“As fresh as it could be but cold enough to freeze your skin.” He lifted his numb hand away and checked out the rest of the room. It was more of a cave than it was a space created by humans. All the ruins in his land had been created by humans long ago, landmarks of the past. Vedikus looked for ghosts.
“Do you still have your bone bowl?” she asked.
He grunted and loosened his pouches, setting them by the fire, and handed her the bowl when it was free. Without pause, she had cleansed it and made use of it to drink. He watched Aldora fill it again and again, drinking deep of the water, her throat contracting with each swallow. The fire casting a soft glow on her skin. His ever-persistent shaft twitched, and he wiped his hands across his leathers.
We’re safe this nightfall.Some of the tension drained from his muscles and he built up the fire.
Even the barghests cannot be heard here.He unsheathed his axes and set them aside. His ears twitched when the water splashed and soothing, breathy noises teased them.
Vedikus shut his eyes and clenched his fists. “Aldora.” Those sounds stopped. He felt her gaze. “Take off your clothes.”
***
She stared, transfixed, at her captor’s haloed outline, the shadows created by the dim light accentuating his horns. They seemed to lengthen with each flicker of the flames, elongating and sharpening.Soon they’ll pierce the ceiling like they do the dark. The sky.Aldora fingered the bowl in her hand, frightened and yet... relieved.
She looked around at the dark corners as she straightened, feeling the water trail down her arms, clearing her skin of sweat and grime.
“Fill the bowl with water and bring it here,” he commanded. Each request he made of her caused her to hesitate but she knew, after a day, that each would be answered. Aldora filled the bowl and moved to his side. She placed it before him and stepped back out of his line of sight, bringing her now-empty hands up to play with the hem of her clothes.
“You said you would ask for nothing but my thoughts tonight,” she said.
He emptied one of the pouches of herbs and dunked it into the bowl. “I don’t want your clothes, I want you to take them off.” His voice was gruff, but he did not look her way.
“And after that?” she asked, hating that her belly coiled sharp enough to make her core ache. She was aware of his shaft, thick and pointed just beneath his loincloth. Her gaze had caught sight of it throughout the day. It had not diminished even when he killed, cleaving creatures’ limbs off, and as she swallowed, feeling a hungering hollowness, a wrongness at what was happening, she was aware that sexwouldhappen. She’d felt helpless all day knowing it was coming, that this horned beast was taking her somewhere far from everything she knew to make her his breeder.
That she was sick and he had the means to cure her.
That she had not been able to smell anything since the night before.
That he had not hurt her once, despite her giving him reasons to do so, when everything about him was violent and relentless. In his presence, she was lucky to be alive.
“After that, I’ll feed you,” he said, startling her.Feed me?Food had barely entered her mind, not with everything else vying for the space; fighting with all those little haunting thoughts that wanted her attention. Her predicament. Her life. The cruelty of the Laslites and the Master of Thetras severing her from everything she’d known. Aldora fisted her hands into her tunic.The second sacrifice.
There will be many more to come.The thought saddened her. She only hoped those who came after her were deserving of their fate, and that other innocents like herself would find a captor like—
Aldora refused to finish the thought, her gaze on Vedikus’s ever-sharpening horns. They danced in the shadows, rising up and falling back down to their normal shape. They were paler than the rest of his body and reflected light and darkness equally back to her.
“Feed me?” she asked lamely, taken aback, still unsure.
“You do need food like any living being?” he teased.
“I do.” She swallowed and kneeled at his side. “I wasn’t expecting it.”
“Why?”
“You just asked me to take off my clothes.”
“And yet...you still haven’t.”
A blush warmed her cheeks and she turned away. She didn’t want him to see it.
Her body ached, wrung out from the constant, stressful fleeing for her life. It seemed like an eternity had passed since she had last been in Thetras, had last spoken to another human, and those final memories of her kind only filled her with anger. She gritted her teeth.Betrayal.
Aldora rubbed her arm where the Laslite hurt her, where his mark still remained. Even when she’d gone numb, she could still feel the pounding bruise below her clothes, could still feel the way the patrollee had groped and threatened her, how it hadn’t stopped until they were at the top of the sacrificial stairs on the outskirts of town. There had been no remorse from the man, and the press of his fingers at the center of her back made her want to tear off her skin.
She felt them now. A sudden, single violent shiver wracked her frame.
I don’t want to be in my head!It didn’t make the memory of his touch go away.
