He'd sooner go without any washing than lower himself to bathe in some creek. Fortunately, their upper echelons had tubs and servants to fill them with hot water that Nikias was going to take advantage of instead.
It was an arduous process to allow one person to wash. Nikias really couldn’t fathom why they would object instead to building bathhouses to save them the effort of this excursion every time someone of note wanted a bath. He watched several servants haul buckets of water into his room to fill the tub, heated over fire or by vitae.
Still, their hard labor was worth it for Nikias when he sank into the warm water and the gnawing tension pounding up the back of his skull eased. He lingered in it for as long as he could justify, cleaning himself up from the weeks of travel on the road that he hadn’t yet.
However, taking so long and letting the water go cold meant Nikias missed the first dinner rush and the second and the third. So once he finally pried himself out of the water and cleaned up, refusing to look in the mirror the whole time, he began to wander around the halls, hoping to find a servant to either point him in the direction of the kitchen or to go there themselves and get him something to hold him over for the night.
Of course it was too good to be true that he could spend even a single day in the heart of the demon’s territory and not be subjected to her presence.
He turned the corner, and there she was, coming from the opposite direction.
Her eyes landed on him, and a vicious grin split her face in two.
She was a grotesque mirror of Marcella, and it was in moments like these that Nikias could not comprehend how two women could look so similar and be so different at the same time.
“Ah, Nikias, how delightful,” Hypatia said. Her accent was thick, but not as thick as Marcella’s.
How she managed that, Nikias did not know, given Marcella had months more practice among his people.
Nikias could only imagine what she had in mind if she could only describe what was about to happen as delightful.
Nikias, however, had somehow absorbed some of Gavril’s eternal spring of hope as he turned on his heel and began walking away. But he should have known better than to believe for even a second he had a chance of escaping Hypatia without incurring a few new wounds.
“Come now, Nikias, we’re hardly going to get very far if you turn tail and run from me the second you see me.” Hypatia’s voice followed him down the hall as her pace increased.
Nikias froze in his tracks, teeth grinding together. What was worse, letting her have her fill of his flesh? Or the insinuation that he was a coward who couldn’t take another beating from her?
Nikias stayed put.
“My apologies, demon.” Nikias turned and looked at her from the corner of his eye. “I presumed your handler—sorry, husband—had imparted anything of significance to me already today.”
Hypatia’s facade, cracked almost imperceptibly, but Nikias caught the twitch of her eye before she continued walking, her voice a smooth coo. “Whoever said all the two of us have to talk about is strictly business? We are family, after all. You needn’t fear me. Have you ever considered maybe I’m here to offer you a shoulder to cry on?”
Hypatia’s eyes gleamed.
“Considering what I’ve seen you do to your own dearest cousin, I don’t think being called your family comes with any protection, but especially not any honor.”
Hypatia raised an eyebrow, fingers brushing over the scar on her side he’d once given her that she had then mirrored onto Marcella to save her own skin from capture.
“You think the word honor has any place in your mouth?”
He ignored the wound cutting through him and spat out, “More than it does yours.”
But Hypatia did not seem bothered by the dig. Unsurprising, given she was a creature wholly unfamiliar with such concepts as honor. Instead, her eyes landed on his heart, seeing right through the fabric to the mark she’d left on him.
“What a reception I get when here I am in friendship. Did you decide to be this way, or were you born this way?” And then like the snake she was, her tongue darted out to lick her lips as she went in for the final blow. “Completely and utterly unlovable.”
If killing her wouldn’t restart a decades-long war, Nikias would have done it in that instant. The mark on his chest flared and ached.
He gritted his teeth. “You can say it all you like, Hypatia, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
And then she grabbed him by the throat without even moving her hands.
“Are you trying to tell me that I’m wrong?”
Nikias could not.
Not with the phantom pain of a black eye lingering despite the physical wound healing. His parents might have preferred him over Gavril, but that didn’t mean they loved him.
