17. Masks and the Man Beneath
Chapter seventeen
Masks and the Man Beneath
Imalroc paced the attic prison and waited to hear the guards clomping away back down the staircase.
He counted each breath, just as he had since the moment that fucking duke had forced him to the ground.
Once the guards quit his door, he sank down onto the cot, gritting his teeth as the wobbly metal frame creaked.
It creaked again as he shifted. Every little shriek was a reminder that he couldn’t hold himself still.
He needed a distraction. Anything to stop him from thinking about what Rerdas had just done.
He shot up off the bed and prodded one of the wooden posts, examining the loosened pegs that held it to the metal underside.
Trying to fix it only made it worse, and he lurched away again.
Practicing sword forms or strengthening were usually the best ways to pass the time in confining cells, but if his heartbeat went any quicker, he might put his head through a window to escape the pounding.
He breathed as Master Xavian had taught him. Told himself to slow down and bury the quick-flitting, trapped thing in his chest.
Noise in the courtyard below one of his little windows drew him close to the round pane.
It was still raining, though no longer so badly, and he could see through the droplets sliding like tears down the glass.
Below, he glimpsed the roof of a carriage fitted with lanterns for nighttime travel.
Servants milled all around it, shoving trunks into various compartments and hopping in and out to fuss over the interior.
He imagined popping the window pane free, leaping down, and landing catlike on the coach’s broad roof.
Nevermind that a jump from this height would send him tearing right through it.
In his mind, he could come down lightly as snow and lie flat across the top so that no one saw.
Let it carry him off wherever it was going, into the dark, away from here.
Someone clambered up into the driver’s perch, and the harnesses jangled. The loading finished long before the carriage went anywhere, the horses snorting and tossing their heads in the pattering rain.
Imalroc resumed his restless circling, dragging his fingers along each wall, as if by touch he might discover some other escape route. There were none.
The sound of the carriage finally clattering away from the inn drew him back to the window, but by then there was nothing to see but pooling rain illuminated by the warm light of the inn’s windows. Another few rounds plodding around the oppressive little room.
Calm. Let him be like the frozen surface of a winter lake. Too cold and still to feel anything.
When he looked out the window again, the lights were doused and there was only the fog of his own breath against the glass.
The stairs groaned faintly, and he swung toward the sound.
It was tentative, a light-footed arrival who navigated the ascent slowly, as if wary of being heard.
Imalroc anchored himself in the corner furthest from the door with a clear line of sight.
A furtive knock, and then Rerdas’s muffled voice.
They must have given the huntmaster a key, because a moment later the door opened. Rerdas stepped into the darkened room, carrying a lantern. He closed the door soundlessly behind him and tipped back toward Imalroc.
“Are you alright?” Rerdas murmured.
Everything he had so diligently stowed out of reach came pouring back into Imalroc’s chest. So much for a fucking frozen lake, his pulse was a ripping current, and he moved without thought.
He charged, shoving the huntmaster back against a wall. “You fucking airbrained fool—”
“What—” The lantern skidded down the wall to land beside Rerdas’s feet, but the huntmaster made no effort to get away.
“You walk in here asking if I’m alright? Should I be?” Imalroc roared. He pressed his forearm like a bar across Rerdas’s sternum, bearing down.
Rerdas blanched. “Quiet!” he hissed, scrabbling at Imalroc’s arm. “They’ll come up!”
Imalroc whirled away and bounded to the bed.
He twisted one post loose, wood splintering as the entire frame listed and sent the mattress slumping to the floor.
He pointed the post at Rerdas like a sword.
“Let them come, then. I’ve gone too long without hitting something in this fucking shitstain of a city. ”
“Lower your voice, please.” Rerdas righted the lantern and walked toward him with hand outstretched for the bedpost. “You’re going to get yourself thrown into a cell!”
“Already in one, idiot.” Imalroc flicked the post out of the huntmaster’s reach, rotating his wrist, testing the weight of his makeshift weapon.
Rerdas glared. “I’m trying to help.” He was still advancing, oblivious to the fact that he was well within range. He had no caution, no wary eye on the post in Imalroc’s hand. The huntmaster came forward like someone who had never been struck, who did not think he would be struck now.
Imalroc tasted copper. Wasn’t this what he wanted? Rerdas was entirely unafraid of him.
He jabbed the huntmaster in the shoulder, hard.
