Her blind deception the.., p.23
Her Blind Deception (The Dark Reflection Series Book 2), page 23
Other prisoners were shouting now, banging on the bars of their cells, the sound rebounding off the walls and inflaming the pounding in my head. At least I could barely make out the gasping gurgle of the body on the floor. And the guard didn’t even look at me as I stepped through the door of the cell, too busy trying to staunch the blood flow to see that I was about to finish what I’d started.
The two remaining prisoners were easier. I didn’t have to get so close to them. Just struck them from above, one in the side of the neck, the other in the back. And those hands that had stretched me over the campfire stilled, those mouths that had laughed as I burned went silent.
I don’t think any of the guards realised I was still there as I left the cell. Perhaps they thought I’d already fled. The sight of all the blood in the walkway was distracting enough that they didn’t even look my way. I barely registered where I was going as I left the scene behind, only knew that my feet were moving, my hand dragging against the wall for support as I stumbled away from the blood and the gasping and the noise. Down the corridor that had led me into that damned place. Up a flight of stairs. There was an open door, a quiet room beyond, with a tiny window letting in a spill of sunlight that drew me towards it. By the time I’d closed the door behind me, I realised my breaths were coming fast and harsh, dragging in and out of my lungs until I was lightheaded and ready to collapse again.
I dropped the dagger without realising it and it clattered to the floor. There was a chair. I slumped into it, relieved to release my determination to remain standing. The sunlight fell across my hands and I stared at them, at the blood drying to a crusty brown, sticky and dark around the creases in my skin. I wanted to wash my hands. But not enough to get back to my feet.
Time bent and stretched as I stared at my hands and waited for them to stop trembling. Someone came to the door, but by the time I dragged my eyes up they had already fled.
The light slowly crept away from me and the shadows grew thicker. Footsteps approached again, but this time I didn’t bother looking up. I knew who it was.
He brushed his fingers down the back of my neck and I shivered, clenching my hands into fists.
‘You said it would take away the fear.’ My voice was monotone.
‘It can,’ Draven said, his voice a soft caress, his words a noose tightening. ‘But you’ve got to want it. And not only that—enjoy it. Enjoy the taste of their horror, the sight of their life leaking out at your feet.’
‘I don’t want to enjoy it.’
He moved away briefly, before returning to kneel at my side and placing a bowl at my feet. He gathered one of my clenched and trembling hands. ‘Do you think they deserved to die?’
I watched as he began to wipe at my hand with a damp cloth, staining the white cotton with the remnants of what I’d done as my skin was made clean. ‘Yes.’
A silence settled over us as he gently cleaned first one hand, then the other, before dipping the cloth back in the bowl and staining the water a rusty red. He looked up at me, tilted his head, his face shadowed. 'You look like a warrior.'
‘I don’t think they even knew why I was killing them,’ I said, my voice small, more like a child than a warrior. ‘The one whose throat I slit. I got so close to him, and it was like… he didn’t even recognise me. Even with the glamour, I thought he would. He’s haunted my nightmares, and he didn’t even know who I was.’
‘Then your technique is the problem. Warm up to the moment. Savour it. Make him feel your fury, make him understand why justice has finally caught him.’
I inhaled a shaky breath and studied his expression. He was so still and cool, watching me with an intensity that bordered on excitement. It unnerved me. I’d just slit a man’s throat and he was treating it like it was a skill to perfect rather than a horror.
He reached out and tucked a lock of damp hair behind my ear. ‘I want you to know that bringing them here was never about distracting you. It was only ever about giving you the chance to take the blood they owed you. I would have taken care of them for you if that’s what you needed.’
‘Their death doesn’t change what they did to me.’
He rose to his feet and looked down at me for a long moment, before he took a few steps back, leaned against the wall and folded his arms. ‘The first person I ever killed was my own father,’ he said. ‘Believe me when I say I know the feelings afterwards are complicated.’
