Chapter 27
A scream bursts out of me and I freeze in place, awkward position and all.
The Fates must really hate me.
Slowly, my head turns, pounding with my frenzied pulse.
The Piper is so close that the backs of my legs prickle with the almost-contact. I can see his distorted face through the dimpled glass.
He does not look pleased.
“I . . . umm . . . didn’t hear you come in.”
Which I was counting on, since I locked him out.
“You think I don’t have a key?” he counters. “Don’t try to keep me out of my own rooms.”
“Then don’t keep me in them,” I retort.
I can feel the sting of his silence snap against my skin.
But awareness of my situation sinks in now that the shock has worn off. I’m caught mid-escape, bent over, and totally vulnerable.
And he’s far too close.
His hand thrusts out to circle around my arm, and he yanks me back inside, forcing a startled gasp from my lips. The window slaps down, though the bulky fabric keeps it from closing. I turn and look up at his face, but I wish I hadn’t.
His expression is blistering.
“I knew you were impulsive, but I didn’t think you were stupid.”
My shoulders stiffen. “I’m not stupid.”
“So what do you call trying to toss yourself out five levels up? Genius?”
I falter slightly. “I-I thought this was only three levels up.”
His head tips back, eyes on the ceiling as he lets out an intolerant sigh. He must not find any patience up there, though, because he drops his head down to look at me again. “Next time, I’ll let you do it. Let you splat onto the ground below.”
“Good,” I mouth off. “I wish you would.”
His brow cocks, sculpting his face with arrogance. “Are you truly that desperate to die?”
“No. Just desperate enough to try anything to get away from you.”
Frustration pulls at his lips. His sharp jawline is tense, his body rigid, every muscle in his arms melded against his sleeves.
“Why? Lord Havlon was such a great Govern, you want to return to your beloved city?” he mocks. “When I walked through the streets, it was covered in dead Flies, your river was running black with Poison, and picked-clean corpses littered every corner.”
I say nothing. He’s not wrong, but he also doesn’t need to know my true motivations for getting back. I’m certainly not going to offer up information.
“Let go of the sheet,” he bites out.
I look down, realizing I’m still clutching it, my body half hunched like I’m going to dive through the window, Piper be damned.
There’s a feral gleam in his eye, and for some reason, it makes my stomach dip.
I feel that familiar thrill. The desire to keep pushing him.
“Try it,” he taunts, as if he can read my mind.
And I almost do.
But despite what he said, I’m not stupid. I wouldn’t get an inch out the window before he hauled me back in, and we both know it.
My fingers stiffly release the sheet, and it sloughs to the floor like dead skin.
As soon as I let go, he pulls me forward by the arm again, and a hiss escapes through my teeth. He stills and studies my face before spinning me around.
I stumble, but then his hands are at the laces on the back of my dress, and he starts to loosen them.
Alarm kicks me in the ribs.
“Stop!” I shout, but he doesn’t listen, ignoring me as I try to wrench away.
His unrelenting hands pull at the fabric, making my dress gape and air hit my skin.
My hands fly up, catching the frock before it falls away from my chest. He lets out a noise of irritation, and then the next thing I know, he’s hauling me through the doorway and over to the bed.
My shins hit the sideboards just as his palm plants against the back of my head.
And then he shoves me face down onto the mattress.
Now, my alarm isn’t just kicking. It’s thrashing.
I scream, a hoarse cry punching through my chest. “No!”
He’s going to push up my skirt and do what I first feared when he forced me to sleep in his tent . . .
A shrieking sob escapes me as I try to flail and fight.
“Estinya, stop! I’m not going to hurt you.”
The blunt ferocity in his voice is enough to pierce through my panic. Enough to make me realize he’s not hurting me.
As soon as my movements falter, he folds the fabric apart to completely bare my back.
I turn my head, cheek smashed against the mattress as I try to see over my shoulder. “What are you doing?”
“Quiet.”
My mouth clips shut.
There’s some animal part of my brain that seems to connect. Like the instinct of the bunny to not anger the fox.
To not urge it to bite.
My body goes still, though my bottom lip wobbles, my hands fisting the sheet tucked over the mattress. He releases the back of my head, legs bracketing either side of mine. I’m at his mercy as he carefully cuts away the bindings that the servants wrapped me in.
“Don’t move.”
I wait, my ears straining to hear as he walks around the room. He’s back within seconds, legs pressing against mine again, mattress dipping. I nearly jump out of my skin when something is slathered onto my back.
