Chapter 23
No One’s Little Shadow
Insisting that Baz drink from me was a necessary compromise.
I needed answers; I needed solutions; and by the fucking Ethers, I needed them before I went mad locked up in this castle, all but Baz’s slave.
I was bound twice over. All that spared me from being a true slave was that Baz hadn’t commanded me to do much I hadn’t wanted to do—once we got past when he locked me up in his dungeon and starved me, of course; there was always that.
Screwing him was no burden. In fact, the sex was good, concerningly good. Baz had to be the sexiest man to ever strut across the Opalese.
At least I couldn’t be blamed for not resisting his dubious charms. He was my captor.
Anything I did while working to secure my escape was fair play.
It didn’t matter that Rafaela wouldn’t see it that way.
All she’d see would be me slowly softened by our most terrible enemy.
She could never find out about what had transpired since I’d flung myself onto Ombrash Island.
Baz sucked hard on my vein. A fresh wave of ecstasy rolled through my body, warming me from the inside out. I realized his compatriots and even the ghost would be scrutinizing my every move. Even so, I couldn’t help but writhe with my pleasure.
Baz suckled at my neck while he drew hard at my blood and I damn near ethercrested.
My eyelids slammed shut while I squeezed my core, wrestling it under control.
There was absolutely no way I would allow myself to climax in front of Aziza.
The others might be more understanding, but she would never let me live it down.
Another suck of my blood. Another clenching squeeze of my inner walls.
Keep it together, Sora. You must get yourself under control!
I had offered myself up to the very last man in the entire Opalese I should have because … shit, I knew there’d been reasons. Lots of really good reasons. Great reasons, even. What the fuck were they?
A moan loosed from between lips I could clamp together no harder, and I discovered myself grinding on Baz’s lap. He was so rigid it felt like he had an actual rock for a cock.
My head flung itself back of its own accord as I warred with my impulses, fighting to wrangle my thoughts.
I’d always been one to play hard whenever I got the chance, the harder the better.
Life was no gentle mistress. The demigod was as violent and petulant as the rest of her siblings.
Her twin brother Death could cast his pall at any moment.
But, I’d given myself to my captor for very good reasons…
“For dragon’s sake,” Aziza muttered. “They’re seriously going to start fucking with us right here, aren’t they?”
“No,” Ed said. “They wouldn’t do that.” She hesitated. “Well, Baz wouldn’t do that.” Another considering pause. “Yeah, they’re gonna screw right in front of us.”
Their brazen discussion should have yanked me back from my abandon, if only to dish some shit back at them.
“Stop,” Night said. “No more drinking.”
“Baz … brother,” Félix said. “You’ve fallen under her spell.”
That, the elf’s accusation? It was what finally catapulted me down from the Ethers. I slammed back into awareness of the full extent of my actions.
My thighs clamped down around Baz’s, stilling my rocking. Though I squeezed hard, he continued grinding up into me.
With my head kinked beneath his fangs, I ground out, “For the last time, already, I am not casting spells on him!”
After saying it, I couldn’t remember a time when the Bazrians had accused me of doing so, only Baz.
But I didn’t recant my anger. If Baz was practically my slave master, then they were his enforcers.
They all deserved my wrath, and that was before I doled out the punishment they’d justly earned for destroying our world.
The supposed prophet, Isai, with all his terrifying imports from other worlds to this one, had simply made what they’d done worse.
“You have to be working your faithum on him,” Aziza said. “If not…”
For the first time since I’d met the mouthy wench, I wanted her to continue.
If not, what? What, Aziza, what? Because I sure as shit couldn’t make sense of our attraction to each other. I agreed with Baz only on the one thing: it was unnatural. It was perverse and so beyond taboo, even our depraved world made no allowance for what Baz and I might be together.
Both arms clutching me against his chest as if he was incapable of letting me go, with muscles strong and corded, he continued to drink. But my fury had crystallized my thoughts.
I remembered precisely why I’d done what I’d vowed I’d never allow anyone to do to me, much less my most significant mortal enemy.
Forbidding the drinking from my vein and refusing to drink from another’s was the only promise I’d ever made to myself that was for me and me alone.
Even my promise to punish whoever had abducted me wasn’t solely for me.
The deed couldn’t go unpunished, or Alonso and Rafaela would be viewed as weak.
I’d allowed Baz to attach himself to me like a starsucker because my telltale scar had suddenly reappeared, and this ridiculous, make-believe veil was no lasting solution.
It would be mere days before the Domdurron elites, all who would have powers of their own, discovered that I still lived.
I’d have to kill them all to keep them from spreading the news of my reappearance, and their deaths would be noticed. They’d set off problematic ripples.
Besides that, I had to make sense of the phantom who looked like someone she absolutely should not, and of a dragon book filled with ancient secrets. I also had to save an emperor I’d much rather make dead to win my freedom and Marina’s. And that only got me started on all the rest.
Like tracking down Teo’s murderer.
For it all to work, I needed Baz being Baz and not some dead-eyed diabscure with fine taste in boots. An injection of my blood was the fastest way to snap him out of whatever strange trance had hold of him.
I pressed my hands into his shoulders. He continued to suckle at my neck.
But when I shoved down with such force that a normal man would have shrunk beneath me, he finally stilled, with his mouth pressed to me.
With tiny, careful swipes of his tongue, he cleaned me.
He kissed the spot, went to rest his forehead against it, and rammed into my low-sitting collar.
With an annoyed tsk, he pulled back to stare up into my eyes.
