I can’t see where we’re going. The flooring is cold concrete. It’s not dirty but not perfectly even either. A slight chill bites the air, and I can’t help but wonder why the temperature is so low for hell. I imagined it a bit more…stuffy, I suppose.
Roman jerks me around this way and that as we turn maze-like corners every few steps we take, and he has yet to speak to me.
Perhaps I should apologize.
Perhaps I should not.
Definitely the latter. Yes. Definitely not.
My shoulders square despite how often my feet want to stumble. I don’t, of course. I keep up, and I let him brood the entire way. He stops us so abruptly that my mucus-sticky chest collides into his smooth shoulder. He tenses. I wait. I count the beats of my heart, and three pulses slip by in the awkward silence before the churn of metal turning with a quiet click sounds just lightly.
And pale light casts across his golden skin.
With one strong pull and shove, he tosses me onto a bed. The springs bounce beneath me, and my anger wants to rise up all over again, but I swallow it down and peer around at my new surroundings instead. I take an inventory of every detail.
I do a fine job indeed of pretending to ignore the naked brooding man in the room.
No windows line the tall black brick walls. The stone shimmers like beautiful poison glimmering among so much ebony. A black velvet settee faces a cold empty fire pit in the middle of the room. Two Victorian-style chairs also surround the circular pit, though they appear to be carved from black onyx, with sharp pointed backs.
Every inch of the room, including the bed I sit on, is inky or at best, dark ash. The sheets are silk beneath my touch. The color of charred coal. And the bed: it’s fucking enormous. A dozen wolves could sleep in this thing and never once so much as brush up against the other.
“Whose room is this?” My lashes lift, and I find Roman hunched over a basin bowl in the corner, his features darker than usual as he wipes away dried blood from the bruising bridge of his nose.
Ouch.
…No. Still not sorry.
With the crimson-soaked cloth, he dabs once more, his eyes closing, his shoulders bunching together so tightly a line etches down the hard muscles of his shoulder blades.
Do not help him, Cersia. Do not pity him. He’s a cruel, cruel man. Do not extend kindness to the cruel, for they will accept it and then step on it until it bends, until it bows and until it finally breaks.
Roman is the type of man who could break me. His sea like eyes are too pained. He’s too handsome and too hurt to know how to be gentle with a crumpled heart like mine.
So I seal up the cage that surrounds the little beating thing in my chest.
And then I look away from the blood on his face.
“It’s the High Hell’s bedroom. We’re the final three of our realm.” I can hear the disdain in his voice.
He fucking hates me.
Good.
It’s mutual.
“The three of you share a room?”And more importantly a bed?
I can’t help but remember the way he briefly showed Avian a different side of him. A softer side. A fleetingly fragile side of himself.
“We share everything. We’ll share a life, and we’ll share our enemies. We’ll do anything to protect the last of our kind. We’re the tormented. We’re the surviving. We’re the darkest wolves hell has ever created…” His words slip away into a heavy breath that keeps his full lips parted as he seems to think about his bond he shares with Zilo and Avian.
“Hell created you?” I arch a brow at him, my fingers steadily pushing back my crisp and dry blonde hair to really appraise the lean physique of the man still turned away from me. Hard lines are all he’s made of. They slash across his ribs and clatter down his torso, his hips, his thighs. His arms and even his lower back are sliced in pure violent strength.
I just can’t bring myself to think about his scars.
“The Prince of Hell made us. He makes all of us. We fight for him and his realm. We honor his name as tormentor and ruler of lands.”
“How does he make you?” The words fall from my lips as my mind flashes with too many images of what he could possibly be meaning.
