Chapter 15
What you think of me
Lyric wakes warm and aroused. The blankets are soft, skull sirens call prettily from the latticework ceiling in the room below, and his wife’s breath heats his spine between his shoulder blades.
Her hand rests on his side, fingers under his shirt against bare ribs.
Their body temperature is perfectly aligned, a good night’s sleep having provoked an under-the-cover ecosystem just for them.
He smiles, rubs his cheek to the pillow, and nudges his ass back into the bowl of her hips.
The tip of her nose brushes his back before she stretches the length of her body against his, fitting them together.
She slides her hand down his belly, and Lyric catches his breath.
But she doesn’t stop, slipping fingers under the hem of his loose pants.
He presses back into her again and she hums languorously, walking delicate fingers lower to find the head of his half-hard cock slumped against his thigh.
She pinches teasingly at his foreskin and Lyric laughs his complaint, says, “Singix—”
The name isn’t even all the way spoken when he tries to suck it back in.
Before he can move, Iriset snatches her hand away and rolls over.
Lyric’s pulse throbs in his temples and neck, he can feel it thrumming down his body, and his erection somehow grows worse. He squeezes his eyes closed, then looks at the open balcony, at the softening blue sky. He slowly turns onto his back.
Iriset is seated on the far edge of the bed, legs up and arms around her shins.
She’s buried her face against her knees.
His entire body wants to grab her, drag her to him again, to hold her, to kiss her, to forget again and have it all back.
He wants to lose himself in her, give up control to her eager mouth, distract them both, Holy Silence he wants that.
Them. He wants it with a strength he’s never experienced.
Because he’d never had to deny himself this before.
Instead of reaching for her, Lyric painstakingly stands. His body feels overfull, flush with too much desire. Lyric smooths down his sleep shirt, the pressure better than the tickle of soft cloth skimming against his nipples and stomach. He walks away like there’s nothing wrong.
Lyric washes as quickly as he can in the bathroom, ignoring his body though he considers if jerking himself off will be faster. Maybe, but it will certainly be disappointing.
When Iriset enters, he’s barely dressed, attempting a long dark violet wrap robe that might be a dress based on the way it ties and Irsu River’s comments from two nights before. He’s only tied the waist, and the rest hangs around his hips, baring his torso.
The look Iriset gives him is excoriating, except she licks her bottom lip, and even on this face that does not belong to the wife he’s loved and fucked in every room of their marital suite, Lyric can read the lust.
It brings the edge he managed to soften biting back. Lyric swallows very visibly, he’s sure. Though his voice sounds rough, he says, “I think if I hated you, I might be able to do it.”
He can see it hit her, and Iriset absorbs the words with a proud tilt of her chin. “I do hate you a little bit.”
Lyric knew her response would hurt, but it isn’t as terrible as it might have been, because he expected something like it. Iriset is proud. And cold when she wants to be. Lyric only nods, then turns back to figuring out the clothes.
He hears her bare feet slapping the glass floor. “Why are you being like this?”
“Like what?” he asks the wardrobe innards before she grabs his shoulder to nudge him around.
Their eyes meet, and all the air huffs out of her. “Never mind,” she says, gaze on his collarbone. “I know why.”
“Tell me,” he murmurs, and he means it. He longs for her to explain. His arguer. Iriset Silk.
Iriset leans closer and Lyric cannot resist letting his head fall so their foreheads tap together. It’s the only part of them touching. She says, “Because you don’t know who you are here. Everything you’ve been told to be, made to be, taught to be, wanted to be, doesn’t exist here.”
Lyric shudders. She reads design so well.
“Isn’t that an opportunity?” she whispers.
“Be whoever you want. There’s no Vertex Seal here.
Just Lyric. Just a want-to-be priest, single-minded, obsessive, passionate, smart, thoughtful.
Brutal.” She puts her hands flat on his chest, thumbs directly over his sternum where the marriage knot is buried.
“But it’s temporary.”
“Is it?” Her breath huffs out. “Even if it is, then so? That’s even better. Less pressure.”
He leans away to look at her face. Her expression is wide open, but he knows better than to trust the masks Iriset wears. “Is that what you thought when you married me? It’s temporary, so I can be whatever I want? Do what I want? Ruin what I want?”
