18. Clara
CLARA
The books have won.
I close the last of the blue Latin ones around noon and just sit there, staring at the desk like it owes me money.
Three days of research. Three days of squinting at sketches of corpses crawling out of graves, of translating half-sentences with a Latin dictionary older than Switzerland, of writing notes that all boil down to revenants exist, water is wet, souldust? ??
Aldric was right. There’s nothing here.
“Don’t tell him,” I warn Shmoo, who’s draped over the good chair like a discarded fur stole. “He’ll do the smug eyebrow. I can’t survive the smug eyebrow.”
The worst part isn’t the dead end. The worst part is that somewhere between the fish lessons and the tea with forget-me-not cups and the notes signed —A, I stopped counting days.
Yesterday I caught myself humming while setting the table.
Setting his table. Like a woman with a routine. Like a woman who lives here.
I shove back from the desk hard enough to make Shmoo’s ears rotate. There’s one thing in this castle I haven’t examined, and it’s the actual scene of the crime.
The goblet.
I find Aldric in the kitchen garden, shirtsleeves rolled, tying tomato vines to stakes with twine, and I ignore the forearm situation on principle.
“I want to see the goblet.”
He doesn’t even look up. “No.”
I cross my arms. “That’s it? No?”
“Shall I say it in Latin? You’ve been studying.” He knots the twine and moves to the next vine. “Non.”
“Aldric.” I plant myself in the row, between him and his tomatoes. “It’s the only physical evidence of the curse. The witch touched it. The souldust was in it. If there’s a clue anywhere in this entire castle, it’s in that cellar, and I’ve read everything else.”
“Then you have finished reading, and there is nothing more to find.” His jaw works. “The goblet is not safe.”
“It’s a cup.”
“It is the cup that unmade me.” Now he straightens, and his full height is such that it blocks out the sun.
“Schmetterling licked its dregs and has been a menace for three hundred years. I drank from it and became this.” He turns his palm up, showing me the naked fingerbones, the missing flesh, like a merchant displaying wares.
“The dust could still be in the goblet. I will not have you breathing it, touching it, standing in the same room while it decides what it wants from you.”
“I’m not going to drink from it, I’m going to look at it—”
“No.” He steps around me and crouches at the next vine. Conversation over, apparently. Court dismissed.
Something hot crawls up the back of my neck.
“You know what I think?” My voice comes out level, which surprises me. “I think you don’t want me anywhere near the one object that might actually explain how I got in here, because if I figure it out, I figure out how to leave.”
His hands stop on the twine.
“Careful,” he says, his voice low.
“Or what? You’ll confine me to the castle?
Oh wait.” I spread my arms at the garden, the walls, the whole gorgeous terrarium.
“Every time I find a thread, you cut it. The gate, no. The curse, hopeless. The goblet, forbidden. You keep saying you won’t force me, but you don’t have to force me, do you?
You just have to make sure every door stays a wall. ”
“I am protecting you—”
“You’re keeping me.” My voice becomes shriller with every word. “Honestly? You’d probably love it if that thing turned me. One lick of witch dust and boom, matching revenants. I could rot right here next to you forever. Problem solved.”
The garden goes silent. Even the bees seem to stop flying around us.
Aldric rises slowly, and the look on his face... Not angry. Wiped clean of any expression. For a moment, the only movement is the glint of the shard in its socket, and when he speaks, his voice is so quiet it makes my heart ache.
“You believe I would wish this on you.” Not a question. “This body. This… permanence.”
While a part of me wishes I could take the words back, the bigger part, the cornered-animal part, doubles down.
“I believe you’d take me any way you could get me. Isn’t that what I want everything from you means?”
“Clara—”
“Forget it.” I’m already moving, my boots crunching over gravel, my throat tight and scratchy. “Enjoy your tomatoes.”
I make it through the garden door, down the hallway, up the grand staircase, past the smug 1817 portrait, my pulse hammering the whole way, when I hear him behind me.
He’s not running, because warlords don’t run, but those long strides eat distance like it’s on a two-for-one sale.
I reach the master bedroom door with my hand on the iron latch when his fingers close around my arm.
“We are not finished,” he growls.
I spin. My free hand comes up on pure instinct, my palm aimed at his chest, days of frustration looking for somewhere to land, and he catches that wrist too, fast as a trap snapping shut.
And then we’re just standing there. His hands around my wrists.
My back against the door. Both of us breathing like we sprinted here from a battlefield.
The shard in his eye throws blue light across my knuckles, his good eye is so dark it’s nearly black, his mouth is six inches from mine, and I can hear my own heartbeat in my ears like a war drum.
“Let go,” I whisper.
“Ask me again,” he whispers back, “and mean it.”
I don’t ask again.
I don’t know which of us moves first. It doesn’t matter.
