Chapter 7
SEVEN
“I honestly don’t know what you expected, Rath’a,” I say.
He hasn’t spoken for a day other than to shut down my argument over sharing a horse. Real Orcs run, we don’t ride beasts like we’re tamed City creatures or feeble. I’d lost the argument—so much for the so-called contract.
“It was only a half-hearted assassination attempt,” I add, trying to comfort him. “If she wanted me dead she would have waited and done it herself, not sent second rate thugs when she knew you and the boys would be with me. I’m not even angry.”
I’m more upset about the horse.
Rath’s arms clutch me like I’m an Orcling who’ll break if I take a tumble. “I will deal with my mother,” he says.
I wince. That “deal with my mother” sounds more like “bury her in an unmarked grave.”
“Then why the brooding? Not that I mind—males are best enjoyed silent.” I’m poking him now, trying to get something besides a frosty, sullen response. “Naked, too. Not all this shirt nonsense—Fiuthen looks ridiculous, by the way. How could you let him do that to himself? All that. . .cloth. It’s unseemly.”
Rath, on the other hand, like a proper male wears well fitted black leather pants tucked into quality boots, and his chiseled chest and abdomen are bare except for his clan jewelry. I’d made him take off the weapon harness because it poked my back. His arms—and his marriage scars—are on display, showing his strength and discipline. His dark waist length hair is thick, the slightly textured strands brushed out and interwoven with beaded braids. He draped it over one shoulder and I occasionally have to blow some of it out of my face.
He really is a handsome male. It won’t be a hardship to look at him, order him around. . .maybe other things, for the next year. Before I get rid of him.
There’s no way he’ll keep his word and take the clan. He’s a good boy at his core, trying to please all the females in his life. Mother, sister, best friend then wife. It’s why we all suffered. An Uthilsen male can only have one mistress, or things get ugly.
I endured the brunt of that ugly. Never again.
“You let down your guard,” he says, “at the fucking Sorting. You ordered me to remain behind and I obeyed, then you almost got yourself killed. ”
Maybe now I regret poking him to start talking. “So I got drunk and high and let some half rate beat the crap out of me.” I shrug. “It happens—” I wheeze. “I need to breathe! ”
When he loosens his grip—after too long in my estimation—I continue.
“Besides, almost doesn’t count, or I would be out of a job. Females almost die all the time in childbirth and no one gets huffy about it. It’s a fact of life.”
“It will not be a fact of our life. You won’t order me from your side again.” The hand resting lightly on my thigh tenses, then slides up my torso—and twists my nipple.
I freeze, taking a moment to make sure I can speak without lust turning my voice into a syrupy mess. “I understand. You’re starting to enter the find out phase, and it chafes. You never should have tricked me into a contract like that.”
His lips brush my cheek and he massages my breast, slipping under my vest to find bare skin. I bite back a moan. I shouldn’t allow this, shouldn’t allow his warm breath on my neck and his fingers kneading my flesh until my breast is swollen and aching and between my thighs begins a slow, pulsing desperation.
Not on a horse. I will not do this, in broad daylight, on a horse.
“Every word you speak, I tally,” he says. “I add those words to the sum of all the minutes you spent away from me. Your debt is deeper than a crater, but still you keep digging.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Only with a good time, Ky’a.” His voice purrs in my ear—then he bites.
I choke back a yelp. “You’re trying to manipulate me with your masculine wiles.”
“The wile I want to use remains in my pants. ”
He must feel how his words kickstart the tempo of my heart. My breath is coming faster and I squirm in his arms, unable to keep still. I swear at him.
Rathhur chuckles. “Command me, wife. I can ease you.”
“You’re doing this on purpose.” A thought occurs to me. “Where did you learn to flirt?”
My desire, and the faint tinge of amusement coloring my outrage, evaporates. I grab the hand now sliding down my stomach, fingertips slipping underneath the band of my rough trousers, and dig my nails in. They aren't talons, they never will be, but they are long and strong and sharp.
They draw blood.
“You taught me.”
“Liar! We weren't like this when?—”
“Every night I lay awake thinking of you, you were in my mind. I argued with your image, I seduced your phantom flesh. I begged the female who was nothing more than a figment of my imagination, because I had no way of knowing whether you lived or died, to come home to me.”
I can't speak. I can't do anything but listen.
“I mastered your body, learned your scent and the change in the cadence of your breath when I touched you. You taught me, Ky’a. For twenty years you've been my lover, and you've been the one driving me mad.”
No Orcess can listen to the hopeless rage, the pain filled yearning, in her male’s voice and remain unmoved. I close my eyes, stiffening to keep from weeping.
“Do you think you’re the only one who suffered?” I whisper. “I worshiped you. I loved you. I needed you to stand up for me.”
“I know.” His hand slips under my waistband but all he does is cup me, more like he’s giving comfort than trying to arouse. “It will be different. Maybe the separation was a good thing. We both grew up, we came into our own. We’re whole as individuals, and we’ll now be stronger together than we might have been.”
His hand moves, fingers slipping between my folds. He begins to rub my clit, the circular caress slow, applying steady pressure as his lips move down my neck. My hips move and the sounds of the forest fall away until there’s nothing but Rath’s soft breaths, the rumble in his chest when I moan, his fingers working me to a quick, searing climax.
