Gilded Destiny

by Nola Sarina

Vespers

  Calli

  “You go that way,” Nycholas said as he set me on my feet and pointed off to the right.

  I squinted in the darkness, but couldn’t see a thing. I listened carefully to the night world around me. “Are we near a lake?”

  “Yes, no time to waste. Go that way. Find the boat and row across to the other shore, and I’ll meet you in the little empty house at the end of a cul-de-sac. Small grouping of houses, over there.”

  I glanced around but saw nothing still, just the silhouette of Nycholas’ hulking form. There was no moon in the sky, and what little starlight might have brightened the landscape for my eyes was masked by thick clouds, threatening rain. If there were lights cross the lake, they were muted by the fog, and I couldn’t see any houses no matter where I looked.

  “Go!” Nycholas hissed, and I swallowed hard, turned, and started to walk.

  I tripped on my second step and glanced back at Nycholas to complain, but he was already gone.

  The stillness and solitude sank into my bones like ice, and I chanted to myself again not to faint. There was no one here to catch me, if I fainted. I owed it to Nycholas to stay upright, at least. I turned forward and took another step.

  It was a slow creep over rocks and through mud, and I kept slipping in wet unknowns and fell a couple of times. I jumped when a bird – please be only a bird - flapped overhead, and I scanned the blackness around me for more dark eyes, more glowing fangs… I just needed to make it to the boat.

  I pressed on even though Nycholas’ thick leather coat couldn’t warm the chill that settled through my core, and my legs ached with fatigue. How far did I need to go? The lapping water of the lake on rocky shore didn’t sound any closer than it had when he left me, and I smacked my elbow on a tree, grateful the leather protected my skin. I didn’t want tears to swell into my eyes, but the burn was there, and I pressed my lips together to wrestle my panic back under control. I stepped once more and my foot slipped. I fell face-first into a rock and cried out, and then clamped one hand over my mouth to quiet myself. Shit! If Nycholas’ master was here… if he had any question of whether his AWOL Vesper had made a forbidden human friend…

  I panted in silence for a few moments, and then straightened to a sit on my ass and touched my head. It felt wet and sore but I couldn’t tell if the slickness stuck in my hair was blood or mud, and my knees throbbed from the impact. I shivered and fisted the sleeves of the leather in my hands to warm my chilled fingertips. I glanced around and my gaze settled on a bright light in the distance, back in the direction from which I’d come, muted by the coverage of trees between us.

  I rose to my feet, shaking, and reached out to grab the tree I’d crashed into before falling, peeling loose flakes of bark as I hoisted myself up. Something tickled my cheek and I had to strain in order to silence the shriek that threatened on my lips and quit thinking about spiders in the dark, dammit! I hugged the tree with one arm and squinted at the light I saw. A train headlight? Parked?

  At that moment, I realized I’d somehow climbed a hill, and that was why the lake seemed no closer. Nycholas would be disappointed in my shitty sense of orientation… no wonder my legs were fucking burning. I peered out at the train, and I was high enough off my original ground level that I nearly looked down at the top of the train. It was long and black and parked still on a track, and some of the trees between it and me blocked my view of the back of the great metal beast.

  Voices. I strained to hear them. Men speaking… and Nycholas.

  I just had to see.

  I knew it was stupid. I knew it could mean the difference between life and death for me, but I was lost anyway, so I abandoned the idea of finding some mythical rescue boat. I didn’t even know how to row a boat. Waiting for Nycholas was a much better idea.

  And eavesdropping on Nycholas speaking with… well, anyone other than me and the strange way he spoke to me… I couldn’t resist.

  I climbed a bit higher up the slope, feeling for angles with my hands. It was only moments before I couldn’t tell the difference between my muddy hands and the muddy ground, I was so filthy, and then I gazed back at the train. There were shadows in front of the train headlight, shadows on the track. I crept to my left to move out from behind a tree, to see better… and then my view cleared of branches and I stilled, watching, listening.

  “Five damn years on the run, Nycholas,” the tall one said. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in now?”

  I strained to make out their words. Nycholas stood on the track with his arms at his sides, stressed, braced, and fucking huge. His golden cords of hair looked dark in the silhouette of the headlight, but not as dark as the hair of one of the Vespers he faced… that Vesper was much taller than Nycholas, though not quite as thick, and had long, black hair of steel swaying faintly at waist-level. He folded his black leather-clad arms across his chest and shook his head at Nycholas, his dark hair shimmering against the glow of the headlight.

  “I won’t come back,” Nycholas said with a shrug. “I won’t live his life after what he did.”

  The third Vesper, standing beside the dark one, had short-cropped hair and stood shorter than both the dark one and Nycholas. He threw his hands up in the air with obvious frustration, stomped over to Nycholas and jabbed a finger into his chest. “You’re fucked, Nycholas. Absolutely fucked.” This shorter Vesper paced a few feet from side to side. “You gotta quit running, man. You gotta let us bring you home.”

  Nycholas straightened his shoulders and stiffened his stance. “You take me nowhere. If he wants me, he comes for me himself.”

