Chapter 20 #2
"What's so important about this bath, anyway?" His gaze slides to Iowyn, standing near the door with her arms crossed. "Actually, don't answer that. I can guess."
"Unless you want details about exactly what I plan to do to her in that water, stop guessing out loud."
Iowyn makes a choked sound.
"Tempting, but I'll pass."
I cross to Iowyn. She takes a step back and I take two forward.
"What are you doing?" she asks.
"Taking you to the bathhouse."
"I don't need—I can walk—"
I pick her up.
She makes a sound, startled and indignant, and her hands grab my shoulders for balance. I'm already moving toward the door.
"Put me down—"
"No."
"I can walk. I just said I can walk—"
"I know."
"Then why—"
"Because I want to. Because you squirm when you're embarrassed and I want that too. Because if I don't keep my hands on you I'm going to do something worse before we get to the bathhouse."
Behind us, Renan snorts. "Try not to drown each other," he calls after us.
Iowyn's fingers are digging into my shoulders, her body tense in my arms, and I can feel her heartbeat against my chest. Fast. Getting faster.
"You're impossible," she mutters.
"Yes."
I carry her down the corridor.
The bathhouse is mine. Not Discord's. Not the estate's. Mine. A chamber carved deep into the rock at the far end of my territory, fed by hot springs that run through the mountain's roots. I had it constructed centuries ago after I got tired of sharing.
I don't share anymore.
The steam hits us when I push through the door and Iowyn's hair curls in it immediately, little wisps escaping around her face. I set her down on the tiled floor and she steps back, putting distance between us.
I close the distance.
"Koshin—"
"Arms up."
She stares at me. "What?"
"Arms up. So I can undress you."
Her cheeks flush and the color spreads down her throat, disappearing beneath her collar. I want to follow it with my tongue. I want to strip her bare and lick a line from her throat to her cunt and find out if she flushes there too.
"I can undress myself," she says. "I've been doing it my entire life."
"I'm sure you have."
"So you don't need to—"
"I want to."
She's still staring and I reach for the laces I just tied an hour ago.
"I don't—" She tries to step back and I follow. "This isn't necessary—"
"It isn't."
"Then why—"
"Because you're mine."
"And I want to undress you. Bathe you. Put my hands on every part of you until I know exactly what makes you shake."
"That's—"
"Arms up."
She raises her arms.
I unlace her slowly, my fingers brushing her skin every chance I get—the curve of her spine, the dip of her waist, the wings of her shoulder blades. She's trembling. Small, barely visible tremors that she probably thinks I can't feel.
I feel everything.
The dress falls. She's wearing a shift underneath, thin linen, and I can see the shape of her through it. The swell of her breasts. The curve of her luscious hips. The shadow between her thighs.
I take a breath. Then another.
"Arms," I say. My voice sounds wrong. Rougher than it should.
She raises them again and I pull the shift over her head.
She's—
I need to stop looking.
"Into the water," I say.
She goes.
I watch her descend the steps. Watch the water rise up her calves, her thighs—thick, soft, the kind that felt like heaven wrapped around my head.
The water swallows her hips next and I have to stop breathing for a second because her hips are wide and round and I want to grip them hard enough claim.
I want to pull her back against me and watch the way her ass would press into my—
She stops when the water reaches her chest, her arms folded across herself, her back to me.
I'm still staring. At the curve of her waist. At the flare of her hips disappearing into the water. At every soft, heavy inch of her that I want to put my mouth on.
I undress.
Her breathing changes when she hears my clothes hit the tile, a sharp little hitch, but she doesn't turn around.
I enter the water.
She flinches when I touch her shoulder and my hand stays where it is.
"Turn around."
"I don't—"
"Turn around."
She turns.
I don't look down. It takes everything I have, but I don't look down. I look at her face instead—the flush on her cheeks, the uncertainty in her eyes, the way her teeth catch her lower lip.
I want to bite that lip. Pull it between my teeth and make her moan into my mouth while I fuck her against the edge of this pool.
"Sit," I say. "There's a ledge."
She finds it, lowering herself until the water reaches her collarbone, and I sit behind her, close, my knees bracketing her hips.
I reach for the soap.
