“What are you?”I’d asked Timur before and never got an actual answer.
Maybe the question should've been“What happened to you?”
Though, I doubted he would’ve answered that either. The one question I had to answer for myself was whether I even needed to know anything about him. Did I want to care?
At the edge of the cliff, I caught up with Timur and asked the most important question that I definitely needed him to answer.
“Timur, am I safe with you?”
He stopped at the top of the path to go down. From where I stood, it looked like he hovered over the dark abyss, on the precipice of a fall. But if he fell, I’d fall with him to whateverend, whether I wanted it or not. Because my life was tied to his now. I hadn’t planned for it and certainly didn’t wish for it, but it happened, and I had to know what to expect.
“Tell me,” I demanded. “Tell me how safe I am with someone like you.”
“Someone like me…” he repeated bitterly.
He raised his head. With him sitting in the chair, we were at the same eye level. He freed his hand from his cloak, hisrighthand that looked like a snow-white sculpture of bones and claws. He raised it to his hood, then pulled it off his head, exposing his face, all of it, including the half-mask of bone on his right side.
I shrank back with a gasp, not expecting the gesture. However, now that he wasn’t roaring and screaming, it really looked like the face of a handsome man with ink-black shimmering skin wearing a white skull mask of a beast.
“You’re afraid of me,” he said with a long sigh.
It wasn’t a question. He didn’t ask because he already knew the answer. But he was wrong, I realized. I wasn’t afraid. Or at least not as much as I was before.
“What you do is far more important to me than what you look like,” I explained. “That’s why I’m asking you. What are you planning to do to me? Not just tonight or tomorrow, but a week from now, a year? A decade?” The last word fluttered from my lips on a trembling exhale.
Was this really my future now? Was I going to live and die as someone’s property? Would I never belong to myself again?
He took the leather purse of gold that I’d earned for him tonight and set it heavily on his knee.
“I bought you for this, Sweet One. The gold I spent for you? I need it back, all of it and more.”
“I never asked to be sold or bought,” I scoffed. “I don’t care how much you paid for me. It doesn’t obligate me to you in any way.”
“Yet you will have to work to earn it all back.” His voice remained infuriatingly calm.
The red eye in the white socket of the skull glistened menacingly in the dark. He didn’t look like a human or a fae, but like some demonic entity—cold and unyielding. And that scared me. Fear urged me to run. I trembled head to toe, but I stood my ground. My courage was fueled by desperation and undoubtedly by the wine I’d drunk at dinner.
“What if I refuse?” I challenged. “What if I don’t do a fucking thing for you? You can bring the entire city of Kalmena here, with all its wealth and glitter. You can tie me up and have a million tendrils shoved into my emotions. But you can’t force me to enjoy dinner the way I did tonight. This gold there…” I tipped my chin at the bag on his knee. “You only have it because Iwantedyou to have it.”
He sat in silence for a moment, as though contemplating my words.
I knew I’d pushed it, and I hoped it wouldn’t turn things for the worse for me. What I said was true only as far as my joy from food or wine went. But there were many other forms of pleasure, some of which could be forced by that fucking golden flower. I said he couldn’t force me, but the truth was, he really could.
Thankfully, Timur never wore the flower on his clothing. I hadn’t seen it in his dwelling on the beach either, and I hoped that he either didn’t know about the flower’s effects on humans or just couldn’t get his hands on it. For as long as that remained the case, I held leverage in this negotiation.
He lifted his right hand, and I stepped back again, afraid he might strike me, but he brought it to the clasp of his cloak at the base of his throat.
“What if I told you what I need the money for?” he asked in a quiet, low voice as if revealing a secret. “Would honesty earn me your cooperation?”
Honesty was a good start.
“There’s one way to find out, isn’t there?” I said tentatively. “What do you need the money for, Timur?”
He unclipped the clasp and opened his cloak. It caught on his wide shoulders. With a wince, he yanked the fabric down, revealing a wide white plate that covered his right shoulder. With a cluster of bumps and spikes sticking out, it looked like a skeletal version of medieval armor. The hard, exposed bone descended down his right arm, turning to white, flat scales where it connected with his skin. The scales ran down his upper arm, then merged with the solid bones of his right forearm that then extended into his skeletal right hand.
It looked as if the skeleton of a mythical beast had half-swallowed a man. Resulting in something unnatural and grotesque.
“How…” I blinked, but the image wouldn’t change. Because it wasn’t an illusion. It was real. “How is it even possible?”
