19. Aldric
ALDRIC
I’m making eggs for Clara’s breakfast. Folded, not stirred, just like how Greta taught me when it became obvious I would soon have no one left to prepare my breakfasts. Or any other meals.
I crack the fourth egg one-handed and think about Clara’s mouth on my throat last night.
I made her come four times before the candles guttered.
I laid her out across my bed like the spoils of a war I intend to keep fighting, fed her supper in the wreckage of the bedding, and afterward, when she reached for me with a sleepy smile, I put my mouth between her thighs a final time and drank her last climax of the night down like communion wine.
Twice, she offered to pleasure me, reaching for my belt, her voice sweet and seductive. Your turn. Let me.
I declined. I ached the entire evening, my cock leaking against the inside of my pants, hard enough to hammer fence posts, and still I declined.
A man who spills in his pants like an untried squire does not get to receive.
Not yet. Not until the ledger between us is balanced and my humiliation paid for in full, one of her orgasms at a time.
The whisk stops in my hand.
She went for my shirt buttons again last night, managing to get one loose before I stopped her.
I know she’s seen the glow through the linen—she can hardly miss it, the blue light bleeding through the fabric of my clothes.
But a vague glow is not the same as an unobstructed view of the entire wreckage of my torso.
There is no flesh over my heart. There is a ruin of parted ribs, and inside that ivory cage sits the thing the souldust made of my heart. Cold, blue, pulsing crystal.
Would she still shiver for me after seeing it? Would she reach for me at all?
The eggs begin to catch. I swear, rescue them, and plate the food—eggs, fried potatoes with wild chives, bread toasted at the hearth, honey, and the last of yesterday’s strawberries. I tell myself I’m not attempting to buy her affection with delicious meals.
Upstairs, I ease the bedroom door open with the tray balanced on one palm.
Clara sleeps diagonally across the bed, her hair spread across the pillow, her cheek creased, and one leg out of the blanket prison like she’s balancing her body’s temperature.
Schmetterling lifts his head from the foot of the bed and gives me a look of profound smugness. He has claimed her like he claims everything.
“She was mine first,” I whisper.
His tail flicks. A lie, and we both know it.
I set the tray on the table by the fire, bank the coals higher against the morning chill, and leave her to sleep. There is water to haul.
The bath takes eleven trips. The copper kettle heats over the kitchen fire while I work the well pump, and by the ninth trip, steam curls off the tub’s surface in ghost-ribbons.
I only go through the trouble for Clara. I wash myself with cold water as I have done for centuries. But for her, I scatter rose petals. I fetch a bottle of lavender oil. I make the bath fit for a queen.
“Ridiculous,” I inform the tub. “You are a warlord’s washbasin, and look at you now.”
“Talking to the furniture again?”
I turn. Clara leans in the bathroom doorway wearing my shirt—my shirt, the hem reaching her mid-thigh, sleeves shoved up her forearms in bunches—and holding a piece of honeyed toast. There is butter at the corner of her mouth.
The sight of her does more violence to me than the curse managed to in hundreds of years.
“The furniture listens better than you do,” I say dryly.
“The furniture doesn’t eat your eggs, though. Which were criminal, by the way. I want the recipe.” She pads closer and peers into the tub. “Rose petals. Again. And what is that smell? It’s like a spa in here. A haunted spa. Ghost spa.”
“Lavender. From the garden.”
“You make bath oil.” She looks up at me, toast pausing halfway to her mouth. “You. Destroyer of covens. Scourge of the Holy Roman Empire. You infuse oils.”
I cross my arms defensively. “A man with eternity acquires skills.”
“You keep saying that, and every time, the skills get more unhinged.” She takes another bite and studies the water, and her face softens. I have learned to hoard glimpses of these expressions like a dragon with treasure. “You did this while I was asleep. The food. The stairs. The buckets.”
“You were snoring,” I say deadpan. “I required occupation.”
Clara gasps. “I don’t snore.”
“Like a hog in autumn,” I confirm, my grin returning.
