I raise my eyes to Kassandra, shimmering Kassandra, power and authority rolling off her in waves I have never felt so strongly before.
“What is it, my lady?”
“Weeks ago, you told me that if cruelty must be learned, then it can be unlearned, too. So please—scream at me all you’d like for what I have done. Flog me for it; planes know it is deserved. But do not indict me for trying to be better. I falter every day, but I am still stumbling toward good. I would very much like to be good. So please, let me be good.”
The smallest crack in her voice on the last word.
I lower my gaze, cheeks burning. “Okay.”
Kassandra sighs. “I laid out some clothes for you on the bed, but you will not be joining me in it. You smell like my mother, and lavender has always given me a headache.”
I raise a brow. “She gifted you her own scent?”
“Is it really that surprising?”
“Did she not know how much you love peaches?”
Her sharp gaze finds mine. “Careful, now.”
“Another way you are unlike her, then.”
She turns away. “Avery?”
“Yes?” I sink lower until the water is lapping at my throat.
My mistress keeps her back to me. “I should never have even dared, and for that, I claim full responsibility. I will never again take you. Not like this,” she says. “Not when your only option is to give.”
She departs, and I am left alone in the echoing pool, my body buzzing, my mind teeming with questions. When did it start for her? Those Illusions that flooded our minds included images from our early days together.
As I stride, dripping, to her bedroom, and pick up the clothes she purchased, I notice her stealing glances in the looking glass. As she wrings out her hair, as the tunic slides over my curves in a way cloth has never fit before, I wonder if she has memorized my body the way I have hers.
“Good night,” I say.
“Good night,” she echoes.
Later, in the dark of my room, I slip a hand beneath the sheets to try to finish what we started. But shame and humiliation swell forth, tugging up other times that made me feel this way. Days after my mother died, when I pressed myself, drunk, against Jeremee, and he held my wrists, kissing my forehead before helping me to bed. The slew of half-hearted prospects in the decades of adolescence and early adulthood, young love and old games.
Why now do I cry in a cold bed as an adult? Why do those who claim to care for me the most want to touch me the least? Others were willing to grab, to strip and take and swallow. It was not all bad, all pain. It was power; it was the price placed on my tongue at three gold coins and not just an oath of loyalty. Why should I be ashamed of victory? Of reclamation? Of pleasure? I am not.
But they are. Kassandra and Jeremee are the only ones who deny what spiced their blood and mine.Why?If I cannot be a creature to love, why can’t I just be their creature to covet? Even if only for a few moments.
What felt like power before now feels like broken pride.
Curling up on my side, I feel empty.
Chapter Forty-two
I open my door the nextmorning to find a figure leaning against the wall. When I step forward, something dark catches my eye. Black splotches cover the ground and smear across the walls. Not just any marks—bloodstains.
My bloodstains.
I halt, breath dragging in and out of my chest, the flame dying on my fingertips. The figure approaches—and he is small, with curly hair and big eyes. Benji.
I stare at the skinny child whose face has lost its chubby innocence. I take in his hollow cheeks, his calloused hands, and the debt ringed from fingertips to neck, suddenly looking so much like his brother.
Benji crosses and uncrosses his arms.
“You returned covered in blood,” he says. “Whose blood was it?”