“Not so nice, is it?” I snapped. “Really gets in the way, my slave-bitch collar.”
Anger, anger was the safe ground. I rooted myself in it.
“We have more pressing issues than your scratching the itch,” Aziza said, and though I agreed, I side-eyed her.
I could have moved off Baz now, and I really should have wanted to.
But he was nuzzling his forehead against my cheek, as if we didn’t have witnesses to this unexpected soft side, as if he weren’t the most fearsome man in the entire Opalese.
Zaragans only feared Junot because they feared who was behind him.
“You shouldn’t speak to him like that. He’s our commander,” Ed said to Aziza.
“My point exactly,” she said. “He’s our commander.”
Baz’s entire body stiffened. He pulled his face from mine, his eyes meeting my own for a long second before he looked away, taking in the room. I watched him closely as his focus sharpened, and the blackness finished receding from his eyes.
I tossed my head and nailed Aziza with a glower capable of setting her on fire. “Still think I shouldn’t have given him my blood?”
I heard the words outside of myself. What the dragonfire was I thinking? That I should help my enemy at all was unforgivable. Rafaela would want to stuff me in the cage until another few centuries passed—not that I would let her.
But the Bazrians seemed to miss my disappointment in myself. Begrudgingly, Aziza gave a swift nod.
“What was that?” I said. “I didn’t quite hear your thanks.”
Aziza slapped her hands akimbo. “That’s because I won’t be thanking you, not now, not ever. You tried to kill him. Funny how you keep forgetting.”
I smiled my dangerous smile. “Oh. I don’t forget it for an instant.”
She glared. I glared harder.
Beneath me, Baz cleared his throat, then gently lifted me off his lap, lowering me to the bed beside him.
He ran the ropeless hand along his face.
“What happened?” He flicked a look to the farthest corner of his large room.
The ghost still hunched there, ever watchful, ever listening—ever silent and denying me my answers.
“Last thing I remember, I was trying to get out of the sitting room. Was this all … was this Mauldrene?”
Ed’s lips pursed. Night stared at him, unblinking. Félix studied the scene with eyes I was realizing were the most astute of them all.
Aziza said, “Partly, yes. But not mostly. Baz, we need to talk.” She pointed at me with her chin. “In private. Without her.”
“Rude,” I said.
“So?”
I held up the arm that dangled with the Rillis rope.
“She’s right,” Baz said. “We’re bound. She’s not leaving my side.”
“She has to,” Aziza said.
“She doesn’t.”
“Are you going to let her shadow your every step?”
“I don’t ‘shadow’ anyone,” I grunted, though it seemed lately that I, in fact, did.
Aziza looked only at Baz. “You’re going to sleep with her? In your bed?”
“That’s the logical thing to do.”
“None of this is logical. You can’t sleep with your would-be assassin an arm’s length from you. Tell him, guys.”
“She’s right,” Night said. “Too dangerous.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Baz said, sounding unconcerned, when even I was. How would we sleep together? That sounded dangerous, indeed.
“You need to tell me what happened to me, and she’s not going anywhere,” Baz said. “So. What happened?”
Aziza sighed like she was marching toward the gallows.
“The, ah, phantom was about to pop out of you, and Mauldrene wouldn’t let us out of the sitting room.
So I illusioned the nobles into thinking they were at a decadent party with plenty of olandule and olvidian—the blats are fun entertainment—and then we got the doors open, and Night and Ed carried you here.
” She glanced at me. “With your little shadow trailing alongside us, of course.”
“I’m no one’s ‘little shadow.’ I couldn’t but run alongside him.”
Aziza smiled a touché that was no fucking touché. “Exactly.”
“No, not ‘exactly.’”
“The doors opened finally, then?” Baz asked.
“Um…” Aziza glanced to the others then back. “Not exactly.”
“So what, then?”
I rubbed at my neck, scratching under the collar. The puncture wounds were already nearly closed, the skin itchy around them. “I had a little chat with Mauldrene”—and by little chat I really meant that I’d begged her—“and she opened the doors for me.”
Baz’s brows jerked upward, though he’d been the one to suggest that Mauldrene favored me long before I’d suspected it. “For you?”
“Yeah, for me.” I peered into the gloom of the room’s farthest corners. “And for her. Who is she?”
“We’ll get to that. First.” He glanced at the others. “Lev and Moncho?”
“Likely in urgent need of our intervention,” Felix said.
“Then let’s go.” Baz stood and was steady as ever.
I tugged at the rope. “I need to know about the phantom.”
“The phantom is long dead.” He glanced at her with a sad, apologetic smile. “My friends are not. She will wait. You will wait.”
I scoffed. “Are you trying to order me around? ’Cause that sounded like an order.”
“You can take it that way and come along. Or I can pick you up and carry you.”
“Like fiery flames, you’ll carry me.”
“Then follow me.”
When he stalked toward the door, picking up his pair of broadswords along the way, the rope tugged. I rose and walked after him—like his scorching little shadow.
When I passed Aziza, I hissed at her, then yanked on the rope. Baz turned.
“What of the phantom? Who’ll guard her so she’s here when we return?”
“No one. She’s not going anywhere.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I do. I didn’t take her memories, but I feel her.”
“Then you have answers for me too.”
“Maybe I do. Either way, after.”
I snarled like a pissed-off feethle, but fuck if I didn’t still pad after the asshole when the rope next went taut.
To Aziza, I tossed over my shoulder, “Call me a ‘little shadow’ again and I’ll take your tongue.”
She barked a laugh as she, Ed, Night, and Félix trailed after us.