“Love.” The word tasted vile in my mouth. “You call what you just did love?”
“Did you not enjoy it?”
I wanted to lie. I wanted to tell him I’d felt nothing but revulsion—that I was as pure and horrified as any good woman should be.
But I was done lying—to him, to myself, to God.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Is that so?” He reached out to touch my face, and I let him. His fingers were warm. Human. It was so easy to forget what lay beneath his skin. “You have spent your entire life being told that your desires are sinful. That the things you want—knowledge, power, pleasure, love—are forbidden to you. That you must deny and suppress and flagellate yourself into submission, just as your Heinrich did.”
“Do not speak of him.”
“Why not? I am not a liar. He is me, my dove. And do you know what he feels when I touch you, when I taste you?” He leaned closer, his breath warm against my ear. “Ecstasy. Because I am giving him what he was too afraid to take for himself.”
I closed my eyes and inhaled his scent. It would be so easy to believe him, to tell myself that this was simply Heinrich freed from guilt and fear, Heinrich finally able to love me the way he’d always wanted. But beneath the familiar scent of leather and incense was a wrongness I could no longer ignore.
He was right. I had known, and I had let happiness blind me. I’d letwarm hands and hot kisses suppress the part of my heart that knew I didn’t deserve this. Whatever wore Heinrich’s face might contain some fragment of the man I loved, but it was not him. It could never be him.
Heinrich, my Heinrich. I’m so sorry.
“Give him back.”
The smirk fell from his face. “Our souls have become entwined now. I am him, and he is me. To separate us would mean death…well, most certainly for him.”
“You lie!” The words were a hiss between my teeth. “All you do is lie!” I grabbed the front of his vestments. To claw at him, to shove him, to pull him closer? I didn’t know. “Give him back to me! Give him?—”
His hand cupped my face, and despite everything—despite the wrongness radiating from him like heat from a fever—my body responded to his touch. I hated myself for it. I leaned into it anyway.
His lips brushed my ear, and his whisper was the sound of breaking seals, of doors opening that should have remained forever closed.
“I have never, and will never, lie to you, Katharina. You see me as a demon, but I am so much more than that. I am the fire that purifies and the fire that destroys, for there is no difference between them.” His breath ghosted over my neck. “I am the answer to all of Heinrich’s prayers—to all of yours.”
“I never prayed for this.” I didn’t pull back, didn’t want him to see the tears that rolled down my face.
“Who do you think the bees told your secrets to? All those sins you didn’t even dare to tell Heinrich. But I heard them, your hidden confessions, whispered by buzzing wings on the wind. But you don’t need forgiveness. You need to succumb to the power that sleeps inside of you.”
He breath hitched.
“Claim your power, and if you have the courage, claim me. I amyours, Katharina.”
Now Ipulled back from him. “You disgust me. I will never claim you.”
I realized the darkness I had seen in his eyes up until now had only been a shadow, and echo of his true corruption. Now he revealed his true face, and it was terrifying the last hint of kindness melted away.
“More lies, my dove? I know how very much you enjoyed me, all the things that I did to you. Suddenly, you act chaste, but I remember the sounds you made when my tongue was in your?—”
The slap resounded against the stone walls.
For a heartbeat, everything was still, the skin of his cheek reddening slowly. Then, it bulged as he pressed his tongue against it from the inside, a smirk creeping onto his lips.
“There it is—that fire.” He grabbed my wrist, yanking me closer. “Shall I turn the other cheek?”
“Let go of me.”
His smile stretched wide, too wide, contorting his face into a mask of wicked mirth. “Is that really?—”
“Let. Me. Go.”
