Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
As Septimus stepped into the chamber and I closed the door behind him, Zefiah flared in protest from her place lying across the bed.
“Your sword dislikes me,” Septimus observed.
“Well, yes. She hates vampires.”
“Perhaps if you’re both lucky, she’ll get to drink my blood one day.”
I gave him a smile that was more of a baring of teeth. “Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll get to drink mine.”
Septimus’s smooth expression flickered. He took another deep inhale of his cigarillo in a way that seemed a little urgent.
Then he exhaled, and that smirk unfurled over his lips again. He looked me up and down.
“Let’s look at that shoulder.”
I hesitated. He raised his brows at me expectantly.
“You expect me to undress in front of you?” I said.
“Come now. Don’t try to tell me that you’re shy.”
He wasn’t wrong. I’d been happy to present my naked flesh to strangers in inns far seedier than this place. Still, presenting it to Septimus seemed like a very different prospect. Worse, it would reveal my obvious weakness.
Perhaps he somehow heard this in my silence, because again, his expression shifted.
“Turn around,” he said.
It went against every instinct to turn my back to a vampire, but reluctantly, I obeyed.
I heard his footsteps cross the room. Then the running of water. Then footsteps, until I sensed his presence behind me. I really could feel, physically feel, his eyes on me.
“I’m going to cut this shirt off now,” he said.
Relief swept through me. Because he had spared me the indignity of having to tell him I couldn’t take it off myself.
“Are you flirting with me?” I said drily.
“If I was, you certainly wouldn’t have to ask.” I drew in a sharp inhale as he took the hem of my blouse in his hands. Even that miniscule movement tore at my wound. “And I’d be using my teeth.”
As if he expected this to distract me, a rip tore through the air.
Pain drowned everything else. Cold air engulfed my body. The shirt fell to the floor in a heap. I reflexively began to fold my arms around my chest, only to be punished by a shock of agony through my right shoulder.
“Gods fucking help me,” I breathed.
“The gods put us here. Don’t thank them for that. My back is turned. Go to the tub. Get in, if you can. If you can’t, I’ll help you. There’s a sheet in there, if you would like to cover yourself.”
I might have expected to hear a mocking note in his voice. But the words were almost gentle.
I peered over my shoulder to see that Septimus, indeed, had turned his back to me. I went to the washroom and turned off the tap with my good arm. The water steamed faintly in a way that was practically arousing. A sheet had been draped over the edge of the iron tub.
Thankfully, I was able to get in with my dignity intact. Then I lay the sheet over myself, holding it over my breasts. The wet, thin fabric clung transparently to my skin.
I scowled down at it. It wasn’t much of a modesty cover.
I adjusted, then called, “Come in.”
Septimus turned, then stopped short. His gaze darted to me, then to the wet sheet piled up on the ground. Very much not on me.
His shock, well-hidden as it was, was immensely satisfying.
I was going to be exposed regardless. I’d rather own it, use it to force his vulnerability out right alongside mine, than cling to a wet sheet that didn’t hide anything anyway.
In that brief shock, I reclaimed a little of the pride I’d left with my bloody clothing on the floor. A little piece of victory.
His eyes narrowed, like he knew exactly what I was doing, but didn’t acknowledge it. He dragged a stool behind me and sat. I could feel him surveying my naked skin, though I refused to shrink under that stare.
Finally, he stated plainly, “You are a mess. This will hurt.”
The water shuddered as he dipped something into it, and then warm water caressed my back.
“Fucking hell,” I gritted out.
Hurt was an understatement. The warm water stung fiercely. My eyes squeezed shut, fingernails biting into the rim of the tub.
And yet, that pain, blinding as it was, didn’t hurt as much as the unexpected gentleness of the touch. Like my body was remembering that the last time someone had touched me this way, my entire world had been different.
When his washcloth moved closer to my wounded shoulder, my body threatened to fold in on itself.
Septimus hesitated, but I forced out, “Don’t stop. Get it over with.”
“What I always love beautiful women to say to me. Medicine, now. Ready?”
“Just do it.”
He obeyed me, even though the harsh texture of the washcloth and every syringe of medicine was unbearable. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed tears weren’t running down my cheeks.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, he murmured, “Still more to go, but the worst is done.”
