Chapter Forty-One
Hours later, I return to Kassandra’s bedroom only to be greeted by steam flowing from her bathing chamber. Where’s Briar? Why isn’t the faerie laying out Kassandra’s clothes for tomorrow night? Checking the fabric and cleaning the jewelry our mistress will wear for two dinner guests?
“Avery.”
The voice floats from the bath. I should slip out now while I can, allow Kassandra to think she imagined I was here.
“Come here, Avery.”
I swallow, my skin prickling.
In the glittering silver-tiled bathroom, a sparkling inlaid pool stretches out before me, steam rising from the surface. The space is quiet, heady. From the fog emerges a naked figure. Kassandra.
As she wades through the water, it swirls around her hips. Droplets roll off her curves and splatter into the bath. Her hair falls in plaits around her shoulders, cheeks pink with heat, lashes dewy with condensation. I say nothing, only wipe damp palms on my thighs as she glides toward me.
“You said Briar and I saw you naked,” she says. “Need I remind you how many times you’ve seen me unclothed?”
“That’s different. It’s my job to dress you.”
“And undress me, no?”
“Yes,” I say.
Little raindrops roll off every part of her. I tear my eyes away to find hers again. Heavy-lidded and glinting, she smiles, and I know I am caught.
“Briar’s off for the evening,” she says, rising onto the first step that leads out of the pool. Her thigh emerges from the water. Another step, and the surface flickers just below her center. Another step, and it’s fallen to her knees. Again, I drag my eyes up to her smirking face.
“What’s changed?” I ask, not for the first time. “Between this morning and now.”
“I needed a bath and Briar is gone.”
“So I guess I’ll just have to bathe you myself.”
Kassandra wrinkles her nose. “Not smelling like that, you won’t. You’ll get me more dirty than clean.”
“Is that your desire?”
My mistress blinks. Then she’s stepping back down, the pool swallowing up her thighs, her hips, her waist. She sinks lower, her breasts cupped by the water.
“You’re bold,” she chides, voice smooth. Pink blushes across her chest, from heat or words, I do not know. I do not care.
“Am I?”
“Are you attempting to be mysterious?” The ends of her hair float around her like a siren’s. As she moves deeper into the pool, I take it for what it is, what I have been denying since I entered the bathing chamber: an invitation.
She wants to play? Let’s play.
Gripping my damp nightgown, I pull it over my head, dropping it to the tiles beside me.
Kassandra straightens. “Avery, what are you doing?”
“Being bold.”
“What if someone comes in?”
What if someone comes in? Not No, don’t. Stop that. What is wrong with you? You’re disgusting. Get out. No, she asked, What if someone comes in?
My blood sings.
“Briar’s off, like you said. And anyone else will see a faerie bathing her mistress.”
“Naked!” she yelps.
“That’s generally how bathing works.”
As warm water laps at my thighs, slips over my stomach, I feel the borrowed indulgence of the glimmering baths and the expensive soaps that line the pool’s edge. To be naked in the same pool as a nude Kassandra is exhilarating—nothing akin to the sick cot that has become her bed.
She turns away. A reaction that causes a sinking feeling. She is questioning it; she is ashamed. The law says nothing about looking, I told her once. But even that may be too much for her.
I stop, the water circling my waist. The entire pool stretches between us. It was too much, too soon. So I reach for a soap bottle resting on the ledge.
“Wait,” Kassandra barks. “Not that one.”
I watch her, untwisting the cap and inhaling. “Lavender.”
“It was a gift.”
“I see.” Then I dump the contents on my chest and lather.
“Avery!”
“Yes?”
“Wipe that stupid smile off your face.”
“Shall I frown instead?”
“The soap was a gift from my mother!”
“You hated your mother.”
“Why do you have to be so—”
I laugh, and Kassandra huffs. A phantom touch caresses my forearm.
“I have a solution,” she says. “If someone comes in, they won’t see anything.”
That ghostly finger trails along my upper arm, goosebumps budding across my skin.
“Are you cold?” she asks from the other side of the pool.
“No.”
“Oh?” The unseen hand trails over my shoulder, sliding down my chest, between my breasts. It slips below the surface, the water rippling, as it circles my belly button. I don’t move. I stand half in the water, upper body exposed, my nipples hardening.
Her unseen hand brushes against my inner thigh, and I feel myself clench.
“Is this what you desire?” she asks.