Some of the numbness seeped away as my hungry desire to solve the puzzle of who he was stirred. I stared at him, waiting.
‘We weren’t close,’ he added casually.
‘Why?’
‘He was a cruel son-of-a-bitch.’
‘But why did you kill him?’
‘Because the steps to power are paved with blood, my dear. It’s a slippery climb, but worth it when you reach the top.’
He seemed to be waiting for my reaction as he leaned against the wall, affecting a carelessness that was so convincing I almost believed it. But I was beginning to know him better now. He was unusually still, his eyes locked on me, and I knew this moment was important.
‘I didn’t enjoy it,’ I said slowly, ‘but I don’t regret it.’ I’d meant it as a line to lure him out, but as I spoke the words, I knew them to be true. There was an angry, red-raw part of me that felt vindicated, pleased but not sated at the memory of the blood on the stones, even as another wave of revulsion kicked me in the guts. They’d deserved to die.
He nodded. ‘Good. Guilt will suck the strength from you, make you weak and ineffective. When you act, be decisive and don’t waste time wondering whether it was the right thing to do. If it needed to be done, then that’s enough.’
‘Is that why you killed your father? Because it needed to be done?’ I almost held my breath as I waited to see if he would answer, expecting him to brush me off, to turn away. The silence felt baited, like a trap about to snap shut.
‘He was the one who taught me to fight violence with violence,’ he said finally, his words a low murmur skating over the stillness. ‘He might have been proud of me for what I did to him, if he hadn’t hated me so intensely. It was the moment all his training proved effective, after all.’ He let out a low, bitter laugh that didn’t possess a trace of humour.
My curiosity burned, flaring hotter as he fed it. ‘Why did he hate you?’
Hi tilted his head to the side, his attention wandering to his sleeve. ‘I think he suspected I wasn’t his. Wrong colouring.’ He spread his fingers wide and turned his hand this way and that, as though examining it. ‘I’m lucky for it, though. I met fear young. Now it’s an old friend.’ As he spoke the words, he closed his fingers into a fist, then looked back up at me. ‘Weakness can be driven out. Your greatest fears can be mined to fuel your strength.’
There was something about the way he looked at me, his gaze roaming my face, that made me suddenly feel conscious of the fact that he knew what hid beneath the glamour of my beauty. A chill ran down my spine and I shivered.
‘You don’t sound lucky,’ I found myself saying. ‘You sound like someone trying to convince themselves that they suffered for a reason.’
‘You don’t think the things you’ve been through have made you stronger?’
‘I think I could have been strong without them.’ I turned my hands over, rubbed at a spot of blood he’d missed. ‘There’s no reason for the terrible things that happen to people and it doesn’t make me feel any better pretending that there is.’
When I returned my gaze to him, I was surprised to see that he was staring intently at the ground with demons scored across his face in deep lines. And it was like everything shifted. Suddenly I could see him from a different angle, one I’d been pretending wasn’t there. I saw the things he’d done to gain power, the times he’d manipulated me and the times he’d infuriated me, and they fell into a different alignment in my head. Maybe he wasn’t some dark creature sitting opposite me at a game board, but someone with a past he’d fought hard to strangle. Someone who had to climb to the top of the heap because he knew he’d be crushed at the bottom.
Someone like me.
‘Something is haunting you too, isn’t it?’ I asked quietly. For a moment, I really thought he’d answer the question.
‘There’s something haunting everyone,’ he muttered. His face cleared, and he pushed off the wall and offered me a hand. ‘You’ve hidden in here for long enough,’ he said, his voice surprisingly gentle.
I accepted the hand with no comment, and a strange calm settled over me as he helped me to my feet. If a wave of furious councillors or guards or citizens bore down on me, demanding retribution for what I’d done, I felt that Draven would be the wall between me and the tide. I still didn’t trust him, still knew he kept secrets from me, but for some reason this moment felt real. I thought that maybe, just maybe, he really was trying to help me.
