16. Clara
CLARA
The door clicks shut, and I count to ten before I open my eyes.
Then I count to twenty, because the seven-hundred-year-old warlord is known to lurk, and I refuse to get caught mid-smirk.
The room is empty. Gray dawn light pours in from the windows, the fire is dying, and the chair by the hearth is definitely angled differently than it was last night.
“Okay,” I whisper to the ceiling. “So that happened.”
When you’re sleeping in a cursed castle with a hot undead landlord who announced his intention to make you beg, you don’t really sleep.
To be honest, I’ve been taking two-hour catnaps since I got here, jolting awake at every creak and gust. So when the door whispered open in the middle of the night, I woke up like a ninja.
My eyes shut. My breathing slow. Though I’m surprised he didn’t hear my heart racing.
I’d been dreaming about him, and in my dream, Aldric had me against the bookshelves.
Dream-me was not filing complaints with HR about it.
So I was already halfway to combustion when the real Aldric came in, and I braced for him to do something that would make me beg, something I couldn’t resist, just like the night before.
Instead, he sat down. There was the unmistakable rustling of clothes. Then his breathing changed. It became rough, low, with a growl underneath it like distant thunder. And then the sound of slow, slick—
Fuck.
He didn’t break any of my rules. He sat there in the dark, jerking off to me like I was the last woman on earth, which, for him, I basically am, and every rational cell in my body got outvoted by the horny ones in a landslide.
So I kicked the blanket down. On purpose. Sue me.
I touched myself while a monster watched, and I timed my breathing to his, and when he came with that restrained growl, like he’d rather die again than let me hear it… Shit.
And he thinks I was asleep.
I don’t have to admit anything. Not that his voice does things to me that should require a permit.
Not that I’ve catalogued every piercing I’ve found so far and lie awake speculating about the ones I haven’t.
Not that when firelight hits him at the right angle and I can see the places where his flesh has gone thin, where pale bone glints through like ivory… it doesn’t make me flinch.
It makes me clench.
“I want to fuck the monster,” I whisper, testing the words out loud. “I want to fuck the actual, literal monster.”
Shmoo pushes through the door Aldric must have left cracked and gives me a look that says he heard everything and has heard worse.
“You’re one to talk. You’ve been living with him for three hundred years. Stockholm has a syndrome named after you.”
He hops onto my blanket nest and starts kneading my stomach like bread dough.
The problem with Aldric isn’t the bones, or the glow, or the fact that my type has apparently expanded to include deceased.
The problem is that he said I’d beg. He said it with that smug ancient face, and every hour I spend here, the begging gets closer.
I can feel it, like a countdown. And if I give in, if I let him seduce me…
what does that make me? A woman who traded oat milk lattes and voting rights for a man who thinks Tesla is still working on free electricity?
Who does that? Who looks at indoor plumbing, streaming services, and modern dentistry and says, no thanks, I’ll take the corpse?
“Not me,” I inform Shmoo. “I have goals. I have a return ticket to the twenty-first century, pending a loophole.”
Shmoo purrs like a lie detector going off.
I spend the morning in the library, drowning in dead languages.
Aldric said his servants brought scholars’ letters, occultists’ books, spiritualists’ texts, and he wasn’t kidding.
I’ve pulled down a whole shelf of them, stacked around me on the desk like I’m building a fort out of futility.
The problem is that most of them are in German.
Not German German. Old German, with letters that look like they’re wearing costumes, an S that cosplays as an F, and handwriting that suggests every scholar of the era wrote during an earthquake.
“Der... Wiederg?nger,” I sound out, dragging my finger under the word. That one I know. Revenant. The rest of the sentence dissolves into loops and daggers. “Great. Fantastic. He walks again, and then, the author had a seizure.”
I flip pages. Woodcut illustrations of corpses climbing out of graves. Something about consecrated ground. Something about… is that word Seele? Soul? Souldust maybe? I squint until my eyes water and get exactly nowhere.
At some point, a plate appears at my elbow.
Fresh bread, butter, honey, sliced apples arranged in a fan like he’s auditioning for a bed and breakfast five-star rating.
I never hear him come or go. I look up once, and there’s just the door easing shut and the smell of cedar hanging in the air, and my stupid heart does its stupid skip.
“This means nothing,” I tell the honey. The honey is delicious, and it also means nothing.
Lunch materializes the same way, hours later. Cold trout, potatoes, a tomato sliced and salted, and this time a small pot of tea, still steaming, next to a chipped cup that someone painted forget-me-nots on centuries ago. There’s a folded scrap of paper under the cup.
The blue books on the third shelf are in Latin. The brown ones are in a dialect even I struggle with. Do not waste your eyes on the brown ones. —A
I read the note four times. It’s practical. It’s helpful. And he’s feeding me. Quietly. Attentively. Like the world’s most terrifying innkeeper.
“He’s being nice,” I tell Shmoo, who’s occupying the good chair right now. “It’s somehow worse.”
By late afternoon, my spine has fused into a question mark, and I’ve written exactly four useful notes, one of which just says “souldust???” with increasingly desperate punctuation.
The library door opens. No stealth this time. Boots stomp, and Aldric fills the doorway with his shirtsleeves rolled up, and I hate that I notice the forearms first. The shard in his eye socket catches the low sun and throws a blue gleam across the floorboards.
“You have been in this chair for ten hours,” he says.
“I’ve been in several chairs,” I quip. “I rotate.”
“Your eyes are red, you’ve eaten half of what I brought, and I’ve heard you arguing with the books.”
“The books started it.” I gesture at the brown pile I was explicitly warned about, because of course I ignored the warning. “Whoever wrote these hated vowels. Personally. Like vowels killed his family.”
Aldric crosses the room, plants one scarred hand flat on my open notebook, and looks down at me with the unbending expression of a man who has commanded armies.
“Enough. You require air that does not taste of dust, and light that does not come from tallow. You will walk in the garden while the sun remains. Then you will help me prepare dinner.”
I lean back and cross my arms. “Is that an order, my lord?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. Not even a flicker. Then his lips press together, and he blinks. “It is an order I am… requesting. You may refuse. But if you refuse, I will stand here describing in detail everything I intend to cook, and I am told my voice does things.”
My mouth falls open. “Who told you that?”
“You did. Last night.” He pauses, and something wicked passes over his ruined, gorgeous face. “You talk in your sleep, little intruder.”
Every drop of blood in my body relocates to my face at once. He knows something. Does he know? He can’t know. He thinks I was asleep. He has to think I was asleep, because the alternative is that we both know, and I am not emotionally prepared for mutual knowledge.
“I don’t remember my dreams,” I say, with the steadiness of a woman lying under oath.
“Mm.” He straightens, collecting my lunch plate, and heads for the door, and I absolutely do not watch him go. “The garden, Clara. Ten minutes. Wear your boots. Then the kitchen. You are learning to fillet a fish tonight.”
“I know how to fillet a fish,” I call after him.
I do not know how to fillet a fish.
His voice floats back down the corridor, warm and dark and insufferable.
“Then you may demonstrate, and I will watch.”
I look at Shmoo. Shmoo looks at me.
“Not one word,” I tell him and go find my boots.