Rerdas stared at him with a stupefied expression, his mouth half-open. And still, he didn’t move more than half a step back. “What are you doing?”
The post still hovered between them. If Rerdas had no fear of him, then there was nothing that could stop him from coming near. And if Rerdas touched him—he hated what this man had done to him.
Imalroc dragged the post over Rerdas’s chest, right over his heart. “You put a fucking muzzle on me, you shithead!”
“I had to!” Rerdas tried to bat the post aside. “Umber was—”
“No, you fucking didn’t have to!” Imalroc thundered.
Rerdas’s hand curled around the post. “I can’t refuse a duke—”
“That’s not it.” Poison leaked into every word. “You’re just too much of a coward to refuse. Too afraid to stand your ground, too weak to defend it.”
Even in the half-light, he saw pain flash into anger. Rerdas’s gaze flattened. The resistance increased in his own arm as Rerdas tried to wrench the wood out of his hand.
“Stop trying to come closer!” Imalroc bellowed.
He left himself open to a blow from Rerdas’s free hand. He expected an angry lash. Knew he could block it when it came.
But Rerdas only released a hard breath, let go of the post and backed off, all the way to the opposite wall. He stood there with his arms tightly crossed. “You can’t solve everything by screaming insults and swinging a sword.”
“Oh, because you’ve solved so much with your scheming?”
Rerdas squeezed his own forehead. He didn’t speak until he lowered his hand.
“Can’t you see that defiance isn’t the way to handle someone like Umber?
It’ll only anger him. And if he’s angry, he can punish me, but he can have you executed.
It was the only way I could think of to keep us both safe.
You had too much of his attention after Widran, and I need you to be beneath his notice. ”
Imalroc hurled the post at the wall. It crashed harmlessly into the corner, far wide of Rerdas. “Fuck your story, your useless plan,” he said, trying to keep the anger alive. It felt better than the desperation that crawled up his throat and out of his mouth. “How could you stand to do that to me?”
That hung there in the air as if it echoed off every wall. It turned the space between them into a chasm.
He’d been degraded before. He’d been tortured and deliberately weakened and sent into fights he wasn’t meant to survive. Fastening a muzzle over his face shouldn’t be the worst thing someone had done to him.
If Umber had been the one to put it on, he could have borne it and disdained the man, focused on all the ways he could dismember him, and shredded the contraption at the first opportunity. But to have the hands he longed to kiss be the same ones to fit the metal across his face…
He’d submitted to it for Rerdas. He’d handed Rerdas so much power over him.
Something cracked in Rerdas’s icy expression. Thank the gods he didn’t move closer.
“I… It was the only way I could think of.” Every word was soaked in misery. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you.”
The pressure in Imalroc’s throat flooded into his face, his eyes stinging. Fuck everything about this. He circled the room in an unceasing circle. His unsteady breath felt sharp in his chest.
“Why won’t you just fight?” he hissed.
“I’m trying,” Rerdas said quietly. “The way I know how.”
It wasn’t enough. He should demand that the huntmaster leave. Pitch him from the room, and shut out the tumult of feelings on the other side of the door with him.
Rerdas’s presence was worse than Draalish poison when it came to keeping silent. Imalroc’s chest tightened, and his voice shook, but the words tore free. “I couldn’t have done that to you. Humiliate you and sacrifice you… I couldn’t do it.”
“Imalroc,” Rerdas pleaded, “I cut the strap before I put it on you and I was sure it would come off as soon as I went to tighten it, but I was afraid he wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t at least look like I was willing to use it. I thought… you’d only have to bear it for a moment.”
He kept himself pacing on the opposite end of the room, far from Rerdas’s touch, but his gaze stayed fixed on the man he wanted out of his room, out of his head, out of his heart.
“Bear it for one moment,” he echoed. “And then bear something else the next? I’m tired of enduring every part of my fucking life. ”
“Every…” Rerdas’s voice wobbled. “I don’t want it to be that way for you.”
“I’m not going into that fucking battlebox in Drida. Not for anyone.” He should have said it a hundred times over already. “I don’t care what you told him.”
“We never intended to—” The protest was cut short, and Rerdas took another slow breath. The huntmaster shook his head, eyes closed, brow furrowed, as though he were arguing with himself. “Umber was called back to Kirinoll. You won’t have to go near Bren Kul Mari.”