I followed him out of the tower, and every flight of stairs put more stone between me and the body I’d left twitching on the floor, and I managed to convince myself that I did feel a little stronger, more dangerous, and not at all afraid of taking stock of the road I’d trodden since I’d entered the palace all those months ago. I wanted to be formidable, didn’t I?
Was it enough yet?
Was I the sort of person none would ever dare to cross?
If those men had met me in the street now, would they have run the other way instead of dragging me to their camp? Could they have seen, just from looking at me, that I would be their end?
Was I safe?
We passed down a long hallway full of shadows and the echoes of our footsteps. The wall was notched with little alcoves housing dim clusters of light weaves, and as we approached one I stopped.
‘What’s wrong?’ Draven asked, halting mid stride. I didn’t think, didn’t question, only reached for him, slamming my mind into silence as I kissed him. There was no protest in him. He obliged immediately, winding his arms around my waist and pulling me tight against him, holding me up as I melted into him, lost myself in the warmth of him, wrapping my hands around the back of his neck and dipping my tongue between his lips. My breathing was a rush, my heart a heavy thud against his, and his hands slipped down my waist, over my hips, to cup my thighs. I gasped as he lifted me from my feet, spinning us into the little alcove, where he pinned me against the cold stone and drew his lips from my mouth to my jaw.
‘How much of this is real?’ My question was a breathless plea.
He fisted my hair, tilting my head to the side, trailing whispered words down my neck, each touch muddling my thoughts and stoking my longing. ‘All of it. None of it. What does it matter?’
‘You’re doing something to me.’ My breasts felt heavy and constrained against his chest. I wanted to tear myself out of my dress, out of my skin, but I settled for finding my way to his, gripping him so tightly my fingernails would leave little crescent moons over his back. ‘Using your magic. Enchanting me.’
He pressed his forehead to mine, his breathing hard. ‘Tell yourself that. Does it make it any easier to swallow?’ His colourless eyes bored into me as he picked up my hand, turned it, kissed my palm. ‘I’m the only one who knows you, who sees you as you are, who can hold your self-interest, your ambition, your fear. I’m the only one who can look past the mask you wear and see your true intentions. How can you possibly say that this is not real?’
In that moment, I didn’t care either way, because my hand was slipping down his stomach and stretching past his waistband, finding that petal-soft skin of his shaft, wrapping my fingers around him. I chased the quickening gasps of his breath, the stillness that followed the right stroke of my fingers, the strain to hold fast and not let go of the feeling I could sense riding his thighs, his stomach, the tendons of his neck. He caught my mouth, swallowed my cries, consumed them, left me breathless and hollow and aching. When he bundled my skirts, found skin, then the slippery embrace of the desire between my thighs, he stroked me tenderly as I freed his cock from his trousers, and he pushed into me without removing a single piece of clothing, filling me, fucking me with that frenzied intimacy of a stolen moment with the threat of being caught just around the corner. The desperation of it stole every thought from my head, every word from my mouth. Until all I could say was More.
Now.
Faster.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
And my climax was obliteration, a perfect, pure second of pleasure annihilating everything I had done, everything I had become, in a crescendo quivering, of clenching, of a wordless cry against the heat of his mouth. He gripped my hair at the roots, pounded me hard against the wall in a way that was almost, almost, violent. Until he ground into me, groaned my name against the curve of my neck in a sound of such sweet agony that made me feel like I owned his release, owned the gush of heat and the sharp jut of his hips, and it made me want to do it all over again.
But we held still, clinging to each other as our breathing slowed.
The flood of my warm breath rebounded on his skin and carried the smell of him back to me, and I ran the tip of my nose back and forth across him, my eyes squeezed tightly shut, pretending, just for one more moment, that it was alright to find so much comfort in that smell. Pretending that there was any refuge in his arms.
