Chapter 69 The Twisted Game
The Twisted Game
Istare at the bowl long after the door closes, the steam thinning into nothing while the sour smell remains thick enough to cling to the back of my throat.
Silence presses against my ears at first, dense and expectant, and I almost allow myself the comfort of believing perhaps he and Yvara are dining together.
Fraisah is her favorite food, after all.
She would appreciate it far more than I would.
Then the silence fractures. It begins as a vibration more than a sound, a dull impact that shivers through the wall behind me and travels into the legs of the table.
I keep my spoon suspended above the soup, my body very still, listening despite myself.
Another impact follows, heavier, unmistakable, the drag of wood shoved hard across the floor, and then her voice.
Breathless, unrestrained, already climbing.
He chose a room close enough. The room next to this one.
The next sound is not subtle. It is a body driven into something solid, followed by a gasp that breaks into a moan she does not attempt to swallow.
Glass shatters. Something topples. Her laughter dissolves into a cry that rises and cracks in a way that makes my stomach turn.
He is reenacting it.
Yesterday he stood a door away while Colsar carried me into the council chamber and fucked me against walls built for treaties and war, and I did not soften a single sound. I did not lower my voice. I did not care who listened.
Now he makes certain I listen. The noise grows less controlled, less careful, the rhythm violent in its insistence.
Furniture slams. Something splinters. Her voice lifts again, louder now, raw with pleasure and strain, and I picture him gripping her the way he grips everything else in this palace, as though possession is something he must prove physically.
I force another mouthful of soup into my mouth while she cries out, my throat working around both the taste and the humiliation.
The sourness coats my tongue and I swallow it anyway because he bent to my ear and told me not to waste a drop.
Because obedience, in this moment, was meant to be part of the game.
Obedience with Colsar has always been comforting and pleasurable, satisfying in a way that is difficult to explain. Whatever this is, it is not comforting. It is something else entirely.
Another cry, louder now, followed by the unmistakable rhythm of a body driven hard into something that answers back with dull, punishing force.
I grip the spoon tighter. My stomach twists, bile rising against the taste of goat and curdled milk, and beneath the disgust something else swells, anger so concentrated it burns at the back of my throat and refuses to be swallowed.
You answer to no one but yourself.
Colsar’s voice cuts through the noise in my head and I rise, carrying the bowl to the hearth in one unbroken motion and tipping it into the fire.
The thick liquid hisses and spits against the flames, the smell turning acrid as it burns, and I watch it blacken without flinching.
Let him count what is left. Let him taste ash.
The sounds continue unabated, brutal and obscene. I cross to the door and grasp the handle, but it refuses to turn. Now I fully understand. He did not only want me to hear them, he wanted me to listen with the painful knowledge that I had no other choice.
For a fleeting, reckless moment I imagine throwing myself against it, shattering it open, screaming until the entire wing hears something other than her pleasure.
I imagine storming past their chamber and forcing him to look at me instead of her.
But that would be another reaction, and he is craving one too much for me to allow him the satisfaction.
I return to the table and sit down. The King had not said “indulge me,” because none of this was about appetite.
This was not a meal, it was a game. For now, anyway.
A means of venting his anger like a man throwing knives with nowhere else to aim.
This game he is playing is twisted beyond comprehension, yet keeping score is my specialty.
I humiliated him once yesterday. Twice, if you count the proposal rejection.
He has humiliated me with this disgusting soup, then by making me listen to him fuck my sister.
Sevrin, two. Asharin, two.
Allow me to be the tiebreaker, King.
If this is meant to break me, I will not sit here and be broken.
I will not let him own this moment. I let my hand slide beneath my dress.
The room is still thick with the smell of that foul soup and the lingering heat of Sevrin’s earlier presence, but I focus on Colsar’s voice when he calls me Asha Bear, the way it lowers when he wants something, the bite I left on his neck.
Heat gathers between my legs, fueled by anger and humiliation. I hate that my body reacts at all, that the rhythm of her pleasure outside bleeds into the rhythm building inside me, but I do not stop. If he can make me listen, then I choose what it means.
Her voice peaks again, almost shrill now, followed by the violent crash of something shattering against the wall.
I tip my head back and whisper Colsar’s name under my breath.
Next door, I hear him bark “Get the fuck out,” and another crash. There is the sound of scrambling feet retreating down the corridor, hurried and embarrassed.
The door explodes inward with a force that makes the candles gutter. Sevrin fills the doorway, chest rising too fast, hair disordered, shirt open at the throat. He smells of sweat and wine and my sister, and the scent makes something inside me curdle.
“What the fuck do I smell?” he demands, his eyes sweeping the room before locking onto me.
I draw my hand from beneath my dress slowly and meet his stare without flinching. “I miss my husband already,” I say, my voice calm in a way that surprises even me. “So I thought of him.” I lift my fingers to my mouth and let my tongue trace them without breaking eye contact.
His nostrils flare, something dark and immediate flashing through his expression. “I am not your fucking Colsar. I lack inhibition. Do. Not. Provoke me.”
“Do not trap me in a room and make me listen to you fuck my sister.”