He yanks my head around and kisses me right as I cry out, the kiss capturing both my scream and his snarl, his tongue invading and claiming, conquering as his teeth gnaw at my bottom lip, draw blood and suck on the drops my lip offer.
“Soon you’ll drench my cock the way you’re drenching my fingers,” he says. “And it won’t be your blood I drink either.” He lifts his head and looks down at me, expression dark with lust, eyes feral. “Though I think I’ll have more of that too. Kyona.”
My name is a demand for submission.
I close my eyes, turning my head away, tucking against his chest. “Yes.”
What else can I say? I’m not strong. I refuse to endure hunger the way I endured pain.
We camp. Maezii signs to ask if I need her before she goes off with her Icarian—he likes to “fly her to higher ground.”
I suspect that’s a euphemism, but I’m not bold enough to look in his cool, enigmatic face and outright ask if he’s already seduced my apprentice. She’s grown. She’ll tell me if she needs help.
“. . .dyed its hair?—”
“ Pelt, you snails for brains.”
“Fur. On a cow it’s fur.”
“How would you know? You don’t read. Anyway, and put those horns on its head and the illusion charm to make it breathe fire. . .Erdguth thought it was a hellshound!” The boys burst into riotous laughter.
I don’t think it’s all that funny, but they’ve been smoking.
“I remember that one,” I say, smiling. “Erdguth blamed me, and Matriarch whipped me in punishment.”
The boys stop laughing.
“Rath took over. He convinced her the punishment would be worse if he did it. He wasn’t wrong.”
He stares at me across the fire, expression stony, except for his eyes. “She would have whipped you until your spine kissed air, Ky’a.”
“I know.” I shrug. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it, or forgive you.”
Hatthar passes me another smoke. I accept and take a long drag. During Sorting season the governor’s soldiers patrol the roads, so it’s safe enough to relax for an evening if there are enough of you. Maezii and I wouldn’t have done this on our own. The boys started telling stories of our youthful misadventures—all the funny, happy, mischievous stories.
I take another drag. “I know what you’re trying to do. The thing is, for every funny memory you dredge up to remind me how much we loved each other, I have an adjacent memory.”
“This is a slow death,” Lathhan says. “Seek bloodgilt and heal the wound.”
“I don’t want blood.”
“What do you want?” Hatthar asks.
Rath watches me, silent, the flames flickering in his face.
My lips twist. “I don’t know. You want me to bring out a ledger of every blow, every slight, so you can make recompense one by one and be done with it. It doesn’t work like that. I don’t remember everything. Not with my mind. Just to live my life, I had to bury so many memories, so deep, so I could close my eyes without questioning my worth even in my sleep.”
“Then we start with what you do remember,” Hatthar says. “What is the first bad memory?”
“I don’t want to do this.” I stand before I realize it.
“Sit,” Rath says softly. “It’s safe with us around the fire, but there are still dangers in the forest.”
He’s not wrong. I sit, reluctantly. I’m not going to go running off into the dark in a storm of tears like an idiot.
“The first,” Rath says.
Haven’t I dreamed of this? Having them at my mercy as I railed about every word, every stone, every hurt they ever hurled at me in the name of deflection? Even after I was old enough to realize deflection had become something else. Had become a way to cope.
Fiuthen and his poverty, his low status as an orphan, enduring constant mockery.
Lathhan with his internal battle to fight a repugnant, dark nature.
Hatthar and his constant need to prove he was the strongest, the fastest, the worthiest because being second best meant he was nothing.
Iloni. Daughter of a mother who couldn’t be sure the girl she’d born wasn’t a product of her own rape, the torture that had shaped her hatred toward Humans. But instead of taking it out on Iloni, the Matriarch had found an easier target. Me.
And then, Rathhur.
The one trying to bind us together, trying to keep his parents from spiraling, trying to protect his sister, heal and defend against his mother.
He hadn’t cared about me at first. That came later. Once he’d come to care, it had been noticed.
I can let my past turn me bitter, vengeful, like his mother. I can find someone weaker to offload my hurt on. Or I can face it, and accept why they keep trying to offer. Acknowledgment. Healing. Recompense. It wouldn’t work if they weren’t sincere, but. . .they’ve never been liars. And the males they are now , I think I can trust.
“This is the purpose of bloodgilt,” Lathhan says. “When there’s hurt so heinous it can’t be resolved without an eye for an eye. Rath won’t let you go this time. Choose how you can move past this.”
“I don’t have to?— ”
“You do. Rathhur will not let you go. Choose how you will heal.”
I stare at Lathhan, at his cool, intent gaze, and understand the true nature of his ultimatum; it’s an offer. A way out. If there’s no choice but to accept, I can still respect myself.
Though I know it’s a mind game, I feel relief. “The only time I can endure blood is in a birthing bed. Fine. The first bad memory.”
That is how we spend the next several hours. Recounting my hurts one by one, until my voice is hoarse. I don’t know when Rath moves to my side of the fire and takes me in his arms, letting me weep on his chest. I don’t know when the boys pile up against us, adding their warmth and weight. But I know that by morning, we’ve begun to lance the infection.