Sometimes, I found myself forgetting who we were and what we might do to each other. Sometimes he was not the man who tricked me into murder, and I was not the woman who told him a lie. I forgot the threats and the magic and the secrets and the scars and the death and the fate of kingdoms that hung in the balance, suspended above this game between us. Sometimes I was just Rhiandra and he was just Draven.
Sometimes we were just two people reaching for each other in the dark.
Chapter 20
Rhiandra
The curtains remained shut against the daylight, the door locked. There was platter on the side table that had been long picked clean of the food Draven had scrounged from the kitchen in the middle of the night. He’d wanted to go find more, insisting I eat. I hadn’t let him. I’d pulled him back into bed instead. It was a method of persuasion that always seemed successful.
The fire in the grate burned low. We were going to run out of fuel soon and I hadn’t decided whether I’d let him unlock the door for that, or if we’d just let it die away. I didn’t really want the tangle of sheets to wind up pulled up to our necks against the cold. I liked looking at him, liked the smooth lines and hard edges of him, like tracing the litany of scars on his skin. Some he told me the stories behind. A fall from a horse, a fight as a gangly teenager, a slip through the ice on a frozen lake. Some he didn’t. That raised one beneath his collar bone had turned him silent. I’d kissed him until he’d forgotten I’d asked about it.
Our murmured voices had risen and fallen throughout the day and the night before, winding around and between memories and stories and little pieces of history that made us up. I told him about trying to learn to pickpocket, and how terrible I’d been at it; about Madam Luzel and the girls at the Winking Nymph; about how I’d once dreamed of being an actress, then of inheriting the suvoir. I didn’t tell him how before all that I’d simply dreamed of a safe place to sleep. He told me that it snowed in winter in Yaakandale and he and Lester would sneak out to tear down hillsides on sleds they made themselves. He told me about his mother, how she’d carved him wooden animals and sung to him, that she’d died when he was still a child. He didn’t tell me how.
Once, someone knocked on the door. He had stepped out and spoken to them in a low voice. Whatever he’d said, no one had knocked since, and the hours ticked on. I told him about Jerren, the lover who’d promised to marry me when I was young and stupid, and he told me he would like to find him and make him bleed for ever having looked at me. I didn’t tell him about the deal Dovegni had offered me, and he didn’t tell me about why he’d ordered the attack on Oceatold. And I didn’t ask again. We didn’t talk about the dead men in the tower. We didn’t talk about the future and how we would eventually have to leave the room and face it.
What a stupid, fragile bubble to have locked ourselves in. But every time I closed my eyes I saw flesh splitting beneath a blade, and the only thing that seemed to dissolve the image was sinking into him. For a while, I would be stupid. For a while, I would grip him tight, would hang on his words, would lose myself in the way our bodies fit together like we were two pieces of a split stone. And for a while, it wouldn’t bother me if it was real or not.
‘Rhiandra?’ Leela’s whisper found me. I sat up, my gaze dropping to the figure beside me in the bed. His eyes were closed; asleep, or at least dozing. With a sigh, I crept out from beneath the covers and went to the door. She’d cracked it open already—I hadn’t even heard a key in the lock. When I slipped through, I closed it quietly behind me.
Leela, as unflappable as ever, didn’t even glance down at my bare legs, or up at my mussed hair. Her expression remained mild. ‘You’ve been locked in there a while.’
‘I don’t feel like being queen today,’ I muttered, wrapping my arms around myself.
‘You might never have to be one again if you don’t come out soon. The court is in a bit of an uproar. I’m doing my best to keep them all out, but I don’t think I can for much longer.’
With another sigh, I ran my hands over my face and tried to clear the fog from my head. I didn’t want to go back to thinking and assessing and plotting. I wasn’t ready to let go of the dim room and the tangled sheets and the soothing quiet. But I could already feel it slipping away as reality came bleeding back into my awareness. ‘How bad is it?’
‘Your council is angry,’ she said quietly. ‘A lot of people are. They’re demanding we open negotiations to try and avoid an outright war with Oceatold. There are wild rumours flying around, so many I can’t catch them all.’
