“And I love you, Mama,” she replied, turning her face to press a kiss against my lower ribcage. “You know it’s okay to love more than one person, right? That just because you might feel something for Lex doesn’t mean you love me or Daddy any less. I like Lex. He makes you laugh, makes you happy.”
My daughter was wise beyond her years, and I laughed ruefully at the fact that she could both understand and process those emotions.
It was a skill that I was certain would serve her later in life.
I said nothing, just clutched her a little tighter and dropped a kiss onto her curls.
“Now, let’s find a place to hang this where we can see it,” I said, releasing my daughter. I turned, looking at the wall once more, but not before I saw a small, sly smile curving Itanya’s lips.
She might be meddlesome, but she wasmymeddlesome little girl, and I’d do anything to keep her safe, keep her smiling, keep her surrounded by love.
Even if that meant Bonding a too-enticing-for-his-own-good Pleasure Mage.
Chapter Fifteen
Sasori
Drum. Drum. Drrrrum.
Drum. Drum. Drrrrum.
My fingers beat an incessant cadence against the armrest of the bone-white throne that I lounged across sacrilegiously. I scratched my head against the back in an attempt to alleviate the ever-pounding headache that constantly grew until I could hear nothing but the thumps of my heartbeat.
Voices rose and fell, a constant undulating that echoed off the curved walls and impossibly high ceiling, both the same hue as the throne that I perched in now. Even the floors of the manor were the same unsettling color, as if we were deep in the belly of a beast. No pops of color served to accent the stark white, and the glaring brilliance of it in the high afternoon sunlight threatened a migraine that would leave me incapacitated for days.
The headaches had only gotten worse as days turned into weeks, which turned into damn near two months. Two months since I’d severed the Bond with Lex d’Talionis. Two months since I’d killed my father and plunged Samyr into chaos, gaining the throne through the blood spilled of damn near one hundred Vessels. The same throne I’d all but relinquished when I invited the gods to Samyr as a place to regroup and strategize in the wake of the disaster that was the Battle of Vespera.
Drum. Drum. Drrrrum.
Concentrating on the movement of my fingers and the steady beat they produced was the only thing keeping me sane—in this moment, in this meeting, in this manor that felt more like a prison with every passing hour.
“Lady d’Hida?” A disapproving voice broke my thoughts and sent searing pain from my temples when I moved my head incrementally to regard the asshole who deigned to speak.
“What?” I snapped, my voice whipping through the now silent space as the advisor cringed at my rebuke. My father, for all of his flaws and missteps—and there were plenty—was not a harsh man. To other men, at the very least.
Women only served one purpose for him, as evidenced by the massive harem I’d discovered once I’d gained control of the manor.
He’d had a similar fate planned for me once I returned from Vespera. I’d been “soiled goods” since I gave my body to my Bonded—as if I’d had a choice in that matter—and would have been “gifted” to his soldiers. In all likelihood, I would have been hogtied naked and brutally raped until I died. I’d seen it happen before to my older sister; she’d so desperately wanted command of her own life, wanted to share in something “beautiful” with a boy who cared about her before she was sold to the highest bidder like a horse at auction.
My sister’s maid had informed Father of his eldest’s indiscretion, and he promptly had her dragged by her long black hair from the manor the next morning, naked as the day she was born, and threw her to his soldiers just beyond the manor’s back courtyard. Cocks in hand, his soldiers waited as if they had beenpreparedfor that precise moment.
“Look,” my father had said, his fat fingers gripping my chin so hard he left bruises for a week. “Watch what happens to daughters who don’t follow their father’s words. She wanted to whore herself out to a man not selected for her, and so a whore she will be.”
He’d pulled my chin straight and forced my eyes open when I’d closed them, just so I could see my sister’s arms and legs tied open as she fought off her rapists, her constant piercing screams muffled as cock after cock was shoved deep in her throat while others relentlessly thrust into her.
Tears cascaded down my face and over my father’s fingers as I was forced to hold my sister’s gaze and watch the light slowly die in her eyes. When her wet cheeks dried, she’d turned her face away, breaking our eye contact as if she didn’t want to subject me to the pain I’d see deep within their amber depths. I stopped my struggle then, resigned to my fate, the same as she.
Bile burned my throat and threatened to escape, but I bit my tongue until I tasted blood, swallowing back every urge to vomit lestIbe tossed to his soldiers next.
Eventually her screams quieted, and she grew lax, her body undulating bonelessly as soldier after soldier sought pleasure in her unwilling flesh well into the night. Blood trailed between her thighs to mix with their semen that dried there or dripped on the ground.
With her naked and abused, the life gone from her eyes, my father made her chosen lover fuck her once more before ending her life with his sword in her ribs.
“A small mercy I allowed her,” he’d gruffly told me. I didn’t want to know, nor did I ask, how else she was supposed to die.
Her ex-lover was found hanging from a tree outside his home, not a day later. The pink blossoms native to Samyr fell early that season, nearly all shaken from that particular tree to land in his hair and around his feet like our land wept for them both.
That day forward, I feared and was repulsed by my father—really, all men—and bowed to whatever whims he carried. When he’d sold me to Vespera as a Vessel, I knew the fate that ultimately awaited me when I returned home, a fate I’d avoided when I stuck a knife through his belly.
