"Damn you, Lira..."
It was barely a mutter. Low. Ground between his back teeth like gravel.
She smiled. Small. Victorious. The particular smile of a woman who had just detonated sothing very small in a very precise location and was internally cataloguing the damage with profound satisfaction.
Ytrisia, pressed warm and unmoving against his right side, said absolutely nothing.
That was sohow worse.
The steam still ran thick and slow along the tiled ceiling, curling lazily above the three of them—two bare won, one increasingly exasperated man, every inch of skin making contact in a configuration that could not possibly be mistaken for anything other than exactly what it was.
Cruxius exhaled through his nose.
Long.
Controlled.
The exhale of a man renegotiating his relationship with the concept of dignity in real ti.
His hands stayed where they were—a broad palm on Lira’s ass, another low on Ytrisia’s hip. Not possessive, currently. Just architectural. Just load-bearing. Just two large hands deciding, on a purely structural level, that this was where they lived now.
"You are both—" he began.
"Don’t," said Lira.
"Don’t," said Ytrisia.
A beat.
They looked at each other sideways over his chest, this being the first ti in the last seven minutes they had acknowledged each other’s existence in any direct way. Sothing passed between them. Not warmth, exactly. Not understanding.
More the mutual recognition of two won standing on opposite banks of the sa flooding river.
Cruxius watched it happen.
His jaw set.
"...Fine," he said finally. The word a door being closed with surgical quietness. "Separate rooms tonight. Both of you."
Lira’s golden eyes flicked up to his face. She read sothing there and decided, for once in her entire existence, not to push it further.
She stepped back.
One small, deliberate retreat—the kind that cost her sothing—her warm weight peeling away from his left side with a soft, damp sound of separated skin.
Ytrisia followed a second later. Slower. Her violet eyes staying on his face a beat longer than Lira’s had, searching for sothing she didn’t vocalize.
She didn’t find it.
Or maybe she found sothing worse: she found ’nothing’. Just the even, dark calm of a man who had already recalculated the entire situation and made his next three moves.
She turned.
She found her towel.
The only thing that was stopping them from leaving was the voice of Cruxiius; he simply inquired from behind, "By the way, how about I apologize to you both before you leave?"
---
Elsewhere.
Down a long corridor where torchlight breathed and swayed against carved obsidian walls.
A pair of bare feet moved across cold stone.
Slow. Unhurried. The gait of a woman who has never once in ten centuries needed to rush toward anything, because everything she wanted eventually ca to her anyway—either crawling or bleeding, both acceptable.
Evangeline.
Silver hair, loose and tumbling well past her bare shoulders, catching the torchlight and throwing it back in fine pale threads. Her gown trailed behind her—thin enough that the light passed through it at angles, the dark stone corridor visible briefly through the fabric before the next torch threw everything back into amber and shadow.
Her fingers rose to her lips.
Touched them, barely.
The sa gesture she’d repeated without realizing it, six tis now, on this sa walk. The sa thoughtless drift of two fingertips to the soft curve of her lower lip, lingering, pressing faintly, like checking to see if sothing was still warm.
’Strange.’
The pendant at her sternum pulsed.
Hard.
A sharp, aggressive throb of red light that flared against the thin fabric of her gown and cast a faint rose-tinted shadow across her collarbone.
She glanced down at it.
It pulsed again. ’Urgent. Insistent. The magical equivalent of sothing tugging frantically at her sleeve.’
Her eyes moved back to the corridor ahead.
She kept walking.
The pendant flared a third ti. A fourth. The red light stuttered like a panicked heartbeat, the ruby surface darkening to the color of arterial blood where it glowed hottest—
She simply let it.
’Whatever you’re trying to tell ,’ she thought, with the ancient, serene indifference of soone who had survived enough catastrophes to know that urgency, left long enough, always simplified itself, ’you’ll find a way to be more specific.’
The torches thinned as she moved deeper into the east wing.
The wing she had cleared. The wing she had rerouted her servants away from.
The wing she had given—for now, with full awareness of what that ant, with full awareness of the precedent it set, with full awareness that she was either being very shrewd or very stupid and had not yet decided which—to ’him’.
She could sll it before she heard it.
Blood.
Old copper and sothing deeper beneath it. Sothing her body registered before her mind caught up—warm, living, the particular iron-thick sweetness of blood that carried ’lineage’ in it. The kind that made the oldest parts of her nature wake up and turn toward the scent like flowers to light.
Her steps slowed.
’He’s—’
Then she heard it.
A sound.
Faint, through thick stone. Then less faint as she moved another ten ters. Then entirely unmistakable.
A woman’s cry.
High. Raw. Broken at the edges in the very specific way that indicated it wasn’t the first one and wouldn’t be the last.
Then another voice—overlapping, lower in pitch, shaking:
’"Sir—ah—Sir, please—"’
Then a third sound, not a voice at all, just sound: skin. The sharp, wet report of flesh eting flesh in a rhythm that needed no translation.
Pah. Pah. Pah.
Evangeline stopped walking.
Her chin lifted slightly.
Sothing crossed her face—not shock. Not offense. The expression was subtler than that, finer. The expression of a woman who has just been handed confirmation of sothing she’d already known was true and is finding it both completely expected and, against her better judgnt, mildly ’fascinating’.
Her mouth curved.
Just barely. Just the ghost of it, at the left corner.
’What kind of vampire is he?’
The thought surfaced with a kind of genuine amusent she rarely gave anything credit for producing. She had seen a great many things in her centuries. She had presided over courts of excess that made mortal depravity look like children playing. She had watched bloodlines rise and fall on the specific character of their appetites.
But this particular human—this ’infuriating’, ’blood-warm’, ’impossibly ancient-blooded’ man she had installed in her east wing like a curiosity she hadn’t yet decided what to do with—
She could practically ’hear’ him, if she let herself imagine it. The flat, unbothered delivery. The exact cadence. Sothing like:
’Just like you suck blood... I suck—’
She walked forward.
To the window.
The window looked down into a private courtyard-facing chamber—her most ornate guest room, all dark carved stone and heavy silk, two torches burning low. She looked through it and simply saw.
The pink-haired woman—’Lira. The one with golden eyes. The one with claws in her smile.’—was seated on his face.
That was the cleanest way to describe it.
Her pale, soft thighs bracketed his jaw on either side, her knees dimpling the dark silk sheets, her hands braced on the carved stone headboard for balance. Her head was tilted back, pink hair a tangled curtain down her bare spine, mouth open, lashes fluttering in rapid, lost patterns. Her hips rolled. Slow, shaking, involuntary—not a deliberate rhythm but the body’s response to sothing too precise to ignore.
Below her, his tongue moved.
Deliberate.
Unhurried.
Practiced enough to be genuinely offensive.
’"Haaah—ah—haahh—Sir—!"’
User Comments
0 comments from readers