“Ouch!”
“Don’t be weak.”
“Don’t be an ass!” I fume, wanting to claw his face off.
He makes a noise, like this is all so irritating to him.
“What were you going to do once you escaped? Even if you could evade me—which you can’t—do you think you could actually trounce from my territory all the way back to Hamelyn with no coin, no weapon, no provisions, and with your back still in this condition?”
He makes me feel like a fool, and I hate him for it.
“What are you putting on me?”
He spreads another glob over my thrashed wounds. “No idea.”
Whatever it is, it stings. Enough that it makes my eyes water. Or at least, that’s what I’m blaming it on.
I’m lying here at his mercy after I just tried to escape, and he’s ministering to my wounds. I feel too vulnerable. Too conflicted. And I know it’s ridiculous, but my back must look terrible, and it makes me feel self-conscious.
“I don’t want you to touch me,” I say mulishly.
“You prefer I bring you back to the healer?”
“Yep.”
“Don’t lie,” he retorts, and it’s a sound full of grit. Full of shadows that scrape.
The abrasion pebbles my arms.
I let out a breath and shake my head, my skin jumping with his touch. “I don’t understand you,” I whisper, though I wish I hadn’t said it aloud.
“Not many do.”
There’s a clumped condemnation in his answer. Something I can’t swallow down.
Seconds pass. Then minutes.
Silence becomes a spectator that hovers over us. My muscles feel tight enough to snap.
He continues to smooth the ointment on, and I become wholly aware of his every movement. His every stroke against my flayed skin. The way his callused fingers drag in purposeful swipes over each split inch.
Our silence turns heady. Lathering on, thick and dense. All while he moves with familiarity, proving to me that he really did tend to me. That he did this very same thing while I was unconscious and helpless.
I’m not sure how to feel about that.
When he moves to another wound, I flinch, my whole back spasming and making the pain worse.
“Relax,” he growls.
A shuddering breath slips out of me.
The salve stings but then melts, the remedy sinking into the shucked peel of my skin and coating it with a tingling numbness. Not as all-encompassing and definitive as Lacera’s magic, but something tried and true and . . . familiar.
Something that holds a subtle trace of velvane in it.
An ingredient I know all too well, since I’ve crushed its leaves for my mother’s tinctures for years.
The scent hits me hard, leveling me with nostalgic pining. My heart swells with a watery sorrow.
Just like that, the flood of emotion saps the rest of my tension, and my locked muscles begin to loosen.
“So you can do as you’re told.”
I squeeze my eyes shut in an agitated blink. “You took me away from my home,” I reply, and I hate that it comes out in a vulnerable rasp instead of the defiance I wanted. But the scent of velvane has cracked open the book of my family, their presence flipping through me page by page.
The faintest lull falters his movements. “And what was home?”
“A small third-floor apartment in a tenement building on one of the poorest streets of the city,” I answer softly.
“Sounds terrible.”
I snort into the sheet at his honesty. A noise that I think surprises me as much as it does him. “It isn’t.”
It couldn’t be. Not when those walls, as worn as they are, hold in so much love.
“Hmm,” the Piper hums beneath his breath. “Interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
“Paper dye, was it?” he asks.
My face scrunches, mind whirling. Did I speak out loud about the paper?
“Your fingernails,” he explains, and I go utterly still. “On my horse, they were tinged in dark orange. You said it was from paper dye.”
Surprise flits through my pulse. My gaze flicks to my nails that now have streaks spreading from each cuticle, coating them in a glossy sheen, the color like the deepest parts of a sea.
A grieving blue.
I curl my fingers into the sheet, nails burying into my fists. “Yes,” I say defensively, before clearing my throat. “I’ve used so many dyes over the years that a lot of colors show up, depending on the lighting.”
There’s a pause. “I see.”
He continues to work, and I let out a strung breath, forcing myself to shove away my sadness.
Forcing myself to close the book of my family, where the pages are my aunt, the scent of the mill and pulp lingering.
Where the ink is my mother, slowly fading, getting fainter with every word.
Where I’m the binding, holding them inside.
I can’t afford to think of them. To think of home.
I just have to get there.
But for now, I’m here. With him. And he seems to notice everything, from a flinch of pain cast across my breath to the tinge of color on my fingernails.
I think he might be far more dangerous than I’d first realized.
Because as he tends to me, it feels like he’s helping my skin knit back together, even as he’s peeling me raw.
And I don’t want that.
Not at all.