23 Understanding #2
She stilled in the act of washing her face.
“Eleven years ago, Clan Kader’s manor was my home.” Kadra paced the bedroom. “I preferred being by the servants’ quarters. The others were determined not to fraternize with them, so I had all the quiet I wanted.”
“Others?”
Kadra’s gaze was distant as if he were staring all the way to the farthest corner of the world.
“My siblings. At the time, Clevsin was as powerful a lightning magus as the Magus Supreme before Aelius. But he was risk-averse. He preferred the underworld to ruling above ground. He enjoyed creating a dynasty to rule from the shadows. He had little trouble finding the women.”
Understanding dawned. “Noceo’s your half brother.”
He nodded, unbuttoning his robes. “The oldest now. There were others, older and younger, but Clevsin was a harsh taskmaster. Not everyone survived.”
Heat licked behind her eyes, and she drew a choked breath. “You and Noceo did.”
“I inherited Clevsin’s power and then some. Noceo had no ability with lightning, but his voice reached Seventh-Tier even as a child. It takes a great deal to fight Coercion. That made him extremely useful for the Clan’s dealings. Drug distribution—blazeleaf at first. Women for Clevsin.”
She was scrubbing herself raw, she dimly realized. “Were those your dealings too?” she whispered.
His fingers paused on his buttons. “An aptitude for bloodshed and limited remorse afterward marked me as better suited to enforcing.” The dark look he leveled on her left her in no doubt as to what that was.
Torture and elimination of the Clan’s enemies. His last contact with them had been eleven years ago. He would have been thirteen.
“I caused the strike on the manor eleven years ago. Dalvia informed Clevsin of my plans for escape, and he cornered me. I reacted. He, the manor, and its spoils, burned.”
She swallowed. “Why didn’t you take Noceo or Dalvia with you?”
“I had reason.” The dark intensity edging into Kadra’s gaze said that the tale was an ugly one. “I expected for him to seek vengeance, but after eleven years, I grew complacent.”
“Anyone would,” she murmured. “Why is Dalvia a part of this? She doesn’t seem to want any bloodshed, and so far, she’s acted like a strong wind would scare her.”
“She believes that, in killing Clevsin, I left her and Noceo powerless in a city of predators.” His voice was hard.
“But what good would it have done her to cling to a power that ugly and which wasn’t hers?”
“Because she felt safest with it.”
As she reeled under that simple, bitter truth, Kadra shrugged off his robes, the ripple of his muscular frame sending her pulse into a gallop.
There had always been an innate elegance to his movements, not a whit of wasted motion.
Her throat burned. He’s former nobility.
Their pasts had nothing in common after all.
She realized she had said it aloud when his eyes darted to her, starkness penetrating the ice in their depths. He leaned over the washbasin with a jerk of his head, almost blindly going through the motions, and she saw it then. Saw what it was like to see him afraid.
Oh.
When she left the tub, he barely looked at her, seemingly girding himself for war by the vicious set of his features.
While he got clean, she wrapped herself in one of the bathrobes in the closet, still reeling.
She had let her insecurities get in the way of seeing the truth. He really thought I’d leave.
His was an ugly past, but no more than she had guessed during her short stay in Komis, and she had long known that Kadra’s hands were bloodstained.
This wasn’t what he had kept from her. There was more.
Something that had made him avoid broaching the topic from the start.
She saw it in the tension coiling his muscled back as he emerged from the bath and drew on a robe.
He seated himself in an armchair by the bed with unconscious grace, dark hair spilling over his forehead.
She wondered what he would have looked like back then.
“I think my younger self would’ve found you quite handsome at thirteen,” she mused.
Kadra’s fingers fell from the stern line of his lips. He blinked when she strode over to him, and knelt, dropping her cheek on the velvety fabric over his lap.
Face turned up to his, she smiled sadly. “You were little more than a child, Kadra. An intelligent one, no doubt, but a child forced to make adult decisions.”
He exhaled roughly, a calloused palm settling on her hair to stroke it with breathtaking tenderness and a strange finality before letting her go. As though his next words would alter them irrevocably. Dread wove through her ribs when his lips parted.
“Eleven years ago, I created whitesleep.”
True.