I wash her hair first. My fingers work through the tangles, and she makes a small sound when I scratch her scalp. I add it to the catalog I'm building—the sounds she makes, the things that break her composure, the places I'll exploit when she finally lets me.
"You don't have to—"
"Stop telling me what I don't have to do."
She goes quiet.
I rinse the soap from her hair, tilting her head back with one hand. Her throat is exposed. Long. Pale. I can see her pulse fluttering under the skin.
I don't bite.
It's a near thing.
I move to her shoulders instead, working the soap into her skin, feeling the knots of tension under my fingers, pressing until she exhales.
Then lower. Her back.
The scars are easier to see in the water, in the light. More of them than I realized. Some thin, some thick, some layered on top of each other where the whip landed twice in the same place.
Discipline, she called it.
My jaw aches from how hard I'm clenching it.
I wash each one. Trace the lines with my fingers. She's tense under my hands, waiting for me to say something, and I don't. I just touch her. Learn the map her father left on her skin.
When I'm done, I press my mouth to the worst one, a thick ridge near her shoulder blade, and she shivers.
"órhal," I murmur against the scar. "Mine. These are mine now. Every scar. Every mark. Mine."
"What does that mean?" she asks. "That word."
"Later."
She doesn't respond. But she doesn't pull away either.
We sit in the steam for a moment, her back against my chest, the water lapping at the edges of the pool. Then she speaks again.
"You said something, more like mumbled it in your sleep. About being locked away. In a place where time moved differently."
My hands pause on her shoulders.
"What did that mean?"
What did that mean?
Such a simple question.
What does it mean to be chained in the dark for decades, alone with nothing but the constant grinding noise of your own perception, watching the lies your captors told themselves until you couldn't tell where their madness ended and yours began?
"Exactly what it sounds like," I say.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have."
My hands slide around to her ribs. I'm behind her, chest to her back, my mouth near her ear. She's tense. Waiting.
"I was imprisoned," I say. The words come out without permission. "A long time ago. By people who wanted me gone but couldn't figure out how to kill me."
"How long?"
"Long enough that I stopped counting."
She's quiet, and I can feel her thinking again. The silence stretches while I work soap down her spine, tracing each vertebra.
"Why didn't you escape?"
I pause.
That's the question, isn't it. Why didn't I escape. Why did I let them keep me in the dark for decades when I could have broken out at any time. Why did I sit there in the silence and let them think they'd won.
"I didn't care enough to try," I say. "I had nowhere to go. Nothing I wanted. They could keep me there forever and it wouldn't matter because nothing mattered."
Her breathing changes. Softer. Something in her body shifts against mine.
"What changed?"
"They decided to kill me." My hands are still moving—her stomach now, the soft give of flesh, the vulnerable hollow beneath her ribs. "I found out I wasn't ready to die after all. So I stopped letting them keep me."
"And then?"
"And then I killed everyone who knew what I was." Flat. Simple. "Found a half-dead child in the rubble afterward. Kept him."
"Renan."
"Renan."
She waits for more, but I don't offer it.
My hands move to her legs and I lift one from the water, soap sliding along her calf, her thigh. She's rigid.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"You asked."
"You didn't have to answer."
"No." I set her leg down and lift the other. "I didn't."
The silence stretches while I wash her other leg, her ankles, her feet. She relaxes slowly, degree by degree, until she's leaning back against my chest.
"I spoke at the meeting yesterday," she says suddenly.
"Yes."
"I shouldn't have—I don't know if that was—you said I could, but I don't know if you actually meant—"
I pull her back against me. Hard. My arms wrap around her waist, crossing over her stomach, holding her in place. My cock presses against her lower back. My balls rest against the curve of her ass. I don't adjust. I don't pull back. I let her feel all of it.
"Listen to me," I say. Low. Against her ear. "I want you to understand this clearly."
She's not breathing.
"When you stood up in that meeting and spoke—" I have to stop. Start again. "I spent the next hour trying to figure out how to get everyone out of the room fast enough that I could bend you over the table and fuck you until you couldn't remember your own name."
She makes a sound. Small. Strangled.
"When you gave orders—my orders, in my voice—I considered killing the man across from you just for the pleasure of having something to do with my hands that wasn't touching you."
My arms tighten. She's trembling again. Not from cold.