His mouth crashes into mine, or mine into his, and it’s nothing like the kiss from that first night.
This is a fucking battle. He releases my wrists, and my hands are instantly in his hair, yanking.
Aldric’s arm wraps around my waist and lifts me off my feet, and the door swings open behind me.
We stumble into the bedroom in a graceless tangle. I bite his lower lip, catch a piercing between my teeth, tug, and the sound he makes vibrates straight down my spine and detonates somewhere below my navel.
“You are the most infuriating creature,” he snarls against my mouth, walking me backward, “in seven hundred years of creatures.”
“You’ve been dead for most of them, your sample size is garbage—”
The backs of my knees hit the mattress, and I go down.
Aldric follows, one knee on the bed, one hand braced beside my head, careful even now not to crush me, and that does something to me.
I pull him down by his collar. His weight settles over me, cool and enormous and solid, and I arch up into him, wanting more of all of it.
His mouth moves to my jaw, my throat, piercings dragging cold trails over hot skin. My hands roam his shoulders, his back, the terrifying breadth of him, and then slide around to his chest and find the top button of his shirt.
He goes rigid.
Before I can get the button through its hole, he catches my fingers, presses a kiss to them, and then he’s moving down.
“Aldric—”
“Later.” His voice is wrecked. “There is something I have thought about every night since you arrived, and I will not be denied any longer.”
His fingers find the button of my jeans, and then he’s peeling the denim down my legs—inside out, catching on my heels, the least sexy garment removal in human history, and neither of us cares.
My underwear follows, and then Lord Aldric Blackthorn, terror of the German lands, conqueror of territories, goes completely still between my knees.
He’s staring at me. At—oh.
“You are smooth,” he says, with the reverent confusion of a medieval man encountering twenty-first-century grooming habits. His thumb traces over my bare mound, feather-light, and my hips twitch. “Everywhere. How—”
“Lasered.” My voice comes out three octaves higher than normal. “Laser hair removal. It’s a light that—you know what, it’s science, don’t worry about it.”
“Again, I do not know what any of that means.” His thumb makes another slow pass, and his gaze darkens as he watches goosebumps appearing in its wake. “But I approve. I keep myself groomed as well. A blade, a steady hand, and patience.”
I can’t help but picture it—Aldric, a straight razor, scared hands gripping the trouser snake I can tell is a python—and the moan that comes out of me is frankly humiliating.
Whatever leash was holding him back snaps.
He hooks my thighs over his shoulders, drags me closer, and puts his mouth on me like a starving man finally seated at the feast. There’s no warm-up, no teasing.
He licks me from my entrance to my clit, and then his tongue is circling, and the barbell in it is a cool, smooth point of pressure against all that heat, and I grab a fistful of his hair and another fistful of fancy bedding.
“Oh my god—”
“No god here,” he rumbles into me, and the vibration alone nearly ends me. “I’m the only ancient spirit in these halls.”
“Shut up and—ah—”
One thick finger slides into me, curling forward like he’s beckoning, and he finds the spot on the first try like he’s got a map.
“There she is.” His voice against my inner thigh is dark and filthy. “So wet you’re dripping down my hand, little intruder. Is this what being denied does to you? Should I refuse you more often?”
“I hate you,” I gasp, grinding shamelessly against his mouth.
“Mm. I can taste how much.” A second finger joins the first, and his tongue returns to my clit, working in tandem with his hand, and my thighs start to shake against his ears.
“Your body has been arguing with your mouth since the night you screamed at me from a bathtub. I am inclined to believe the body. It is a far more honest witness.”
“Objection,” I manage.
“Overruled.” He seals his lips around my clit and sucks, fingers curling, and the coil in my belly winds so tight I can’t breathe. “You called me your captor not an hour ago. Look at you now, riding my face in my own bed. Who is the prisoner, Clara?”
I push out words between panting breaths. “You—you arrogant, ridiculous, backwards—Aldric!”
Without warning, I come apart with his name in my mouth, shouting it like an accusation, my back bowing off the bed while he works me through it, relentless, wringing every last shudder out of me until I’m boneless and gasping and swatting weakly at his head.
“Enough—enough, I surrender, white flag—”
He presses one final, unhurried kiss to the inside of my thigh and lifts his head. His mouth is wet. His smirk is criminal. The blue shard blazes in a way that’s almost smug.
“Note,” he says, hoarse and unbearably pleased with himself, “that it was my name you screamed, not God’s.”
I stare at the vaulted ceiling, my chest heaving, my dignity somewhere on the floor with my jeans.
“Note,” I pant, “that I’m still mad at you.”
“Duly recorded.” He turns his head and bites, gently, the thigh he just kissed. “Stay mad. It suits you. Now…” His fingers flex, still inside me, and my breath hitches all over again. “Shall we discuss how many more times you can hate me before supper?”