“I’m going to breed you, human,” he growls.
I cling to him, shudders of my own orgasm still ricocheting through me.
He is not, I think. The thought rising into my consciousness like evaporated water turns into a fully formed idea, even if I have no idea how it got there.
His body shudders. He pushes up on his elbow, looking at me, surprise again contorting his features. The disbelief suits him poorly. It is as if he has never made this expression before. His mouth is open, he almost looks weak—momentarily, but it’s still something I see.
“Kryth’a sar slorim,”he says.
I have heard this before. He sounds surprised that he has said it, and looks almost tender, and confused.
But the moment is fleeting, and darkness pours back into his eyes. As if I’m a hot coal, he withdraws, looking almost angry, and steps away from me, glaring, like I have stabbed him in the heart and he knows that he will bleed to death. He clutches hiskryth, the pulsing yellow nearest his heart.
He stares at me, then shifts his jaw.
It’s a dangerous gesture, from a dangerous man.
I have a moment in which I believe I’m going to die.
But Zethki seems to recover, almost as suddenly as he lost it. He shakes himself, bounces, and then strolls over to a table, pouring a drink into two glasses that have been set out, I suppose, for us.
He brings mine to me grasped from the top, both glasses in one hand.
“Drink,” he tells me, staring down at me like I’m a science experiment he has to keep an eye on. I take the glass and hold it, and he downs the liquid in his in one gulp. Wipes his mouth. Grins. “I’m not done with you yet.”
CHAPTER17
Rysethk
Zethki says nothing when he opens the door to his vast suites in the far corridor of the fortress. I see immediately that something is different about him: he’s somber, serious. A hint of confusion—the kind of emotion that Zethki never expresses, even if he feels it—wanders about on his face, in his movements.
It’s the first time I have seen him behaving as if he’s unsure of something.
My heart drops at first, thinking the worst: he has done something terrible to Anya. This is why he hasn’t left his suite, why he did not appear at morning practice. Typical Zethki, he put no stock in the ‘vision’ I told him I had received from a seer.
Or worse yet, he has acted upon it as an inevitability. I curse myself. It was a lie I invented in the last moments before the wedding ceremony, poorly thought out, poorly executed. I was overcome when I saw her in her wedding robes, and I acted out of the weakness Anya inflicts upon me; I didn’t want to share her, not even for a single night. I wanted to buy more time, and now I fear I may have done just the opposite.
Zethki, after all, is a madman, high on his own power: if anything, my false prophecy caused him to thumb his nose at the fates, by going on some kind of bloody rampage.
And now, I will see what he has done, and I will have to live with a tragedy born of my own foolishness.
Immediately after this sinking fear comes over me, mykrythbegins to boil. Murderous thoughts brim over in my mind. It’s my private code to not be overrun by emotion, to not act rashly, to always think my way to victory or revenge, but I’m unable to see through this sudden, all-consuming hatred.
If he has harmed her, I know that I will kill him. Violently, terribly. And then I will burn the whole world down.
I’m moments from enacting this fantasy. I can already taste his blood and feel the raw, stringy wires of his flesh in my mouth when I shred him like an animal. My eyes move around the room, looking through the open doors, and I see into the bedroom chamber. I see the porcelain flesh of Anya’s human body, unmarred, her limbs strung about as though she collapsed from exhaustion, but no blood, no horrible twisting of her limbs.
Zethki follows my eyes and looks through the doors at Anya’s slumped figure.
And that is when I see it. The same, inexplicable obsession that haunts me has infected Zethki as well. Hiskrythshimmers and his eyes linger on his human bride. It’s not within Zethki’s capacity to be tender (but then, is it within mine?) and yet there is something of affection in his gaze.
And possessiveness, the kind that I recognize because I feel it, too.
I control my breath, settle mykryth, and it’s a struggle, but I do it out of necessity—for Anya, because now we enter an unknown chapter, something I did not factor into my schemes, a problem I could not have anticipated. I must observe, I must remain calm. Zethki must not know that I feel anything for Anya, let alone that I want her for myself.
That I willhave herfor myself.
He runs his hand through his hair and turns around, surveying the tables littered with empty drinking vessels. He finds a half-filled cup and knocks over another as he reaches for it.