I cannot deny the deep ache anymore, the feeling that if she does not touch me, I will not recover from this moment, I will not move on.
I will remain in this pool, repeating this feeling over and over, wondering what I have done wrong or right in my life to end up here, in the hands of my mistress, desperately waiting for her to mold me anew.
“Yes,” I breathe.
“Is that the truth?” The water swishes with her walk, those hips I have slipped fabric over day in and day out for two years, gliding closer now.
“Yes.”
The ghost of fingers, threading through my hair. A phantom feel clutching my hip.
“After all,” I gasp as her magic tugs me closer, “you aren’t truly touching me.”
She stands only a few feet away, head cocked like a cat, eyes narrowing.
Only her chest betrays her, flushed and heaving.
One hand grips the edge of the pool, the other twitching by her thigh.
We are bared to each other like throats to knives.
We are a feast of silver and blue and brown and tan, of her curves and my muscles, of rough hands and sharp nails and a pink mouth I want to grab and swallow whole. Her voice comes low.
“The law says nothing about looking.”
“Nor your Illusions.”
Her eyes flash. “Do you want to feel all of your senses all at once?”
“I want to feel all of you, everywhere.”
The Illusion in my hair gives a gentle tug, baring the column of my throat to her. I swallow, staring at the ceiling. She could slit my neck with a fingernail.
“Are you sure?” she whispers.
“Do your best.”
My nose fills with the scent of her skin, as if she were under me now, her gasp tickling my ear, my tongue dragging on her neck, licking the salt of sweat.
On the ceiling is the prettiest picture, a mirror to this moment: her magic coaxing my legs open, and her real hand between her very real thighs, stroking as she watches my pupils dilate, my mouth part, my chest blushing.
Unseen hands tease down my body, circling my nipples, sliding lower, my abs flexing.
She circles around where I need her most, again and again and again, and I should have known she would be perfect at this game, too.
A breath hisses between my teeth, pressure building higher, higher. I am cupped by her Illusions, overloaded and overwhelmed and overtaken in every sensation.
No wonder she failed as the Heart of Illusion, for she should be its queen.
A moan builds in a throat, but in whose I cannot say, we are one and the same, every part of her indulging every part of me.
“Is this,” she pants, “what you want, my love?”
“Yes,” I cry in the rising crescendo. Illusions stream through my mind like water.
Her on her knees before me, my thumb pressing into her neck, my body pinning hers to the mattress, her nails scraping my back, and it is her fantasies over the years setting my very essence on fire.
Steam rises from the bath, hotter and hotter.
“But is it—” She swallows, leaning against the pool as her body tremors, and I see it all on the ceiling above me and in my mind’s eye, and hear her very real gasps around me. “Is it what you need?”
I groan in response. The tide is taking me away, everything hot and shivering, and if I do not burst now, I will die.
“Can you…can you say no to me?”
“Never.”
Everything stops.
Everything. Stops.
The images die out, the sensations yanked away like a tablecloth under a feast, and everything scatters, ruined.
“No,” I sob, slumping forward.
Water swallows my torso, smacking my mouth; I sputter. Delicate hands, much weaker than their magic, grip my shoulders, hauling me up. Kassandra, her flushed face pinched with worry, mouth set in a tight line.
“What is wrong with you?” I snarl, shoving her away, humiliation burning every inch of me where heat just was.
She flinches, eyes wet, almost afraid. Then she’s reaching for the ledge, hauling herself out of the pool.
“Wait,” I say, reaching. “I didn’t mean that.”
Her feet slap against the tile. “Yes, you did.”
“I didn’t—”
“This was a mistake. I made a mistake.”
This time, I flinch.
No. Not this, not now—not when I was so close to a release, to feeling something that is not rejection and failure and fear.
“Why?” I demand. “Because I am female or a faerie?”
“Because I am your mistress.” She reaches for a robe draped over a hook on the wall. “I’m sorry. I should not—will not take you like this.”
As Kassandra ties the robe around her, I stand naked in the water, my entire body burning with hatred and unspent pleasure.
“So now you care how you touch me,” I mutter.
She glares at me. “You’re still covered in bruises from Maxian.”
“And now a scar from the brother you offered me to.”
Kassandra crosses her arms, standing on the ledge above me, the light glinting off her silver features like a glittering statue. She is incandescent and horrid—and she is silent. She knows I’m right, and this knowledge only propels my rage.
