Chapter 25 #2
She laughed once, breathless and bitter. “Right.” This psychopath wanted her to tell him he owned her. On her wedding day. On the day of her wedding to his brother.
She shook her head, stepping backward. He matched her retreat with a calm step forward. She retreated another step, and another, until her shoulders brushed the heavy door. He stepped close enough that her dress gathered around his long legs.
Say it, he signed, his expression so cold and contained that he might as well have been ordering her to extend her training time with Cairn.
Eiko stared at his hands, and then at his face.
You are out of your mind, she signed sharply.
Give, he signed, repeating the unfamiliar Echo-gesture with deliberate care, as though he were carving it into her understanding. Then receive.
Her laugh came out too short and thin. “You can’t be serious.”
He tilted his head a fraction, a looming bird of prey watching a worm attempt to wiggle away through packed, impossible stone, content to simply sit and watch the fruitless struggle.
She swallowed, her mind suddenly torn to shreds with sharp-edged confusion. Chasin Goldmoor might have been the most aesthetically beautiful man in the world, but he was the most dangerous of all the poisons he had mastered. He was lethal, a weapon with no soft edges.
She raised shaking hands, but her fingers refused to form the words. He stepped closer again, until his heat saturated her even through the layers of her skirt, which now wrapped even more intimately around his legs.
Still, her fingers refused to obey.
He inched forward again, a clear challenge in his eyes.
I hate you, she signed childishly, before she could curb the urge.
His only reaction was to shift so close that he was pressing her weight up against the heavy wooden door, one of his powerful thighs threatening to position itself between her suddenly trembling legs.
Her blood cooled as her skin heated, her breath catching in her throat.
What in the dark is this?
An arousal response, Hymn responded helpfully.
That’s not funny.
I’m not joking.
She tuned him out, shoving her little monster away and focusing on her hands, now almost crushed between her chest and Chasin’s.
“Say it,” he rasped, “or I’ll find another way to prove it.”
Cocky asshole. Imagine thinking you were beautiful enough to turn a woman weak-kneed despite your horrific personality.
Your knees are trembling, Hymn pointed out.
Would you stop? she grumbled.
Chasin’s hands wrapped her waist, cinching into the forced, exaggerated curve of her corset. “You have three seconds,” he warned.
Her laugh was sharp and disbelieving. “You can’t scare me into it,” she lied.
That did it. Something in Chasin’s face finally cracked. The tight, furious stillness in him gave way to something raw and incandescent, like a blade pulled too fast from its sheath.
“One,” he whispered, his dark eyes crawling down to her mouth.
Her insides were drowning in fear and doused in heat by his presence, but she was only a fool at the end of the day. A fool who didn’t know when to back down. She lifted her chin, her eyes blazing. “Go on.”
“Two,” he warned, so quiet there was barely any sound to the word.
“I dare you,” she snarked.
“Three,” he mouthed, before surging forward and catching her mouth in a hard, brutal kiss, anger bleeding straight into heat.
His hand fisted in the silk at her waist, crushing her back into the door hard enough to knock the breath from her lungs, and she made a sound against his mouth that was pure fury.
The kiss was all pressure and insistence—his mouth performing an obvious claiming, lips moving against hers with ruthless certainty.
The first brush of his tongue was sharp and unapologetic, sweeping in like he expected resistance and was daring her to give it to him.
She met him head-on, her mouth parting in defiance as much as instinct, her teeth grazing his lower lip hard enough to draw a low grunt from his throat.
Her lips moved against his with furious intent, refusing to soften, refusing to yield, kissing him like she was pushing back just as hard as he was pressing forward. The way they clashed together sent a jolt straight through her, heat sparking low and fast, her pulse hammering wildly.
Her hands shoved at his chest, nails scraping over black fabric, her body reacting with treacherous urgency even as her mind screamed at her to stop.
The silk of her gown was crushed between them, her senses drowning in awareness.
She could feel everything—the rough drag of his breath, the way his mouth shifted to deepen the kiss, slower now, heavier, tongue pressing deliberately against hers as one of his gloved hands drifted up from her waist, lightly ghosting her ribs and the swell of one breast before flattening to her chest, and slipping up …
Her lips tingled. Her mouth felt swollen, over-aware, every nerve ending burning.
She hated how easily her body responded, how her breath broke apart when his mouth moved just right, how the heat between them coiled tighter with every second they stayed pressed together, how she was beginning to forget that this was a collision, a struggle for power.
A lesson. A refusal. So many things, everything under the sun except what it had rapidly turned into.
For the slightest moment, the kiss lost its edge and turned molten instead, their mouths moving in a heated drag, breath ragged, frustration bleeding into something dangerously close to want.
And then his gloved hand closed around her throat.
The pressure was deliberate and measured, his thumb sliding beneath her jaw, tilting her head back just enough to force her mouth open wider against his, breaking the kiss only to remake it deeper and slower, devastatingly thorough.
He kissed her like he knew precisely how much she could take, like he had already mapped the limits inside her and was pressing against them one by one.