The words leave me cold and precise.
He steps closer. “Jealous?”
“I am jealous,” I answer evenly, “that she has someone as despicable as you while my husband rides toward danger.”
That strikes him; I see it in the way his shoulders stiffen.
“I am King,” he says, the words edged with pride and warning. “I will do what I want.”
Furniture lifts off the ground before I even realize I’ve called it. A chair slams into the far wall. The candlesticks scatter. Plates shatter.
“Fuck you, Sevrin.”
He laughs, dark and almost impressed. “This. This is the part of you I—”
The room spins, the surge of power burning too hot, too fast. My vision blurs and suddenly my throat constricts and copper floods my mouth. I cough and red spatters the table.
“Sit down,” he snaps, stepping forward.
“Don’t touch me.”
The folded paper Colsar gave me slips from my dress and drifts to the floor between us.
Sevrin sees it first. He bends, retrieves it, unfolds it in one smooth motion, and scans the names only once before his mouth lifts in understanding.
“Oh,” he murmurs. “My brother gave you a list of safe places to run to. People he trusts, should his volatile brother misbehave.”
“Give it to me.”
He does not respond. Instead he walks to the hearth and tosses the parchment into the flames.
It catches instantly, curling in on itself, ink blackening and vanishing.
I move toward it on instinct, but the air thickens around me, pressing against my limbs, holding me in place as if unseen hands have closed around my wrists and throat.
I look up at him, surprised. He smirks. “Yes, Princess. A small taste of what a feeder is capable of. Your husband’s powers are mere party tricks by comparison.”
The paper curls inward as the fire consumes it, edges blackening, ink blistering and vanishing until the last of Colsar’s careful script collapses into ash.
I feel it go like something torn from my ribs, and I strain against the invisible force holding me still, my fury rising hotter than the hearth itself.
Sevrin now has three points, I have a mere two. Bastard.
He barely spares the flames a glance once the names disappear.
He turns back to me slowly. “Let me make this unmistakably clear, Princess,” he says, stepping closer, voice dropping into something stripped and raw.
“There is nowhere you can go that I cannot reach. There is nowhere you can hide from me.”
I stare at him with hatred.
“And although I know you both appreciate our dear cousin Junis,” he says, adjusting his cuff as though we are discussing supply lines and not my last defense, “the Thren threat has forced my hand. Effective immediately, the northern and eastern ports are closed for the next three weeks.” He sighs, his voice thick with mock regret.
The words sink slowly, then all at once.
“Cousin Junis will not be arriving anytime soon to protect you,” he adds smugly, stepping nearer, the scent of wine and sweat and my sister clinging to him like a second skin. “As my pathetic brother no doubt intended.”
“You did that because of me,” I say, my voice thin with disbelief and rage.
“I did that,” he replies evenly, “because I am King.” His eyes move over me, taking in the blood at the corner of my mouth, the tremor in my fingers, the power I just flung across this room.
“Did you really think,” he continues, “that he would leave you here with allies I have not vetted? That I would allow another man to arrive under the pretense of protection and pretend I would not see it for what it is?”
“Junis is family,” I snap.
“Family that answers to my brother,” he corrects softly. “And my brother answers to his own impulses.”
The pressure around me loosens just enough that I can move, and I step toward him instead of away, the fire cracking behind him as the last of the parchment collapses.
“You locked me in a room,” I say, incredulous.
“You made me eat while you fucked my sister down the hall. You burned the only names I had. And now you close the ports.”
He does not deny any of it. “You humiliated me yesterday,” he says, voice lowering, the polish gone. “You made certain I heard every sound you made for him. Every time you cried out. Every time he—”
“You chose to listen,” I cut in.
His jaw tightens, but he presses on. “I am King,” he says again, closer now, heat rolling off him. “If I decide who enters and who leaves, that is not cruelty. That is order. And if I decide you remain exactly where I can see you, exactly where I can control what touches you—”
My stomach twists violently, a sudden, burning revolt against the sour weight of the soup he forced down my throat.
“I do not know how to cure myself of you,” he admits. “I do not know how to—”
The bile surges up before he can finish. It spills over his boots and down the front of his tunic in a hot, sour rush, goat milk and half-digested bread splattering silk and leather, steam rising between us in a thick, nauseating cloud.
For a moment there is only silence, then he looks down slowly.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, chest heaving, eyes still locked on his. “You made me drink it,” I say hoarsely. The stench hangs in the air, clinging to him, seeping into the fabric he wears like armor.
That earns me another point.
Sevrin, three. Asharin, three.
He lifts his head at last, nostrils flaring, something feral flashing across his face. “Careful,” he says softly, dangerously, a crooked half-smile pulling at his mouth despite the mess dripping down his chest. “You are very bold for someone still under my authority.”
I hold his stare. “And you,” I reply, voice rough but even, “are very proud for a man standing covered in my vomit.”
The fire snaps behind him, swallowing the last evidence that I ever had somewhere else to run. I step past him, and it unnerves me that he does not recoil. If anything, he looks… intrigued.
In the end, it is a tie. I did not lose.