Inella’s entire body was rigid, her face cast in harsh lines of self-control, lips pressed tight together, breath exploding from flared nostrils. Her gaze—Aru’s gaze—stared in unblinking hunger as Viera’s rear passage relaxed and took those fingers deep inside.
Viera’s clit was throbbing, begging to be touched, but she didn’t let her hand wander between her legs. If it did she would come, and she wasn’t ready for this to end. She was awash in an agony of sensation as Aru continued to plunge the ivory cock slowly in and out of her cunt, and his fingers deeper and deeper in her anus.
And then fingers and member both left her. With a squeal of dismay, she thrust her ass back toward him, needing to be filled, needing to feel him inside her. And then the tip of the fake cock was there, pressing against her rear entrance, pushing inexorably against that resisting circle of muscle. She pushed back against it, feeling her tight nipples rubbing against the sheets, her pussy tingling and releasing a flood of moisture, every nerve in her body hovering on the verge of annihilation. At last the ring of muscle gave way, surrendered to Aru’s relentless invasion, and the cock drove into her, hard and deep. And she was coming, her voice high and keening in her own ears, her body seizing, her inner muscles convulsing as stars exploded behind her closed eyelids.
His fingers found her clit and began to rub, and he just kept thrusting into her anus with that cock she wished was his, and as one orgasm subsided, another stronger one began. She lost track of time, of herself, of reality, one climax rolling over into another as Aru fucked her on and on. When it was over, when her body could finally take no more and shut down out of self-protection, she collapsed on the bed insensate.
When she came back to herself, it was to find Inella unconscious, her cheek resting on Viera’s lower back, arms wrapped tight around Viera’s thighs. Shaking her head to clear the fog of satiation from her mind, she tugged free of Inella’s embrace and looked for Aru.
His come spattered the carpet and floorboards where he’d knelt, but there was no other sign of him. He was gone.
Floppy as a damp rag, Viera raised a shaky hand to her hair and pushed it back from her face. Beside her, Inella lay senseless and unmoving. Affection and contentment overshadowed her dismay over Aru’s defection as Viera ran a fond hand down the other woman’s cheek.
“Wake up, my dear,” she whispered, nudging the woman’s shoulder when she didn’t stir. “Inella? Wake up, slumbering beauty.” Chuckling, she leaned down and pressed a kiss to Inella’s mouth, letting her tongue play a little at the seam of her lips. Nothing.
In growing concern, Viera slapped the woman’s cheek gently, then took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Inella! Wake up!”
Not even a twitch.
Her limbs wobbly, Viera staggered from the bed and hurried from the room, pausing only long enough to grab her robe from her own bedchamber and slip it on. “Aru? Aru!”
The candles on the stairs were beginning to gutter. The breeze from her passing snuffed most of them and the foyer and hall were cast in dimness. Rose petals fluttered about her feet, releasing a burst of fragrance that mingled with candle-smoke. There wasn’t a sound to be heard but her own panicked breaths and the rush of blood against her eardrums. “Aru!”
As she passed the salon door, a glint of gold caught her eye. Moonlight poured in from the salon window, shimmering in his beautiful hair. He sat in one of the padded chairs facing the cold fireplace, his back to the door. He didn’t move, didn’t appear to have heard her calling.
“Aru?” Swallowing, she tiptoed into the room and came around to the front of the chair. He gave no indication that he even knew she was there. If not for the fact that his chest rose and fell, she might have thought he was dead. Crouching down, she reached out, almost set her hand on his knee before she thought better of it. “Aru, there’s something wrong with Inella.”
His glittering, mismatched eyes wandered over to her face, lingered for a moment, then dropped to his lap. “What’s the matter?”
Viera blinked back tears, torn between concern for her friend and confusion and hurt over Aru’s strange, detached composure. “She won’t wake up.”
A single fine line marred the skin between his brows. “She will wake before morning. When she does, will you tell her I am sorry?”
