And it grated her.
“Sylas, my sweet,” she said, pulling away, her voice soft as snow. “Every night you come to my bed, and yet you are cold as a dove in winter. Am I not beautiful to you?”
“Of course, my lady,” he reassured her. “You are more beautiful than any other.”
“Do I not hold your heart in my very hands?”
He took those hands in his. “You must know I am yours, body and soul.”
Pleased, she smiled. One fine hand drifted to rest over his heart. “Then why is it, no matter what I do, I cannot make it beat faster?”
For this, he had no answer. It was not a command. He could keep his tongue still.
He did.
But he could not outplay her. She made the rules.
“Tell me,” she commanded. Then, to soften it, “I do not wish to be cruel to you. We are to be companions. I want to know what it would take to please you. Truly.”
“Only what pleases you, my lady,” he said, happy to reply honestly; then, a dizzying flutter of rebellion in his chest at her pinched expression. “Nothing else.”
After a moment, her smile returned. Hand still over his heart, she dug a pointed fingernail into his chest, hard, harder. It punched through cloth and flesh like the skin of a plum, staining his white shirt red. He did not flinch. He had grown accustomed to her bloodlust.
“Look at the mess you’ve made,” she said, sucking her finger clean, staring at the red spot. “Change, at once.”
As he pulled a clean white shirt over his already healed chest, she returned to shuffling through the nearly identical pages of ink-drawn pines on his table.
“Skies,” she murmured scornfully. “It’s good to have hobbies, I suppose.” Suddenly, she stopped her shifting. She plucked a sheet from the pile, pinching it between her fingers like the tail of a dead mouse. “What is this?”
A drawing. Same as the others. “Trees,” he said vaguely, adjusting his buttons. “My lady.”
“No.” She stalked over to him and pressed the paper to his chest. “This.”
He took it. Between the lines of trees, etched into the pine needles, into the spaces in-between, was the impression of a face. A face, despite himself, he saw in every tree, every cloud, every flower.
No. No he didn’t. “I–” He had no script for this, no prepared response. “I did not intend–”
“You really didn’t know,” she said with a stunned laugh. “My skies, youarepathetic.”
“I’ll burn them,” he suggested. “I won’t draw again. I shouldn’t have.”
She snatched the page back and tore it in half. Eyes blue as the sky, as empty and as endless, bored into him. “I grow weary of this tug-of-war. But I can be patient. You were quite frightened when you first arrived here, weren’t you? Confused. Your tiny little heart pattering like a rabbit’s.” She drummed her fingers against his chest, rapidly, and this time, he didflinch. “Do we think a few years in that state would make you more or less insolent?”
Years. Before, he’d been trapped for less than an hour. Less than an hour to dream of what dreaming once felt like. That dangerous flutter of rebellion would be tamped completely after only a day spent in that state. A day with no color. A day of utter, maddening sense. With his clawed foot chained to the cold floor.
But a day was like a decade, and he and Mira had decades to spare.
He would do anything not to feel that way again. But there was nothing he could do. Not even regret.
“Yes,” she purred, stroking his hair. “Less, I think.”
He did not beg; there was no point. He would need to use his own magic, of course.
It isn’t so bad, he thought, stepping toward the silver perch.There is a window, after all.
But something outside the window stilled him. Something small and vibrant, a red and brown dot moving purposeful and lithe through the stolid gate.
Someone. A man approached the manor.
