44. Leandra
The house feels like it breathes around me in the dark.
I’ve learned its rhythms now, after seven days of silence.
The sigh of old stone settling at midnight, the whisper of servants’ feet in the corridors before dawn, the crack and spit of fires being fed in rooms I have no need to enter.
They come and go like ghosts, these silent keepers.
They prepare my meals, draw my baths, stoke the flames and never once meet my eyes.
I am a thing to be maintained.
A possession in waiting for the very devil to come back and claim me again.
I sleep because there is nothing else to do.
I sleep because each day stretches endless and empty, because the walls hold no answers and the windows show only winter-dead gardens and grey sky.
I sleep because when I’m unconscious, I don’t have to think about my mother and where she might be.
I don’t have to think about Konstantine and what he will do if he finds me, and I don’t have to think about his brother either.
I don’t have to think about his motives for keeping me here, for whisking me away as if he’s some knight in shining armour, when we both know he is the complete opposite.
A sound pulls me up from dreams I won’t remember. A shift of fabric. A breath that isn’t mine. The soft, certain tread of someone who belongs here.
My hand finds the lamp before my eyes fully open. The switch clicks.
And there he is, the monster himself.
Lazarus stands in the doorway of my bedroom, still as carved marble, still as a predator who has cornered his prey and wants to savour the moment.
He wears exhaustion like a second skin. Shadows bruise the hollows beneath his eyes.
His jaw is dark with days of stubble. His shirt is wrinkled, collar askew, sleeves rolled to the elbows in a way that shows the corded muscle of his forearms and the whispers of ink.
He looks like he’s been fighting wars in hell itself.
“What are you doing?” My voice comes out steady. I’m proud of that. My heart might be a wild thing right now, but my voice does not shake.
He doesn’t answer, not with words.
His eyes hold mine as his fingers find the top button of his shirt.
He works it free with deliberate slowness.
Then the next, and the next. The fabric parts to reveal the landscape of his chest, the black ink of all those tattoos that mirror his brother’s, the ridges of muscle, that deep pink scar that practically splits his chest in two.
I should look away, I should tell him to leave. I should remember everything I’ve survived, everything he’s done, and every reason this is madness.
Instead, I watch his hands.
“You’ve been gone,” I say, and there it is; the crack in my composure, the need I’ve been swallowing for seven fucking days, pretending it isn’t there.
“I’ve been fighting monsters.” His voice is rough as gravel. Low. The kind of voice that vibrates in the hollow of my throat even from across the room. “I’ve been dancing with the devil himself to make sure we win.”
The shirt falls to the floor, and he moves toward me.
The colours rise around him like dawn breaking; gold, amber and deep, impossible blue. They’re calm tonight. Calm and yet still burning, the way the ocean is calm before a storm. The way a candle flame is calm while it consumes its wick.
Devotion. That’s what the gold means. Devotion like a physical force, like gravity, like something that could crush me if I let it. The amber is hunger. The blue is something I don’t have a name for yet.
“Monsters,” I repeat. The bed creaks as I shift backward, propping myself against the headboard. I’m not retreating, I’m making room. “What kind of monsters?”
“The kind that wear friendly faces.” He stops at the edge of the bed, and looks down at me as his hands go to his belt. “The kind that think they’ve won before the game is even over. The kind that don’t realize I’ve been playing them since the moment I learned they existed.”
The buckle clicks open.
“The Esau?”
His jaw tightens at the name. “And others.”
The belt slides free with a whisper of leather. He loops it once around his fist, and my stomach clenches at the casual violence of the gesture. But he only sets it aside on the nightstand, carefully, as if he’s handling something precious.
“I’ve made deals with worse.” He braces one knee on the edge of the mattress.
“I’ve knelt at altars that would make your blood run cold.
I’ve shaken hands with men who deserve to have their hearts cut out, and I’ve smiled while doing it.
” The other knee joins the first, and the bed dips beneath his weight.
“All of it. Every compromise, every sin. Every drop of blood I’ve spilled and will spill. It’s all been for this.”
“For what?”
His hand finds my ankle beneath the covers, and his fingers circle the delicate bone. “For the right to come home to you.”