Anger spasms across her face. “Your sister made me—”
Lyric turns away. “We don’t need to readdress this. We were not meant to be married, partners, anything. It was politics and blackmail, yes, I understand.”
“Lyric—”
“You want me to dig, Iriset?” he demands, suddenly furious again.
“Amaranth made you marry me, but you said you loved me. You talked to me, encouraged me, pretended to be mine, that we were, ah sweet Silence, Iriset—you’re the one who made me feel loved.
Made me believe I deserved you. Deserved to be happy.
And then used that to undermine my life, my family, my empire.
That’s what I truly deserved, isn’t it.” He stops, reins himself in with a long breath through open teeth.
Calmer he says, “I can accept that. I know what I’ve been made to be, what I’ve embraced and chosen, and maybe you are every bit the vengeful, glorious retribution you tried to make yourself.
” Lyric backs up, turns to grip the door of the wardrobe just for something to squeeze.
“But here, even with all that swept away, how can I look at you without remembering? How can I let myself be vulnerable enough to touch, to love, to hate, to—to feel anything, when the vehicle of my devastation is looking at me the way you look at me?”
Iriset’s lips part, and she takes a startled step backward.
“I can’t build something new with you,” Lyric confesses.
“Our foundation is eaten through. But you do belong here. You have a wild, breathing Moon-Eater, a god of apostasy. Whatever you choose to do with him, with this place and its power. It’s in your hands now.
So remake the world, Iriset. I know you can.
” He ends on a whisper. His chest is so tight, he wishes he’d eaten so he could throw up.
But he has to say this. He has to believe it, to trust the Holy Design.
How can he do anything but cling to Aharté’s will?
Even if what he wants is for this apostate to remake the world for him, for their future.
He can’t just make her do it. He can’t make her do anything.
In absolute quiet, they stand there. Iriset apparently has nothing to say, and Lyric tries not to say any more. Tries not to spit out the bile churning in his gut—it’s all for himself anyway.
Finally, he starts pulling the rest of the clothes on.
Iriset moves closer and helps, finding the armhole and the right ties for his waist. She keeps her eyes down, gentle like Singix, and he wonders how much of that was an act.
He doesn’t think the sex was a lie, so maybe this sort of care wasn’t, either.
Is this how Iriset treats things that matter to her?
Her most precious designs. He thought she was pregnant only a quad ago, and imagined her holding a child, longed for it, secretly wished they could be anywhere but the palace of the Vertex Seal, because he meant it all those years ago when he told his uncle he hated the thought of subjecting his child to his own childhood.
No matter how loved he’d been. Lyric never would abandon his throne, his family, the mirané people and all the rest of the empire.
But that doesn’t mean he didn’t dream about it.
Iriset adjusts the collar of the robe and sorts through the options until she finds a sheer vest that hangs past his knees. It’s pale gray, shimmering with iridescent embroidery. “There,” she says. “This dress makes you look soft. And your eyes vibrant.”
It would be nice to be soft, soft and luscious like Amaranth, made for loving, not this hardened tool his father forged.
Maybe here, like Iriset suggested, he can remake himself in Aharté’s image a little bit.
He’s already using her name. A calm, just goddess.
Made to love. Nobody outside of the priesthood ever sees the love in Silence, but Lyric always knew it was there. It’s part of Aharté’s name.
In his prolonged quiet, they finish getting dressed.
Iriset tells him to sit on the stool and he closes his eyes, and she paints lines against his lashes and something small and swirling on his freckled cheek.
She puts a little color on his bottom lip and tells him to smear it around.
He does, looking up at her, and Iriset touches his jaw very lightly, inspecting him.
“Good,” she says, then paints her own face very lightly and they take turns with each other’s hair.
Lyric isn’t quite ready to ask her to teach him how she knots hers, instead twisting pieces of it into a triplet of buns.
He adds a small decorative comb inlaid with turquoise, and when he’s satisfied with its placement he looks up and catches her watching him in the mirror. Her expression is solemn.
Lyric lifts his brows in question.
Iriset takes his hands. “I have to tell you something.”
His stomach drops. “All right.”