Chapter 16
Devilry So Dangerous That It’s Just Right
Resembling a tall and mighty tree losing a battle, Baz had plummeted straight back as if felled. I threw a nice punch, but I was half his size. My strike shouldn’t knock out a man as big and strong as Baz.
He lay flat on his back on the smooth, glistening floor, unmoving save for the twitching of a vein at his temple. His eyes, those mesmerizing ocean eyes, were closed.
“Baz.”
The vein ceased its clenching.
I leaned over him. “Baz!”
He jerked as if in surprise. When he still didn’t open his eyes, I slapped him.
His head rocked to one side.
“Hunh,” I said. “I thought I’d enjoy that more.”
Even if he hadn’t killed Teo, he was still my captor, the man who’d stuffed me in a cold, dark cage.
It was a nicer prison than what Rafaela had kept me in, little more than a person-sized birdcage, and it was at least as nice as the room Teo, Isi, and I had shared at the fighting pits—until Isi was killed, and then one new boy after another had cycled through her empty bed until Rafaela had found us.
Baz had starved me and made me feed from him when I’d vowed never, ever to drink from the Majora vein. He made me desire him.
Maybe I needed to try harder.
I slapped Baz’s other cheek. His head jerked hard.
That time definitely felt better. Now I wanted to smack him again.
Baz’s eyes snapped open and flashed at me.
“You hit me.”
Leaning back onto my heels, I grinned. “Sure did. In fact, I slapped you twice, right across each cheek. They landed perfectly.” Dreamily, I rubbed each palm. “I can still feel the contact.”
He pushed up onto his elbows and glowered. “So can I.”
“Really, I hit you three times, ’cause first I punched you.”
He rubbed his jaw. “I know. I was there.”
My insides twisted into a knot before I remembered that this man was my enemy, and no matter what he did or how good he looked while doing it, that would never change.
“No, you weren’t there. That’s the whole point. I wasn’t hitting you just for fun.”
“You had ‘fun’ striking me?”
“Definitely. But that was just a bonus.”
His mouth hardened.
“That’s why I hit you, to knock you out of it.”
“I didn’t need to be knocked out of anything, and especially not by you.”
“Tell yourself whatever you want, but that doesn’t change that, yeah, ya did.”
When he stood, I did too. When that eerie moaning snaked through the cave once again, he spun in place, back and forth as far as the Rillis rope would allow, peering down a pair of tunnels that bifurcated away from us.
“You’ve already led us down both of those. We need to head back this way.” I pointed over my shoulder. “There may still be some tunnels or caves we haven’t gone through.”
“We have to find her. We have to help her.”
“Who … Carina?” It came out like a gentle touch, as if he and I were friends, when I should have wanted to flagellate him with the name to punish him for the loss of my brother. “Who is she?”
He reeled back as if I’d physically struck him. “No one. She’s … she’s no one.”
The pain so plainly tugging on his face indicated that Carina, whoever she was, meant everything to him.
“Don’t say her name ever again,” he snapped.
I opened my mouth to demand why I shouldn’t, but ended up closing it, giving my enemy a level of respect he didn’t deserve. I wound the rope around my forearm, tugging him closer.
“What makes you think this person whom you don’t want me to name is in these caves with us?”
In the lumoonlight, his face was usually warm, having been toasted by the sun. Now, it paled.
“She’s…” He shook his head. “She’s not. She can’t be,” he said, so softly it became one with the steady keening. “I was … confused.”
We locked eyes for several beats, during which my power pulsed futilely against my collar.
Never before in my life had I gone so long without connecting to someone else’s blood.
Not only was I usually able to manipulate the blood of others, but it also provided me with information about a person, ranging from what or whom they’d last eaten, to their level of strength or weakness, to sometimes knowing where they’d recently been.
Not all blood provided me with the same data, and some resisted sharing anything at all.
But my power normally managed to retrieve something useful for me.
I missed my power nearly as much as I missed Teo—or perhaps it was as much, so long as I wasn’t admitting it to anyone but myself. The loss of both had left an aching, empty void inside me.