“Where were your morals when you spit on me and called me names and insulted me every day for two years?”
“I know!” she cries. “I know you’ve experienced the worst of me.”
“So forgive me if I don’t believe that you’ve suddenly changed.”
“I’m trying to be better. I’m…trying.”
A small voice in me screams to stop as her eyes fill.
But her tears, her guilt, are nothing in the face of the pain and servitude and grief my people have suffered, and my desire curdles to disgust, but if I were to look too closely, I would know it is disgust in myself. So I don’t look this time. I point.
“You’re just like Eli,” I say.
“Explain.”
“Never mind.”
“Go on, say it. It’s what I always liked about you, after all.”
“That I’m a bitch?”
“That you’re not a coward, even if you are foolish enough to let your feelings slip along the plane.”
“You fae dangle dignity in front of those you deem fuckable. Then you rip it away once you’re done with us. But we all deserve rights and respect—whether it serves you or not.”
“Eli is a good fae.”
“Would he have taken Lila in if he didn’t love her?”
“I do not know.” After a moment of silence, she speaks again. “I will not report you for your insults or send you to the executioner, if that’s what you desire.”
“I do not desire it.”
“Then why say such dangerous things if you do not have a death wish? Most fae would harm you and I tell you this, and still, you are insolent.”
“Because,” I snap. “Because—”
Because it’s you.
She watches me with her sharp, feline eyes, and somehow this makes me wilt, covering my bruises and blushing with the hot pool.
“A part of you trusts me,” she states. “And you hate that about yourself.”
I say nothing.
“Well, there are parts of me I hate, too. Most of me, actually,” she says.
“I am sorry for everything I have done to you and to the other faeries. My own pain clouded my privilege. I do not expect forgiveness or kindness. You can stop serving in my apartments, too, if you’d like. I only ask one thing.”
I raise my eyes to Kassandra, shimmering Kassandra, power and authority rolling off her in waves I have never felt so strongly before.
“What is it, my lady?”
“Weeks ago, you told me that if cruelty must be learned, then it can be unlearned, too. So please—scream at me all you’d like for what I have done.
Flog me for it; planes know it is deserved.
But do not indict me for trying to be better.
I falter every day, but I am still stumbling toward good.
I would very much like to be good. So please, let me be good. ”
The smallest crack in her voice on the last word.
I lower my gaze, cheeks burning. “Okay.”
Kassandra sighs. “I laid out some clothes for you on the bed, but you will not be joining me in it. You smell like my mother, and lavender has always given me a headache.”
I raise a brow. “She gifted you her own scent?”
“Is it really that surprising?”
“Did she not know how much you love peaches?”
Her sharp gaze finds mine. “Careful, now.”
“Another way you are unlike her, then.”
She turns away. “Avery?”
“Yes?” I sink lower until the water is lapping at my throat.
My mistress keeps her back to me. “I should never have even dared, and for that, I claim full responsibility. I will never again take you. Not like this,” she says. “Not when your only option is to give.”
She departs, and I am left alone in the echoing pool, my body buzzing, my mind teeming with questions. When did it start for her? Those Illusions that flooded our minds included images from our early days together.
As I stride, dripping, to her bedroom, and pick up the clothes she purchased, I notice her stealing glances in the looking glass. As she wrings out her hair, as the tunic slides over my curves in a way cloth has never fit before, I wonder if she has memorized my body the way I have hers.
“Good night,” I say.
“Good night,” she echoes.
Later, in the dark of my room, I slip a hand beneath the sheets to try to finish what we started.
But shame and humiliation swell forth, tugging up other times that made me feel this way.
Days after my mother died, when I pressed myself, drunk, against Jeremee, and he held my wrists, kissing my forehead before helping me to bed.
The slew of half-hearted prospects in the decades of adolescence and early adulthood, young love and old games.
Why now do I cry in a cold bed as an adult?
Why do those who claim to care for me the most want to touch me the least?
Others were willing to grab, to strip and take and swallow.
It was not all bad, all pain. It was power; it was the price placed on my tongue at three gold coins and not just an oath of loyalty.
Why should I be ashamed of victory? Of reclamation? Of pleasure? I am not.
But they are. Kassandra and Jeremee are the only ones who deny what spiced their blood and mine. Why? If I cannot be a creature to love, why can’t I just be their creature to covet? Even if only for a few moments.
What felt like power before now feels like broken pride.
Curling up on my side, I feel empty.