He was sorry. Before she could stop them, the tears were spilling free of her lashes. He was sorry? For what? For all of it?
Angry, hurt, she put her hand on his thigh, let it lie there like an act of defiance. He stared down at it, unmoved. “In the morning,” he said quietly and without inflection, “you will pack your things and leave my house.”
Her heart stumbled over itself, kicking the breath from her lungs. “What?”
“Leave my house, Viera,” he said, never taking his eyes from her hand on his leg. “Don’t ever come back.”
She pulled her hand away from him, pressed it against the pain that lanced through her chest. She couldn’t even see him, he was just a charcoal blur amid the stinging haze of her vision. This couldn’t be happening. Not after what they had shared. Not after she had finally broken his foolish stubbornness and forced him to face his feelings. “Why?” It came out more a sob than a word.
“Because I’ll hurt you if you stay.”
She scrubbed the tears from her eyes and searched his face. If he had shouted she would have argued, resisted, railed against him, but he only regarded her with utter calm. He was emotionless, unreachable, and all the more frightening for it.
“You would never hurt me.” She said it not because she believed it, but because she was beginning to not believe it.
His eyes slid away from her. “I would never want to hurt you. That’s not the same thing.”
The snake does not bite out of a desire to cause pain. It bites because it has no choice…
She choked back a sob, something tearing open inside her, spilling out grief like blood. How could he do this to her? How could he send her away? “Aru… You can’t mean this. What about our work? What about the patients?”
That single fine line deepened until it was nearly a frown. “We can no longer work together. It has gone too far. I…cannot trust myself.”
She pushed to her feet, moved a few paces away from him and hugged herself. “I don’t understand… Why would you hurt me? Why would you hurt anyone?”
He only frowned at his hands where they twisted together in his lap. He was already alone, had effectively pushed her outside and slammed the door shut. His lonely penance may have undergone a brief reprieve, but it had apparently resumed with renewed vigor.
Always it came down to this, down to blame. Down to what he did all those years ago.
Her heart twisted. “It wasn’t your fault, Aru. What you did. What you are. It wasn’t your fault. You deserve to be loved.”
His hands clenched into fists, but his face remained impassive. “This isn’t about fault. It isn’t about what I deserve. This is about what is.”
The snake bites because it has no choice if it wants to survive.
She stared at him, one hand at her throat as the part of her he had breathed back to life withered in her breast. The house wasn’t cold, but she was suddenly shivering.
She opened her mouth, but couldn’t think of anything to say. Her movements wooden and halting, she turned and left the room.
A single candle clung to life on the stairs. She stooped and blew it out as she went up.
Light poured from Aru’s bedroom, a mockery of the bleakness she felt. Inella lay where Viera had left her, sprawled naked across the tousled sheets. There were tracks of tears on the woman’s cheeks. Viera reached up and touched her own face, but it was dry. It bothered her a little that she wasn’t weeping. She should be a wreck, sobbing, rending her hair and gnashing her teeth, shouldn’t she? Was she in shock? Was she…empty? Was there nothing left of her now that he was done, had she burned until the part of her that was still capable of feeling was consumed?
She
stood beside the bed for a long time, looking down at Inella’s sleeping face. Wondering what it must have been like for her to share her body with Aru, to experience that ultimate closeness. Finally she climbed back up onto the bed, gathered up the blankets and pulled them up over both of them. Wrapping her arms around the other woman, she pressed a kiss to her shoulder and closed her eyes.
Not long after that, she heard the door close downstairs as Aru left the house.
Chapter Eight
Inella picked her way around the puddles on Clove Street in the chill, gray dawn. A fine mist aspired toward genuine rain, leaving beads of moisture on her old wool cloak. As she stepped up to the back door of Karal’s shop, she swiped at the wetness on her cheeks, a wetness that had nothing to do with the weather.
Damn Aru to hell for what he had done.