Her mouth opened. Closed. She raised her head, the threads comprising the past eight months unraveling and weaving themselves into a different tapestry. His knowledge of the ingredients. His strange tension during raids of whitesleep dens. The coin he allotted toward healers treating addiction.
Wood creaked on either side of her as he gripped the arms of his chair. “Clevsin needed a new product.” All emotion had fled his eyes. “I dried beetle venom to powder and concentrated it.”
“Did you distribute it too?” Her tongue felt like a ship’s anchor.
He lifted a shoulder in an elegant shrug. “An irrelevant distinction. I would have, if escape had failed.”
“Whitesleep has saved as many as it has destroyed. A bladesmith can’t be faulted for how the wielders used their swords.”
That winded him. She saw it in the slackening of his grip on the chair.
She rested her chin on his knee. He didn’t seem to notice. “Anything else?”
“I started killing at nine. Clevsin enjoyed his games, and I showed talent at them. Few of my victims deserved it.”
“I know,” she said. “But will you now tell me why you trusted me enough to try and crown me as Tetrarch last year, but didn’t mention this?”
His face was utterly remote. “You’d leave.” He said it as if it was only right that she did.
Her heart squeezed. “Never,” she returned his declaration.
“I’m familiar with what people do for survival even if I was lucky enough to avoid the worst of it.
You wouldn’t have escaped that manor if you had enjoyed what happened there.
” She closed her eyes on a shaky sigh. “Do you doubt my judgment?”
“No.”
“Then, trust me when I say it.” Rearing back on her knees when he reached for her, she said it starkly, hungrily, and with all the faith she’d always had in him, “I love you, Kadra.”
Registering the stunned shattering of the void in his gaze, she stood and leaned over his seated form. “I would have loved you then, if I had known you.”
A rush of air left him. Disbelief. Relief.
Reaching between them, she undid the tie of his robe, letting hers slip down one shoulder. “And I’ll love you even if you fear to give me your burdens.”
She let her robe part and pool to the ground, baring herself to him. Longing and hunger drummed through her, echoed in the hungry flush sweeping his cheekbones. It deepened when she knelt between his muscular thighs. “Now, call me yours.”
Lips parted, pupils blown, he was a man undone. Tar-black eyes caressed her, painting her with gooseflesh. She moved an inch forward, gripping the thick stalk of his cock, her breath frozen at its zenith in pure anticipation. Breathing hard, they stared at each other.
“Mine.” His voice was low and deliberate, sinking into her bloodstream. Love and hunger, wine and lightning.
Her throat drew tight. “Now, don’t stop saying it.
” She drew him into her mouth, glorying in his harsh groan, in the way his hips thrust to meet her mouth halfway.
His fingers tangled almost desperately in her hair, pulling her in and down his length.
She gripped his thighs, eagerly taking him deep to the music of his rough sounds of pleasure.
He slid and withdrew, murmuring hoarse words of affection, letting her lave him with her tongue.
She burned with need, transfixed at his eyes, the broad expanse of his hair-dusted chest, the rich timbre of his voice.
As potent as a god. She worshipped at his feet, hollowing her cheeks and relishing his filthy praise.
“Fuck, my beauty. Take a little more,” he ordered, his jaw like iron.
Senseless with arousal, she obeyed until he pried her loose with a groan, parting her swollen lips with his thumb.
Locking an arm around her waist, he snatched her off the ground and settled her onto his lap.
They moved as one, her thighs involuntarily straddling him, their bodies slipping against each other with need. His mouth cut off her gasp of pleasure.
Hands buried in her hair, he dragged her lips against his own, pupils bleeding into the black of his eyes. He took her roughly most days, knowing that she loved it, but tonight, he was near feral, palming her breasts, her ass, rocking her over his cock and leaving them both slick.
Her skin was fever hot as he pushed two fingers into her mouth and went heavy-lidded when she sucked on them.
He kept them inside, drawing her breasts into his mouth as she needily tasted his skin.
Hunger gripped her, drilled through her core when he removed his fingers and replaced them with his tongue.
She writhed against him, returning his open-mouthed kisses, biting his neck, grazing her teeth over his chin, pushing down the shoulders of his robes.
His teeth clenched, abs rippling when she drew her nails down them, curling them into his chest hair.
Lust-inked eyes trailed over her nude body. She moaned when he slid a finger inside her. “Ten fucking hells, you’re soaked.”