The pain ebbed. I began breathing again. I chanced a glance at my shoulder. It was cleaner now, but that only made it easier to see the full extent of the damage—purple, torn skin and messy stitches.
A lump rose in my throat, thick with the question I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Septimus seemed to hear it, anyway.
“Don’t worry, Vindica Ultis,” he said. “Your arm will go on to behead things at the worst possible time once more, I promise you.”
Oh, fuck him.
“Aren’t you lucky to have my hands to get dirty, seeing as you like to keep your own so clean,” I said.
He let out a soft laugh. “They’re not clean right now, are they?”
I eyed his hands out of the corner of my eye, barely visible as he wrung out the washcloth in the water.
His sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, revealing long, elegant cords of muscle.
They were beautiful arms. Beautiful hands.
But now, that pale flesh was streaked with blood. Mine, and who knew how many others’.
I thought of his tongue against my open wound at the Salt Keep, meeting my dare. It no longer seemed like petty amusement to taunt him with my blood. The cost felt so much higher.
Septimus caught my eye, and I snapped my gaze forward again, staring into the bloody water. I drew in a hiss of pain as he returned to his work.
He said, “I was . . . not myself when we arrived.”
I scoffed. “That’s not true. You were very much yourself. ‘Monsters recognize monsters,’ right? Don’t apologize. It would embarrass me on your behalf. It’s the most interesting side of you I’ve seen.”
It almost surprised me that I meant it. I liked Septimus best that way: raw, free of his perpetually smooth veneer.
“I wasn’t going to apologize,” he said. “Everything I said was true.”
You only wish you cared, because then perhaps it would make you as good as the ones you let die.
The pang of pain as he applied more medicine seemed to hit deeper, this time. I swallowed thickly.
“But,” he went on, “I realize now that I may have misread you, when we first met.”
“Misread—?”
“When I first began following you, I thought they were companions of convenience. The priestess, the fighter, the machinist girl.”
My body tensed, and this time, it had nothing to do with my wounds.
Mirie, Marko, and Valentina.
Companions of convenience. A reasonable assumption. I’d treated them that way. Did they ever know how much they had meant to me? How could I expect them to, when I didn’t even let myself feel it?
“They weren’t,” I shot back. “They were . . . they were . . .”
How could I describe what they were? I’d never been able to find those words in life, and I was ashamed I couldn’t give them that in death, either.
The silence stretched. Septimus gently nudged my good shoulder. “Lean back,” he said.
I realized he meant to wash my hair.
I didn’t want to. I’d be exposing my face to him when it felt most dangerous to do so. But I wasn’t about to show him that fear.
I leaned backward, and he cradled my shoulders, slowly lowering my hair into the water until warmth surrounded my scalp.
I was very aware that at this angle, with my head tilted back, my breasts were in clear view of him, the fullest part of them rising slightly from the water.
I found myself staring at his face. His lashes were lowered, brow furrowed in concentration, mouth downturned, as he began working something that smelled delightfully like lavender into my scalp.
Even when we were under attack by a goddess herself, he hadn’t looked so serious. His eyes flicked to meet mine. A ring of red still surrounded his left iris.
Then he said quietly, “The priestess, from what I saw, was quite a warrior. More skilled than most White Pantheon acolytes I’d seen.”
The words were measured and casual. And yet, they felt like such a shocking gift. As if we both knew, but would leave unspoken, what he was offering me.
His fingers massaged circles against the back of my scalp, gently untangling snarls of hair. I hated how good it felt—that it sent waves of goose bumps rippling up my spine.
“More skilled than most? She’s better than any of them.”
“The fighter you had wasn’t bad, either. Though he seemed a bit brutish.”
“He was a piece of shit.” I said this fondly, instinctively, because I was so accustomed to speaking of Marko that way. But with those words came the memory of his dead body, legs torn off, crawling to Valentina in his final act, and I swallowed a heavy lump.
“But he surprised me,” I said softly. “In the end.”
“And the machinist?”
Valentina. I saw her as she had been the night I first met her. I saw her as she was the night she died. I saw a million failures that stretched between them.
She was perfect.
The words were right there. I should have said them before. I should have said them often. But she was gone, and coward that I was, I still couldn’t say them now.
I smothered this thought before it set and turned my rage to Septimus instead.
“You have no right to talk about them,” I said, between clenched teeth. “You’re the reason they’re dead, when you could have stopped it.”