Her breath shattered, and the world narrowed violently to sensation—the tight band of gold at her throat, the firm hold of his fingers, the way his mouth moved with infuriating patience now, tongue stroking instead of striking, coaxing heat where there had been fury only seconds before. It was unbearable.
Her knees weakened without her consent, her body betraying her with terrifying speed.
His thigh pressed suddenly between her legs, and his grip around her throat tightened instinctively.
Without even thinking, she pressed herself against his thigh, a small whine leaving her held throat as she tried to bundle the thick mass of her skirts out of the way.
Her mind flashed back to a memory, unbidden and vivid.
Stone steps within a shadowed stairwell.
Her back against cold stone. Ren’s hand inside her pants, fingers dragging through her wetness, her breath bitten silent as she chased release in the dark, furious and aching …
until Chasin’s presence had cut through her like a blade.
He had ruined her orgasm without touching her at all.
Chasin’s mouth broke from hers just long enough for his lips to drag along her jaw, the corner of her mouth, down to the place where her pulse was screaming beneath his glove.
“I know,” he murmured, voice wrecked and low, every broken edge vibrating straight through her. “What you were t-thinking about that night.”
Her body seized.
The broken words hit her like a strike to the chest, recognition detonating inside her.
His free hand found her hip, angling her down to press against the flexing muscles of his thigh, her skirts now out of her way—something she vaguely recalled doing all on her own.
He forced the friction on her that she was so desperate for.
Her breath caught hard, a sharp, helpless sound torn from her throat as the sensation she had chased back then—denied, interrupted, left aching—fought to come roaring back with brutal force. Heat flooded her, fast and overwhelming, curling tight and blinding, stealing all strength from her limbs.
She was cold now, just as she had been then. The scent of him invaded the room just as it had in the stairwell. The never-ending dark of death, a vast power wrapped around the more human scents of sandalwood, parchment, ink, metal, and leather.
He moved her hips just slightly, just enough to rub and press her aching flesh exactly where she needed, ground down onto the hard muscles of his powerful thigh, his other hand never once releasing her throat.
Whenever he dragged her close enough to his lap, she brushed against his lengthening cock, and each brush seemed to darken his eyes further and tighten his jaw until it appeared hard enough to crack.
Her hands fisted in his clothes. Her head tipped back against the door.
She couldn’t stop it, couldn’t stop the way her body arched, the sound of mixed pleasure and frustration that tore from her throat, the way the pleasure twisted and tugged at her until it was too vast to hold inside her body.
She couldn’t stop the wave of sensation that ripped through her at the crest, so intensely it bordered on pain, leaving her in a wash of horrible realisation. She was shaking, empty, wrecked.
Chasin had unmade her, once again.
He had twisted her defiance into breathless want with the snap of his fingers, reducing her to a desperate creature held tightly by his spell, sipping willingly at his poison.
And she had let it happen.
She had dared him to do it.
His grip tightened fractionally, just enough to make sure she understood that he had done this.
That he owned her.
When he released her and stepped back, her legs barely held her. She sagged against the door, her breath sucked in broken pulls, her skin blazing. His dark eyes searched her face with quiet, lethal certainty.
The horror of the moment sank into her with startling clarity. Chasin knew her. He knew her body, her hunger, her weakest, most private moments, and he could reach inside her and pull her apart whenever he chose.
The collar flared hot at her throat, diamonds blazing as her sight surged wide open, perhaps reacting to the tide of emotion crashing into her, or perhaps forced by Hymn.
It cracked too far open, showing her everything at once.
The persimmon bleed of restraint seeping into every angle of his face, the rough hitch in his breath, expelled in a wisp of autumn-blazed need, and the trembling, saturated backbone of carmine control blazing the length of his body, hanging by a thread.
The truth is complicated, Hymn said thoughtfully, apparently unaffected by Chasin’s kiss.
Tell me you didn’t watch all of that, Eiko demanded, mortified.
I tuned out most of it, he admitted. But this part … is interesting.
She quickly pulled the colours from her vision, having no idea just how much the gemstones of her collar were going to boost her for.
Chasin regarded her with every inch of false cool he didn’t possess, and she glared heatedly at him.
“Fuck you,” she spat.
His mouth curved into something sharp and feral and utterly unrepentant.
Eiko, he signed in farewell, stepping around her. He opened the door and stalked out without another word.
It took her several moments of shocked silence to glance down at herself and realise her bruises had been healed.
Because she had reassured him that he owned her.
“Ugh!” she screamed, stalking to the table and kicking one of the chairs, sending it flying into the wall with a loud crash.
“My Lady!” one of the Kingsguard soldiers filled the doorway in an instant, searching the room in alarm.
Eiko quickly turned away from him, having no idea what she looked like in that moment. “Everything is fine!” she called out. “Give me a moment, please.”
After a beat, he backed out of the room again, closing the door. She hurried to the mirror, taking stock of her displaced skirt, tangled hair, and swollen lips. Thankfully, from behind, she appeared normal.
It took her several minutes of fussing and pacing and quiet, muttered cursing before she felt capable of leaving the room, and even then, it was with a severe tremble in her step.