Page 125 of A Requiem of Fire and Ice

We leave the closet. I help her down when she bites her lip at another shudder of pain, clenching her shoulders. As I stand there, I watch her pop two tablets into her mouth and swallow them dry before taking the ointment from the table. She hisses, and the ointment clatters on the floorboards. Pandora reaches for it, but I grab hold before she can.

“Let me,” I say.

Blush tickles her cheeks when she looks away and nods. I squirt the thick ointment onto my hands, rub them together, and, with care, glide it across her right shoulder first. My eyes narrow at the fingerprint marks staining her from where he grabbed her. They don’t blister and aren’t as bad as I expected, but still…it happened under my watch.

When I finish with her arms, I go to close the ointment when she touches my hands. “Can you do the rest?”

My focus lowers toward her hip. Luring her to the bed, I sit down while she stands over me. Pandora’s careful, her movements slow and frightened. But she’s not afraid of me. No, her actions suggest she fears exposing her darkest story to me.

She lifts her shirt until her upper body is bare. Her soft nipples show this isn’t for pleasure or excitement. Goose pimples prickled across the fat of her breasts, standing on edge.

My focus drops to her hip and the hand trying to conceal it. A darkness looms over me when I take her hand and slide it away from the burns. Unlike the others, these tell a story of her pain. Wrinkled, old, but still…they’re raw burn marks of a hand gripping her by the hip.

I wish they were alive so that I could torture them for the rest of their lives.

“It’s gross, isn’t it?” she says.

I touch her hips, lure her to me, and brush my lips against them. Her breath hitches as my mouth leaves a flurry of kisses across what repulses her. When I have kissed every inch of them, ensuring the memory of this moment burns brighter than what they have done, I lather the ointment on my hands and smooth it over the burns.

“Prince Reen…”

My eyes narrow. “Enough with the ‘prince’. Call me Reen.”

“Reen,” she begins, “I don’t want to kill you anymore.”

I breathe a laugh. “Then what do you suggest we do?”

“Can you forgive me?” Pandora’s hand laces through my hair. “I’m sorry that I killed your mother. I didn’t mean for her to die. It’s just⁠—”

“You’re forgiven,” I say, interrupting her. “As for not killing you…it’s an urge hard for me to contain. A trigger in my brain that wants to see your life fade. I don’t know why, but it won’t go away. At least with you around me.”

“What are you suggesting, then?”

“When we get to Oceanview Harbour, I will give you a choice to make.” I kiss her moistened burns. “I want to hunt you…kill you…but I also want you to heal. So, I will break my values for you and give you a chance.”

“What’s the choice?”

I twitch a smile. “Where would the fun be if I told you now?”

“Fucking arsehole.”

And she’s back, the way I enjoy her.

“I’m horny.”

My eyes widen. She’s definitely fucking back.

“Well”,—I pinch my boxers she wears, move them down to her feet and hook my arm under her leg, letting her thigh rest against my shoulder—“I’m fucking hungry.”

Pandora gasps when I devour her. My tongue glides across her slit, tasting her wetness. The hands at her hips move around her, gripping her arse as I burrow in deeper, flicking my tongue across her clit.

But with Pandora, nothing fucking lasts long with her. She crumbles underneath my touch, and before I know it, her body gives out, and she fucking flops onto the ground, trembling with delight and spasming through her orgasm.

I didn’t even get to fucking taste it.

“I’m sorry,” she giggles. “Don’t look at me.”

Resting my arms on my knees, I stare down at her. My shoulders tremble, and as much as I want to suppress it, laughter fills the air.