Renick #2
“Ren…your hand.” Sera takes my hand in hers, urging my fist to unclench to reveal the wound from the glass shard reopened. “Goddess, you’re bleeding.”
She tears a strip of her shift away, using it to gingerly dress my palm, her gaze intently focused on tending me.
I watch her, feeling each of her tender touches. This woman who deals in poisons, mending me with the caring hands of a healer. And I hear myself say, “But he hurt you.”
A beat of silence follows, where she keeps her focus on binding the wound. “He merely hurt my flesh,” she finally says. “And if you try to go after him, you will die. What do you think will hurt me more?”
When her eyes meet mine, they’re blazing, wet and furious. “You’ll die for nothing,” she says. “You’ll be cut down swiftly, Ren, and then I’ll have to marry him anyway. Except then, I’ll have to do so knowing I watched him kill you. Is that what you want? To make me live with that hurt?”
I grasp her hand, the soft dressing doing nothing to ease the pain, inside and out. Every part of me is screaming to move, to act, to end him—
“I can’t endure that,” she says, her voice going gentle, but her grip on me tightens.
My forehead drops to hers. I’m breathing hard, my whole body still humming with the need to do something, be something, end the man who put his hands on her and maybe worse…
“You came here carrying grief,” she continues. “I don't know all of your story, but I know your grief is real, and if you spend it on a reckless strike against the king, you will waste it. You’ll waste everything.”
I lick my lips, desperate to taste hers, to bury this heartache in her.
“I have a plan,” she whispers.
I pull back enough to find her gaze, my heart in a vise. “What are you talking about, Sera.”
“I can’t tell you right now. The less you know, the safer you are, and the safer—” she swallows “—the safer we all stay. But I need you to trust me. I need you to not interfere. Whatever happens. However much it kills you to stand by.” Her hands tighten on my motley.
“Can you do that? Can you trust me, Ren?”
I look at her. At the bruises on her throat, the bite on her breast, the fingerprints on her wrists.
At the steel underneath the silk, like a forged blade.
This woman who walked into a palace already carrying a purpose of her own, and has been carrying it quietly this entire time while I fumbled and pined and fell.
“I don’t know how,” I admit hoarsely. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to just stand there. On the sidelines. Watching you marry him. Watching him put his ring on you and call you his and take you to his bed.” My voice breaks. “Tell me how to survive that, Sera. Tell me.”
Her eyes glisten, her lips trembling. “You know that in your heart, I belong to you,” she says, and my resolve shatters.
“The gods be damned, Sera, I can’t—”
“You can,” she says, more forcefully. “You trust me. Know that I am yours. It’s all I have to give, Ren.” Her eyes shine. “It’s the only thing I can promise. So I’m asking you to take it.”
I press my forehead harder against hers. The fight is still thrashing inside my body, but it’s losing—losing to her, the way everything in me wants to lose to her.
“I swear it,” I say at last, the words torn out of me.
“I swear it on Kammy’s hawthorn tree. On the only thing I have left to swear on.
” I pull back enough to meet her eyes. “But I swear something else to you. If Aldric forces himself on you…” My jaw clenches just at the thought.
“There is no power in any realm that will stop me from ending him. Do you understand me? That, I vow.”
She studies me for a long moment. Then she nods, once. “I believe you,” she whispers.
The silence stretches between us, thick with everything unsaid. My thumb traces the edge of one of the bruises on her collarbone, feather-light, as if I can erase it. As if tenderness can undo his cruel touch.
The ice in my chest cracks, and beneath it is something molten. I think of the king, with his callous pale eyes and his ringed fingers—putting his hands on her, leaving those marks, taking his pleasure from her body while she endured it because she had no choice.
And then I think of something that’s none of my right to ask.
But I’m a fool. And fools have terrible manners.
“Did he leave you wanting?” It’s left my mouth before I can stop it.
Sera stills. Her mouth opens, closes. Her eyes drop from mine, her lashes dark against her cheeks, and a flush rises up her throat. A mix of shame and fury passes over her features. She presses her lips together and looks away, toward the books, toward anywhere but me.
And in her silence, I build my own answer.
I tell myself the cruelest, most bearable version: that he used her and left her cold, left her empty, took and gave nothing.
That whatever happened after the feast, it brought her no pleasure, only humiliation.
I let myself believe it because the alternative—that the monster wrung something of pleasure from her—is a thought I’m not strong enough to hold.
“Sera.” I take her chin between my thumb and finger, turning her face up to mine. “Tell me.”
Her dark eyes are wet at the lash line, guarded.
I exhale heavy through my nose. “He doesn’t get to be the last one who touches you before that altar,” I say, low and fierce. “I refuse to give him that. Not if I can help it.”
Her breath catches. “Ren—”
“Let me be in service to you.” I’m already sinking to the floor, my wrapped hand sliding from her face down her throat, down the soft lines of her body as I lower myself to my knees in front of her. “Let me give you something that isn’t his. Let me replace his touch. Please.”
Her chest rises on my plea, and if she demanded it, I would grovel for her. For just a taste, if that’s all she’s willing to give me.
She stares down at me, kneeling before her in my motley, and her hands come to rest in my hair.
“You’re supposed to be the fool,” she whispers, trembling slightly. “Yet, why are you the only worthy man?”
“Because for you,” I say, “I will be. Worthy in worship of you, my princess.”