"When you looked at me afterward, asking permission—" My teeth are bared against the back of her neck. "I wanted to drag you out of that room and show you exactly how right it was. Exactly how much I want you ruling in my name. Exactly how fucked I am every moment you are anywhere near me."
Silence. Just the sound of water. Her breathing. Mine.
"So yes," I say, my voice steadier now. Barely. "It was acceptable. Do it again. Do it whenever you want. Give orders. Make decisions. Speak in my name. And I will sit beside you and try not to lose my fucking mind."
…
"That's—a lot."
I laugh, the sound cracking out of me, rough and unpolished.
"Yes," I agree. "It is."
"You can't just—you can't just say things like that—"
"Why not?"
"Because—" She struggles and I can feel her searching for words. "Because it's—because I don't know what to—"
"You don't have to do anything."
"That's not—"
"I'm not asking you to respond. I'm telling you the truth." My mouth presses against her temple. "It's all I know how to give you."
She goes still. Something in her body changes—attention sharpening, focus narrowing.
"What do you mean?"
I shouldn't answer. I should deflect, change the subject, make a crude joke about what else I could give her. That's what I do. That's what I've always done.
But she's warm against me and she asked and I can't seem to stop.
"I see things," I say. "Things other people can't."
She doesn't move. "What kind of things?"
"Lies." The word comes out flat. "Truths. They look different to me. Threads in the air—silver when they're honest, darker when they're not. Every lie someone tells, every truth they hide, every half-thing they believe about themselves. I see all of it."
Her breathing has stopped.
"You can—" She tries to turn and I hold her in place. "You can tell when people are lying?"
"I can tell everything. Whether they know they're lying.
Whether they've lied so long they think it's true.
Whether the lie is something small or something that's rotting them from the inside out.
" I press my forehead against the back of her skull.
"I can't turn it off. It's always there.
Every conversation, every interaction, every fucking person in a room—threads everywhere, tangled together, screaming. "
She's very still.
"That's why they call you mad," she says quietly.
"That's why I am mad." No point softening it. "Centuries of noise. The world is built on lies. Every polite smile, every treaty, every marriage. Rot underneath. All of it."
"But you can't lie," she says slowly. "Can you? I've noticed—you deflect, you omit, but you never actually—"
"No." The word tastes bitter. "I can't. The words won't come."
She's quiet. I can feel her putting pieces together—every conversation we've had, every time I said something too honest, every time she waited for the lie that never came.
"That's why I'm different," she says. "Isn't it? That's why you—" She stops.
"Yes."
"Because I don't lie to you."
"Because you don't lie at all." My arms tighten. "You don't have threads. None. You think something and you say it and there's nothing underneath. No tangle. No noise. Just—quiet."
"You're the only quiet thing I've ever touched." I press my mouth against her hair. "And I am not sane enough to let that go."
She doesn't say anything for a long moment.
Then her hands come up to rest on my forearms. Not pushing away. Holding on.
"órhal," I say.
"Yes."
"You're not going to tell me what it means."
"Not yet."
She makes a frustrated sound and I smile against her temple. The steam curls around us, thick and warm, and for a moment there's nothing but the water and her skin and the sound of her breathing.
She laughs. Shaky, but a laugh.
I let her go.
We dress in silence. I pull on what I came in—dark tunic, darker trousers—and she retrieves her dress from where it fell, the wine-red fabric still damp at the hem from the steam. I lace her up again, slower than necessary, and she lets me.
When we're both dressed, I move toward the door.
She follows. Not beside me—a step behind, her eyes on the back of my head. I can feel her thinking. Rearranging every conversation we've had. Every time I said something too blunt. Every time she braced for a lie that never came.
The corridors are quiet this deep in my territory. No guards. No staff. Just stone and silence and the sound of her footsteps behind mine, slightly faster than they need to be to keep up.
We walk until the halls widen and the first Discord members appear—a runner heading somewhere, a woman carrying ledgers.
I catch the runner's arm as he passes. "Find Renan. Tell him to meet us at War's guest chambers. Now."
He nods and disappears down a side corridor.
Iowyn is watching me when I turn back, damp hair curling around her face. Still processing. Still rearranging.
"Ready?" I ask.
"For what?"
"To watch me irritate a War God."