“You take that back or I’m drowning you in your own ghost spa.” But she’s smiling as she sets the toast aside and reaches for the shirt’s buttons, and I turn to give her privacy, which earns a snort. “Aldric. Your tongue has been inside me. I think we’re past the chivalrous pivot.”
If my body is capable of blushing, it’s doing so now.
“Habit.” I turn back.
She peels the shirt over her head, and I stand there and let her beauty do its damage. Then she steps into the water with a hiss that melts into a groan, sinking until the petals gather at her collarbones, and her head tips back against the copper rim.
“Okay,” she sighs. “You can keep me. Kidding. Mostly kidding. God, that’s good.”
I drag the stool to the tub’s side and sit. “Give me your hair.”
She cracks one eye open. “What?”
“I will wash you. If you permit it.” I hold up the soap—the good soap, the one that smells of honey. “Your terms. I’m asking.”
Clara looks at me for a long moment, water lapping, steam rising between us.
“Yeah,” she says, quieter. “Okay.”
So I wash her. I pour warm water over her hair with the pitcher, work the soap through the silver lengths of it, and drag my fingers slowly across her scalp until she makes a sound low in her throat that I file away beside every other sound I have stolen from her.
I soap her shoulders, her back, the nape of her neck.
She goes boneless under my hands, pliant as candle wax, and for a while neither of us speaks.
There’s just the murmur of the fire from the bedroom and the drip of wet hair.
“This is nice,” she murmurs eventually. “You’re being suspiciously nice.”
“I am always nice,” I lie.
She tips her head back against the rim and looks up at me, upside down, her wet lashes clumped and her eyes very violet in the steam.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You have never once waited for permission.”
“Last night...” Her fingers trail through the water.
“You touched me everywhere. Took everything off me. And you stayed dressed the whole time. Buttoned to the chin like you were headed to a funeral.” She pins me with her gaze, and her eyes aren’t sleepy anymore.
“Every time I get near your shirt, you catch my hands. Why don’t you want to be naked in front of me? ”
I freeze. Try to formulate my response so it won’t take this away from me.
“Seven hundred years as a revenant takes a toll on a body, Clara.” I keep my voice level through sheer force of will. “What you see… the hands, the ear, the eye… those are the most presentable portions. The rest is worse. Leave it.”
“The rest,” she repeats.
“Leave it.”
“See, here’s the thing.” She sits up, water sluicing off her shoulders, and turns fully to face me, arms crossed on the copper rim like a magistrate at the bench.
“You’ve had your mouth on every inch of me.
You’ve watched me fall apart… how many times was it?
I lost count somewhere around the supper tray.
You know what I look like when I can’t remember my own name. And I’m not allowed to see your chest?”
“It is not a matter of allowed—”
“Then what is it a matter of?” she interrupts. “Aldric. I’ve seen the glow. I’ve felt your ribs under the shirt. I’m not stupid, and I haven’t run yet. Show me.”
“Clara.”
“Show me.” Her chin lifts. “That’s not begging, by the way. That’s a demand. Note the difference.”
Resigned, I stand, and the stool scrapes across stone. I look down at her and find I have no argument left. Only fear, and I have never once let fear command me. I will not begin now, in my own washroom, before a woman with rose petals in her silver hair.
“As you wish,” I say. “Remember that you insisted.”
My fingers go to the buttons. I do not rush. Collar. Chest. Waist. The linen parts, and blue light illuminates the steam rising from her bath.
I shrug the shirt from my shoulders and let it fall.
I reveal the tattoos decorating my chest and shoulders, wolves and weapons and words no one uses anymore. I reveal my exposed ribcage and the mockery of a heart suspended in it. I reveal countless scars and stitches and missing chunks of flesh.
Clara does not speak. Her eyes travel over me, and I make myself stand still under her gaze, spine straight, hands loose at my sides.
Then I strip off my boots and unfasten my pants and step out of them as well.
My cock springs free, flushed and rock hard, the ladder of piercings gleaming, standing hard against my stomach despite the dread in me. Because of her, always because of her, because her eyes are on my body, and even terror cannot compete with that.
Clara gasps.