Home.
The word lands somewhere in my chest and takes root, though I refuse to admit it.
“Do you expect me to be grateful?” I ask. “Do you expect me to…” My words die as he draws the sheet down.
Slowly. Reverently.
The cotton drags across my skin and I feel every fibre of it, every nerve ending waking up and reaching for him. I’m wearing only a thin silk shift, something the servants left in the wardrobe, something that belongs to a version of me I haven’t figured out how to be yet.
His eyes trace the outline of my body with the same intensity he’d give a sacred text.
“I thought about you every night,” he says as his palm slides up my calf.
“Every moment I wasn’t actively planning someone’s death, I was thinking about you.
The way you breathe when you sleep. The sound you make when I touch you here.
” His thumb presses into the soft flesh behind my knee, and I gasp.
“The way you look at me when you forget you’re supposed to hate me. ”
“I don’t hate you.” The words escape before I can stop them.
Something flickers in his eyes. Something dangerous, tender, and utterly unhinged.
“Good,” he says. “Because I’m going to worship you tonight, and I’d prefer you didn’t hate me while I do it.”
He pulls the sheet all the way off.
The cold air hits my skin, and I shiver but he’s already there, his body covering mine, his heat sinking into me like water into dry earth. His mouth finds the curve of my shoulder and I arch into him without meaning to, without wanting to want it, but wanting it all the same.
“Lazarus.”
“Shh.” His lips move against my collarbone. “Let me taste you. Let me remind myself what salvation feels like.”
I know I should say no. I know I should fight this, should push him off and tell him where to go, but that look in his eyes, it’s fucking lethal, and I want it.
I want that pain, that violence, and I want every horrific thing he is offering to me.
I want it all. I want the rage and destruction that will come with accepting this man.
And in truth, I want him. I fucking want, for the first time in my entire life.
He works his way down my body with the methodical devotion of a man reciting prayers. His mouth maps the hollow at the base of my throat. The swell of my breasts above the silk. His tongue traces the edge of the fabric, and I feel the wet heat of it through the thin material.
“Seven days,” he murmurs against my sternum. “Seven days of planning, politicking, and pretending to be someone I’m not. Seven days of sitting in rooms with men who would kill us both if they knew what I was really thinking.”
His fingers find the strap of my shift. He doesn’t pull it down. He just hooks one finger beneath it, resting it there like a question he hasn’t asked yet.
“And what were you thinking?”
He lifts his head. His colours flare; gold, amber, and that unnamed blue.
“I was thinking about the way you taste, the way you feel when you come apart around my fingers. The way your colours must look when you’re fully, truly mine.”
My breath stops.
“You- you know about that? About the colours?”
“I know everything about you, Leandra. I know you see things other people can’t, I know you saw the difference between me and my brother before you even understood we were two separate men.
” He dips his head and presses a kiss to the fabric covering my nipple.
“I know you see the truth of people, which means I know you see exactly what I am.”
“And what are you?”
“A monster.” He pulls the strap down. “But I’m your monster.”
The silk gives way. His mouth closes over my breast, and I stop thinking about anything at all.
There is only sensation. Only the wet pull of his lips, the scrape of his teeth, the way his hand comes up to cup what his mouth can’t reach.
He sucks hard enough to leave a mark, and I grab his hair and hold him there, my hips lifting off the mattress, my body begging for something I don’t have words for.
He moves to my other breast and gives it the same attention. The same focused, devastating worship. His hand slides down my stomach, over my hip, and I’m already wet, already aching, already so far gone I can’t remember why I ever thought this was wrong.
“I want to taste all of you,” he says, and the words vibrate against my skin. “Every inch, every secret place. I want to learn your body so well I could draw it from memory in the dark.”
“Then do it.”
The command comes out breathless. Desperate. But I don’t care.
He lifts his head and looks at me with those eyes that have seen too much and done too much, and still, somehow look at me like I’m the answer to every question he’s ever asked.
“Roll over.”
I do.
He pulls the shift off completely, and the silk pools somewhere on the floor. I’m naked now, face-down on sheets that smell like lavender and something else, something darker, something that might be him.