baz. He staggered a step closer. “For the love of dragons, will you knock it off already with the fucking humming? You’re making me insane.”
He cocked a brow and a hip. “This is the sane you?”
She threw back her head in affected martyrdom and groaned loudly. When her head snapped down, her eyes blazed like dancing flames.
He put up both hands. The rope, now damp, dangled heavily between them. “Okay, okay. Let’s just figure out how to get out of here.”
“Who says I want to get out of here?”
“We’re standing inside what I’m thinking is Mauldrene’s guts.”
“It is. They are.”
Even with his pair of lumoons joining the two hovering beside her, the lumoonlight traveled only far enough to illuminate both of them. Beyond their light, the cavern, vast enough for their voices to echo, faded into sinister shadows.
“You believe these are her insides, and you don’t want to get out of here?” Maybe his temptress really was crazy.
“Why would I? You’ll just lock me back up in the dungeon till I rot.” She harrumphed. “Or you’ll fuck me to death, maybe, with that monster dick of yours.”
“Monster big dick.”
“Whatever you gotta tell yourself.”
“I’m not putting you back in the dungeon. I took you out of there, didn’t I?”
“Oh yeah, that’s right. My fucking savior. Should I bow down and kiss your ass now?”
“If you’d like.”
“I wouldn’t like. You’re my brother’s mur—”
He whipped his head up so fast that his neck popped, echoing in the pulsing, breathing warren of creepy castle guts.
Looking upward, all he could make out was glistening dark walls leading into a blackness so rich it was like velvet.
Picturing his words stretching to punch through that velvet, he bellowed, “I did not kill your brother!”
His denial reverberated, setting the floor beneath them to quivering, the vibration spreading up his legs. His eyes had to be burning as ferociously as hers.
“I’m responsible for so many deaths that I’ll never be able to scour their stain from my essence. To my eternal shame, I’ve lost count of how many lives I’ve taken. But I never let go of a face. I’m haunted by the faces of every single man and woman I’ve ever killed.”
She opened her mouth.
“No, I did not kill children. Not once, not ever. And I didn’t kill your brother. If I had, I’d own up to it, I really would.”
“I’m just supposed to believe you?”
He threw up his hands. “Believe me or don’t, I really don’t fucking care anymore.
But think about it for a second. Why wouldn’t I admit to killing your brother if I had?
My father would be proud of me for once.
He’d laud me for taking out the Rubor crown prince.
I’d be his fucking hero, at least for a day or two. So why wouldn’t I fess up?”
“Because you’re a liar who’s trying to manipulate me.”
He sighed so deeply he felt his frustration rattle his bones. “I … there’s nothing I can say to convince you”—and why the fuck was he trying to convince his enemy of his goodness—in this one instance—anyway? “I just … I didn’t do it.”
He held her eyes as their glow intensified, until her eyeballs vibrated.
“You really didn’t kill him?”
“No, my dove, I didn’t. I promise you.”
He anticipated some shit about how his promises meant nothing. She breathed in and out, in and out, then in and out again.
“By the Ethers and Fuerin, you really didn’t kill him, did you?” Her words were a mere whisper.
“No, I really didn’t.”
“Well, fuck.”
That wasn’t what he’d expected. But then, when had the woman ever done a single predictable thing?