Cal glanced dispassionately in the direction of his father. “Bury him, I suppose.”
“Beneath the hellebore?”
His eyes widened briefly in surprise. And then he laughed. It was harsh and terrible, but it was a laugh, laced with a darkness she wasn’t sure could be expunged from his soul.
His hand spread over her jaw, smoothing back the loose hairs. She felt the wetness of cooling blood on his fingers as he traced them lightly over her cheek.
“Oh, Nadine,” he said. “You’ll be good to me, won’t you?”
???????
He took his sparrow to the bathroom and had her sit on the edge of the large tub while the hot water gushed in to fill the porcelain basin. Pulling up a stool, he sat with her feet in his lap and carefully removed the splinters and burrs that had pierced her flesh as she ran.
There was an anxious look on her face but he didn’t look up, because that anxious expression was the only thing that she was wearing.
When he helped her into the water, she cried. The wounds on her knee and side were just deep enough to be painful. He didn’t think they’d need stitches, but there was enough blood to turn the water a very faint pink.
“Please don’t leave me.” He heard her voice echo after him as he turned towards the door.
Something heavy settled on his chest and stayed there.
“I won’t.” He sat down on a stool he kicked over to the side of the tub, watching without really seeing as she washed herself, shooting him these self-conscious little looks that would have gotten him hard if he’d been paying attention. But despite the hand he had left dangling partially in the water, he was hardly aware of her at all.
He had killed before and he had enjoyed it, because it had been what he had been taught and how he had been raised. You couldn’t erase something like that: something that had been burned into you like a brand from youth and then allowed to scarify, worn for all to see.
For weeks, he had schemed to get her to come to him. Seeing her wake up dazed and aroused from the dreams that he had helped stir filled him with a dark, possessive satisfaction. He began to play games with himself to see just how close he could edge her to the truth without fully falling to his impulses. Without fully compromisingher.
Fear, his father said, was what bound a sparrow to her master. He had used her fear against her before, but her fear was what had stopped him in the mine.
He hadn’t fucked her, though he’d ached to. No. The shattered expression on her poor little face had instead made him want to destroy whoever had put it there. Even if the person who had put it there was his own flesh and blood.
Or himself.
When the water was no longer clear, Cal emptied the tub and toweled her off, pleased that she didn’t flinch away. She trusted him with her body, at least, if not with her heart.
He pulled the little shirtdress over her head, and when the long, wet strands of her hair slid over her breasts and made the fabric sheer, he felt as if his belly had been pierced by something hot.
He left her on the stool he’d vacated while he rinsed himself off. Too agitated for a full bath, he instead soaped himself and washed his hair, using a pitcher kept by the bath for exactly that purpose, until the water sluicing over him ran clear instead of red.
She watched him, wide-eyed and reluctantly fascinated, her gaze following the soap suds sliding down his nude body, until he was unmistakably erect. Thoughts of things that would shock and terrify her flooded his mind.
Thoughts that involved her bent over that stool, with her backside raised and splayed. Completely exposed to him and his lack of mercy, and the fear of what he would do next.
“I should tell my mother.” He knotted a towel around his waist with more force than necessary. “You can come with me or you can wait in your room.”
“I’ll come with you. I—I don’t want to be alone.”
“She’s going to be in a state,” he warned. “She hates this festival.”
“I understand,” she said somberly.
“No, you don’t. But you will. Come.”
Let me show you the fate that awaits you, darling.
His mother was upstairs—not in the master bedroom, but in the room adjacent. She was lying in bed, wearing a thin lace nightdress, drinking his father’s scotch from the bottle.
When she heard the door open, she stiffened briefly. “Oh, it’s you.”