“If she’s not in the caves, then why did you make us run all fucking over looking for her?” I hesitated. “Tell me who she is.”
His face whipped away from mine while he busied himself looking everywhere but at me. When the moaning surged again, a dirge of tragic lament, he brought his hands to his hips, pressing them to his weapons belt.
Shit! I should have swiped that fine-looking dagger with the etched hilt while he was down. What was I thinking? Or not thinking, more like, which was a problem.
“Whoever she is, we have to help her,” Baz said.
“Aren’t you supposed to be a marauding, killer general? That’s not very maraudy.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be a princess who’s secretly an assassin?”
My brows twitched before I halted all other reaction.
“Your face says I’m not supposed to know that.”
Dammit, how did I give it away? I was supposed to be sharper than this, so much sharper.
“I did my research while you were in the dungeon. You’d be amazed what kind of information I can get my hands on when I’m well motivated.”
“Big fail, then. But hey, at least you got the princess part right.”
“Uh-huh.” He smirked—he fucking smirked at me!
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Of course you did. I’m a princess. Or I was until you stole that from me.”
“Good point.”
“What’s a good point?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, it matters.”
The keening crescendoed into a caterwaul.
Baz’s shoulders hitched tight. “How do we get to her?”
“How the scorch should I know? It’s your creepy castle, not mine.” Even so, I called out, “Mauldrene, what’s going on?”
I waited to see if Baz would snicker at me for trying to have a conversation with a freaking castle. When he didn’t, I continued: “It sounds like someone’s hurting, and hurting a lot. Will you lead us to them?”
The wailing, already unbearably loud, grew louder.
“Or is that … you?”
The intestinal-lining-like floor upon which Baz and I stood opened up beneath us. One instant we stood on a solid surface. The next we were free falling in a repeat of our descent from the small library into Mauldrene’s guts.
More of that intestine-like smoothness rushed up to greet us, banging into the soles of my boots. My knees bent to absorb the shock. I crouched to stabilize myself a second before Baz, tugged along by the rope, landed on me, knocking me to the ground.
It was wet, cool, and slimy. Baz was heavy as a boulder until he pushed upward to brace himself on his hands and off of my chest. His legs, of fucking course, had found their way between mine.
His lumoons jerked to a stop beside our faces as I scowled up at him. “Funny how you were falling ass over boots, and you still managed to position yourself just right.”
He circled his hips, pressing his dick against my sweet spot, and smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes. “So you admit this feels ‘just right?’”
I tried to pull away from him but he was too close, his breath warm on my face. “I admit to no such thing. I didn’t say that.”
“You did.”
“Not like that I didn’t.”
His lips tipped upward in devilry so dangerous that it darkened his face. “It’s okay. You can tell me how good I feel between your legs. Trust me, I want to know.”
“I don’t trust you. I—”
A moan crashed against us, so deafening it was as if it originated from Baz or me.
He jumped off me. I leapt to my feet. He clasped my hand and turned us.
From a chain so long it disappeared up into the cave’s yawning darkness …
hung a cage. Even from the fifty feet or so that separated us, and with the darkness largely concealing it, I could tell the cage was exactly like the pair that swung from the cliffside beneath the Palace of Zaraga—another person-sized birdcage.
I stood frozen as memories battered me: the fierce sea wind rocking my cage, whipping it against the cliffside—me clutching the bars until my fingers ached, holding on despite my terrible exhaustion, regardless of the trembling that racked my frame, suffering a gnawing emptiness and a panicked desperation.
Rafaela never told me how long my sentence would last, nor when my next meager meal in a cup would be sent down the chain with a pulley system.
“Velle?” Baz was saying—from much too close.
I staggered away from him. My eyes zeroed in on the cage. I blinked, then blinked again. I shook my head to clear the vision in front of me. It didn’t waver.
Its occupant wasn’t me, but…
Baz stalked toward me. “What is it?”
“I don’t fucking know,” I whispered.
Here I was, on the opposite side of the world from Zaraga and the prison of my past, in a miserable pit inside a fucked-up castle, seeing an impossible face that I knew all too well.