Chapter 23 #3
“I do,” he said, and, as if it were second nature, he laid his hand over my shoulder.
Perhaps it was a lie. But it was the lie I needed to hear right now, and the fact that he knew that counted for something.
I was the one to, at last, break the stare. “I already feel better. You can go instead of staring at me as I dress.”
“What a shame,” he remarked, and stood up. He looked me up and down, gaze lingering on my shoulder. “We’ll re-apply in six hours. The wound will heal.”
He went to the door, and I blurted out, somewhat reluctantly, “Thank you.”
He paused, and I was already bracing for a snide, Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?
But instead he just said, “Lyri. That’s what you are.”
“Lyri?”
“Old Bloodborn,” he said. “It means lioness.”
And then he was gone.
When I did manage to drag myself out of the tepid, bloody bath and back into the bedchamber, Zefiah was on the bed sputtering light.
{You thoughtless child,} she hissed, as soon as I stepped into the room. {Allowing a fallen one near you in such a weakened state. What were you thinking?}
I didn’t have much of a choice, Zef. Unless you were about to grow some arms and help patch me up.
{You let him handle your blood.}
She said this the way someone might say, You let him shit on you.
I was, despite myself, annoyed.
I didn’t have a choice, I repeated. Besides, look at me. Whole. He didn’t eat me even a little.
I said this sarcastically, but as the words left my lips, I felt his fingers in my hair, gentle and firm. Felt his gaze lingering on my breasts—or, somehow even more intimate, meeting mine as he washed my hair.
I pulled the towel tighter around myself with a flash of weakness I didn’t quite understand.
{I have been by your side for ten years, Kyrene. Do not think I am fooled by you. I know how you are.}
I scoffed. How I am? He’s a mark. A vampire.
{Humans. The lines are always so thin with you. Enemy, friend, mark, lover, employer. Do not let him see so much of you. He will use it against you in the end.}
I bristled.
Right, that’s me. So trusting. I go around opening up my poor little wounded human heart to every handsome cock that wanders by. For fuck’s sake, Marko warmed my bed for years and I never even told him my birthday.
{And yet, you told the fallen one about him.}
I paused halfway through unfolding the shirt on the bed. I wasn’t sure why I felt caught, like a child with her hand in a box of candy, realizing that Zefiah had been close enough to hear our conversation.
What the hell are you so worried about? I threw the shirt on, awkwardly one-handed, wincing at the tug on my stitches. I could go knock on his door right now and fuck him for the next six hours and it would be none of your damned business.
As the words formed, the image latched onto me, uncomfortably vivid. How would he look at me, I wondered, if I did? Would he look at me the way he did when I opened my palm in front of him? With such hunger?
It still surprised me just how powerful I felt every time Septimus’s self-control wavered around me.
It reminded me of the way I felt when flesh parted beneath my blade.
I’d put vampires to the brink of death and it still did not make me feel as strong, as completely in control, as one involuntary bob of Septimus’s elegant throat.
{I have never mistaken you for any nun, Kyrene,} Zefiah spat.
{If you wish to defile yourself in that way, so be it.
But I know you. You have found a distraction.
Someone in whom you believe you see your own hungers.
But those very similarities you cling to are the stakes that will pierce your heart.
Do with your body what you please. But your heart has been promised to me, and me alone.
He does not deserve to break it. Remember who you truly are, Vindica Ultis. }
The steel-sharp edge of the sarcastic title cut down to the bone.
I slipped the clothes on with my back turned to Zefiah, feeling the urge to hide my face—even though of course, there was never any hiding from Zefiah.
She saw all of me, even the ugly animal urges and unflattering emotions I kept from everyone else.
Finally, I returned to the bed and lay Zefiah over my lap.
I ran the clean, dry washcloth over her length, polishing the glowing steel.
My flesh showed every mark of my mortal weaknesses, but Zefiah’s was perfection.
The platinum gold of her blade was so radiant it almost hurt to look at it, rows and swirls of ancient divine glyphs dancing up her length.
The whorls of gold that comprised her hilt and hand guard were so elegant that they seemed to dance in the breeze.
She was, despite everything we’d been through, so pristinely beautiful.
Blessed, holy, perfect. My hands, small and dirty and blood-covered, had never looked so pitiful as they did the first time they wrapped around her hilt.
You’ll have all the blood you crave, Zef, I said. God blood. Vampire blood. Septimus’s blood. And one day, my blood, too. That’s all you need to worry about.
Zefiah—ever weak for a good massage—let out a shiver of reluctant pleasure.
{It is not your blood that concerns me. I know better than any how soft that creature is that lies between your ribs. No one has earned the honor of piercing it. Do not allow them to.}
A smile twitched at the corner of my mouth. Only you can make a threat sound so sweet.
Still, that lump of flesh in my chest did ache.
I pressed my free hand to it without intending to.
Its beat was a weak, dull rhythm—a heart that belonged not to a god-chosen warrior, or a destined crafter of fates, but an unremarkable human, soft and fragile and perhaps lonelier than its bearer would ever admit.
Funny, that it limped on, when it already felt so pathetically broken.
I won’t, I murmured.