Holding her breath she counted to ten, ruthlessly curbing her urge to weep. After all, Viera had not wept over it, had she? Taking herself in hand, she knocked on the door.
A muffled voice answered, just clear enough for the irritation to come through. “What do you want?”
Cringing, Inella tried the knob, but it was locked. “Um, Karal?”
“Shite!” A series of loud clangs and bumps ensued, accompanied by further and more varied cursing. “Coming!”
The door swung open to reveal the Kurgan, his torso encased in a leather apron, his hands and forearms covered in gloves, a face mask dangling on its strings around his neck and a bizarre glass shield over his eyes.
Inella blinked.
“Well, come in,” he growled.
“Um, you should have just left the door unlocked,” she suggested, stepping inside the crowded back room. On the workbench, the one remotely tidy spot in the whole shop, a complicated titration device had been erected. Liquids of several different colors dripped from individual spigots to mingle in a glass bubble suspended over an oil flame. The vapors escaped through a coiled tube, condensing to drip from the end into a beaker. “I hate to interrupt…whatever it is you’re doing.”
He grunted. “Shop’s closed today, and I wasn’t sure you were coming back.”
She stopped in her tracks. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He turned to regard her, his arms folded over his leather-encased chest. “Nothing personal. I’ve gone through seven assistants since last summer. Three of them quit after less than a day.”
She shrugged, trying not to wonder what he must have done to make someone quit his first day. “It’s twelve falcons a month.”
He laughed. “Not everyone thinks it’s worth the money to put up with me.”
Absurd tears prickled behind her eyes and she clenched her fists in her skirts against the sudden urge to hit something. “I couldn’t earn half that in a month on my back. So you can expect me to come back here tomorrow and the next day and the next, no matter how awful you are.” Annoyed with both him and herself, she scrubbed at her face and brushed past him through the little doorway to the front of the shop. “I’ll get started in here.”
Her ledger sat on the counter where she’d left it the night before. She swung her cloak off her shoulders and tossed it on a stack of boxes, then took up booklet and charcoal. A crate of bottles sat open in the middle of the floor. The label named it “Extract of Eltharra”, a product Inella was all too familiar with. Its viscosity and lack of odor made it a common ingredient in poultices and ointments.
It was also the substance of popular choice among whores to simulate evidence of female arousal.
Dragging in a shaky breath, she threw her ledger back down and pressed her eyes with her palms, willing herself into some semblance of composure.
When it felt safe, she let her hands drop and opened her eyes. Karal was standing in the doorway, scowling at her as if she’d grown another head.
“Is there something I should know?”
Inella stared at him, stricken. How was she supposed to explain? She’d woken in the small hours to find Viera’s arms wrapped around her and the candles all gone out. Aru had left the house. Turning in Viera’s embrace, she had reached up to touch the other woman’s face, felt the wetness of tears. Something terrible had happened, Inella knew. Last night Aru had given her a glimpse, however brief, of the appalling bleakness that lay inside him. He had hijacked her body, made her do things to her friend that should have brought a flush of shame to her cheeks, but all she had felt in him was reverence and adoration and a terrible, despairing love.
And then Viera had told her what the Darjhan had decided, and Inella couldn’t believe her ears.
She looked at Karal. “Aru sent Viera away this morning.”
Karal offered no comment, seemed entirely unaffected.
“He turned her out of his house. He dismissed her. Told her to never come back.”
He grunted and folded his arms over his chest. “It’s for the best.”
“How can you say that?” she snapped, feeling her throat go tight all over again. “She loves him!”
“She doesn’t even know him.” He turned to go back into the rear room.
“I know him!” she shouted, remembering the feel of his will inside her, guiding her hands.
He looked back at her, his brows raised. “You’re a fool if you think that, girl.”
She stared up at him, cursing the tears she couldn’t seem to stop, stupidly feeling as if everything that had happened was somehow her fault.
