2. #2
Ash sat down heavily on the floor. His leg was bleeding afresh now, seeping through the dark silk of his dress trousers to smear on the tile.
There was no rip in them, so whatever wound he’d incurred there must’ve happened while his father and uncles were making him get dressed for his sham wedding.
He was in bad shape. Claire had been so preoccupied with her own hurts that she hadn’t paid much attention to his.
The place on his neck where Greg had injected him with sedative was swollen and bruising, and his black eye had darkened to an alarming shade of plum.
One of his fingers looked bent the wrong way.
“The god didn’t heal you,” Claire murmured. She left the paperweight where it was and went to sit next to him, gingerly taking his injured hand in her own. She didn’t know why, it wasn’t like she could fix it, but he’d kept trying to comfort her and it only felt right to return the favor.
Ash shrugged. “It wants pain, right? Human suffering. To feel something, to the god, is a gift.”
“Weird that it would want me, then,” Claire mused. “Since I don’t feel anything.”
“You do,” Ash replied. “Even if you don’t want to. It’s like wine in a cellar. Better because it hasn’t been touched.”
All that pain, still in there. Waiting.
Claire gnawed on her lip. Funny, how she and the god were so opposed in their opinions on pain, balanced on two sides of a scale. It wanted to feel everything and couldn’t. She didn’t want to feel anything and couldn’t stop.
“It only healed you because it didn’t want you to die before being Worn.” Ash winced and pulled his hand away from her. “A torn intestine is a little more serious than a broken finger.”
“But you’re the heir to the company, aren’t you? That seems important enough for them to not want you too messed up.”
“I was the heir until I refused to go after you,” he said. “Now I’m pretty sure the plan is to give you the company. Or give it to the god, I guess. Once it is you.” His bloody lip went between his teeth again. “I guess it thinks it’ll last, this time.”
Because she’d made that promise, all alone in the middle of the ocean.
She wondered if Dierdre or Theo had thought of it, if they’d heard the same voice she had while they suffered their own sea-touched tragedies.
Maybe they’d just chosen to ignore it. Maybe they’d instinctually known that such promises were dangerous, that you never knew what was listening.
Or maybe they just hadn’t been as scared as she was. As young.
The shudder started at the crown of her head, crawled all the way down her spine and into her extremities. “What happens if it doesn’t work?”
Ash’s lips thinned. He didn’t answer.
She looked again to the smashed-out cameras, blinking in shards on the floor.
The final piece of the ceremony would be left undone.
She’d never be made an official Ashbury, the pseudofeudal rules that required consummation to seal a marriage never fulfilled.
But part of her knew it didn’t matter. The god would take its price.
Even without Ash, without Elias, she would have ended up here somehow. This was between her and the god; the Ashburys were just decoration. Just the beneficiaries of a contract she’d already signed.
With a grunt, Ash stood, grimacing as he braced his hand on the glass. It left a smeared print, cloudy against the dark sea. “The bed is big enough for us both to sleep on it without touching,” he hedged. “And probably more comfortable than the floor.”
They curled up on opposite ends of the bed.
She had to lie on her left rather than her right, seeing as her normal sleeping side had been ripped open twice in the last twenty-four hours, and even though it was fully healed it still hurt like a bitch.
They both smelled awful and left disgusting streaks of gore on the white sheets.
Ash’s hand reached out, lightly touched hers. There was no expectation in it. Just the simple comfort of human contact.
“I think I could have liked you,” she said drowsily, her eyelids growing heavy as she burrowed into the plush pillows, the high-thread-count sheets. “If you’d actually talked to me instead of just following me. If you’d tried. I think I could’ve liked you.”
His muscles stiffened. Claire opened her eyes and turned her head to see him staring at her, eyes a deep and drowning blue. He lay on his back, leg held awkwardly, his bruises lurid against the white bedclothes.
Ash let go of her hand, and his thumb drifted over her cheek, a touch like a ghost. “I think I did like you,” he said. “As much as I could, without really knowing you. I think if I had more time, I could like you a lot.”
She didn’t know what to say. His touch lingered a moment, then fell away. Her lids lost the fight with exhaustion, making her blink long and slow. Ash turned away, looking up, so she couldn’t see if his eyes were open or closed. Claire faced the wall.
Right before she drifted off, Claire stared up into the dark of the ocean beyond the glass again.
The blackness was too complete for her to see much, too opaque for her to make out shapes.
But she knew they were being watched. Knew that they floated in the eye of something monstrous, something that had waited for a long time.
She looked out into the dark until sleep finally made her eyes close, watching what watched her.