Karal’s face did not soften. “Aru knows what he is. It scares him. If you knew, it would scare you too.”
She grabbed his arm before he could walk away, tugged him around to face her. His expression should have frozen her blood, but she couldn’t see past her own distress. “Tell me what he is. Tell Viera. Then let her decide.”
He shrugged off her hold, his muscles bunching, and she took an uneasy step back. He was like a block of granite from head to toe. A very tall, very strong, very annoyed block of granite. “Get to work, girl, unless you’d rather spend your nights spreading your legs for strangers again.”
She glared up at him, appalled, her palm tingling with the urge to slap his ugly face. “You’re a pig, Karal.”
The brute only glowered at her. “But you’ll take your twelve falcons, no matter how awful I am, won’t you, girl?”
She turned away, her eyes stinging once more, and took up her ledger and charcoal. In that moment of capitulation she hated him, but no more than she hated herself. Because no matter how awful he was, he was right.
There was a certain comfort to be found in the work, though, in the mundane repetition of counting and tallying and finding a place for everything in the tiny shop. Inella was driven, determined to fill her mind with letters and numbers and columns and rows, hoping that might serve to push her dismay to the fringes of her awareness. The sorting went faster than she would have thought. By noon, she’d recorded and relocated more than a tenth of what had once been heaped haphazardly about the front of the shop. More than seven hundred bottles, phials, jars and tins were now neatly stowed on the available shelves, and there was enough clear floor space for three people of normal size—or one large Kurgan—to fit in the room.
Karal had banged about in the back the whole morning. His curses drifted out to her at intervals, but he didn’t show his face again, and that suited her fine. Vin’s words from last night came back to her, over and over. Her own assessment of “a bit grumpy” appeared to have been unduly kind. Mean and nasty and ugly and horrible described the Kurgan much more aptly. In truth, twelve falcons a month was beginning to look like rather poor recompense if it meant dealing with him every day.
Setting her ledger down, she stood and surveyed her progress, one hand massaging the knot of stiffness that had formed between her shoulders. Her stomach growled. When she’d arrived at her apartment this morning, she’d been so distraught she couldn’t stomach even the thought of breakfast, and hadn’t given any thought to what she would do for lunch. There were a couple of decent places here on
Clove Street, but Karal hadn’t bothered to tell her how long she could take for her meal, and she was hardly going to ask him after the cruel things he’d said to her.
Sighing, she picked up the ledger again and prepared to get back to work.
The smell of fresh jaffha assailed her and she cursed under her breath. The odors emanating from that back room all morning had ventured from acrid to fetid to gut-twistingly vile, but the blissful smell of jaffha was infinitely more objectionable considering her current ravenous state. And following on its heels, the sweetness of oatcakes and honey-cured ham.
Her stomach clenched, gnawing on itself. Bastard. Was he going to sit back there and eat while she starved?
“You hungry?” he asked, poking his head through the door.
She glowered, resenting his unexpected courtesy even knowing how petty she was being. “No, thank you,” she said at the precise moment her stomach clamored once more.
He grinned unpleasantly. “Suit yourself.”
“Wait,” she sighed before he could disappear again. “That was churlish of me. I’m starving.”
“Come on then.”
Resigned, she followed him into the back room. Three crates had been set up, two for them to sit on, one holding a platter of cakes, ham and cheese, and two cups of jaffha that gave off wisps of fragrant steam.
Picking his way across the crowded floor, Karal crossed to the taller crate and sat. She took the crate opposite, avoiding his eye. He handed her a cup.
“Thank you,” she murmured, breathing deep of the aroma before taking a long, strengthening sip.
He grunted in reply, grabbing a cake and shoving it indecorously into his mouth. Her lips twitched in involuntary amusement as she watched him eat dessert before lunch like an errant child. Feeling a little better, she reached for a piece of cheese, wrapped a still warm slice of ham around it and took a bite.
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