  “Don’t do that,” the tall one said, a musical, soft quality ringing through his voice that was more friendly than frightening. “You’ll only provoke him with that kind of shit.”

  “I’m already dead, Levi.” Nycholas laughed, spreading his palms to his sides. “He won’t absolve me of my crimes, so why would I go home?”

  Levi dropped his folded arms and palmed Nycholas roughly in the shoulder, sending him back just a hint of a stumble.

  Don’t touch him! I wanted to scream, so I clamped my hand across my mouth again. Was I really here, filthy on a hilltop watching three snake-like predators brew up a fight on a train track in the middle of the night?

  Nycholas turned his palms to Levi like stop-signs and tilted his head. “Don’t fight me, brother. I don’t want to fight with you.”

  Levi relaxed his stance and shook his head again, and I thought a moment of remorse glanced across his face. Could have been my imagination, though, as my fear at Nycholas engaging these Vespers in a fight swelled. What would I do if they started throwing punches at each other? What could I do?

  The smaller Vesper scoffed. “Nycholas, last chance. If we fail to retrieve you… he will come after you himself, and you don’t want that.”

  I wrapped my splinted hand over my mouth atop the first to help stifle the scream that threatened in my chest. No, Nycholas, we don’t want that! We had to get out of there!

  My heart stumbled as thoroughly as I’d stumbled up this hill. We? I wondered vaguely about a concussion as I cemented the idea of me and Nycholas as a ‘we’ without his consent.

  “I don’t want that, Festus,” Nycholas answered the shorter Vesper. “No. But I won’t come home. If he wants me, he comes for me himself.”

  Levi and Festus were silent, glaring at Nycholas, the tension between them so thick I could have slashed it with a blade and not made a dent.

  Nycholas’ broad chest heaved with a sigh, and he extended his hand to shake Levi’s. The tall, dark-haired Vesper accepted, but Festus refused Nycholas’ handshake and spun away, stomping back to the train. I heard a loud clang and an angry curse peal up the hill in my direction.

  Shit, time to move! I panted with fear and clamored down the hill as best I could, and then tried to remember which way Nycholas had told me to go. My arms shook harder than before and I tripped even worse on this journey than the last, and I almos
t screamed aloud when my foot suddenly froze beneath me. Water! I’d found the lake.

  I scrambled ahead on my hands and feet, feeling for sharp rocks and struggling to stay in the dry areas of the winding lakeshore. I grabbed something slimy and yelped, and then my fear flooded out of my lungs and into my eyes and I started to cry.

  I didn’t want to cry. Dark was bad enough; blurry with tears was worse. Nycholas, his brothers, the threat they posed to him, the threat Nycholas posed to me, Freddy’s death, my fainting… everything flooded out of me at once and I dropped to my knees, gasping. I bent at the waist and my head thunked into something cold and hard.

  Wood. I reached forward and grasped the edge of a boat. Yes! I dragged myself into it – patted around for snakes or giant leeches or anything else grotesque and horrible that might latch itself onto me as I slipped into the little craft. I found two oars, so I grabbed them, leaned out of the boat and shoved off with my unbroken hand.

  Into the even blacker night across the misty, humid lake I paddled, forcing myself to breathe easy. I can do this. I can paddle a boat! I’d never done it before, but there had never before been a better moment to try.

  I got a rhythm of pulling water with paddles and my chest burned from muscle strain as much as from cardio. I’d had more of a workout that night than I’d had in a month, and I pressed onward, not sure how to steer, not sure if there was land anywhere near me at all. I vaguely wondered if I was sitting in a boat, covered in mud, spinning in ridiculous circles in the middle of the night and going nowhere at all, and I might have laughed at the notion had I not been absolutely terrified into silence. If I started laughing, I’d look even crazier as I spun in circles in a boat with a broken hand, and Nycholas would never come help me because I’d look like way too much of a fucking moron.

  The water splashed behind me and I screamed and dropped the oars into the lake. The boat tilted back and I grabbed the edge to steady myself… The master? One of the brothers?

  “Help!” I cried out as loud as I could as the boat rocked at a deadly pace. I prayed Nycholas would hear me shout and come for me.

  A hand clapped across my mouth and blood spurted across my tongue as the solid palm slammed my lip into my teeth. I thrashed as the iron arm restrained me by my head, but his powder-soft chin pressed against my cheek and shushed, and I stopped fighting and squeezed my eyes shut.

  “You’ll alert them,” Nycholas whispered.

  I thought my heart would sprint out of my chest and paddle away on its own, my terror shook my whole body so hard. I relented and leaned back against Nycholas as he slid himself into my seat and scooted me onto his lap. The boat was tiny, and he rocked it some more as he fished for the floating oars I’d dropped, and then pulled us forward in the water by the strength of his massive arms. I held very still and was very quiet, cradling my bleeding lip and struggling not to cry.

  He hadn’t meant to hurt me, I knew. I was more thankful for the security of his presence than I was angry that my lip was torn.

  His chest was wet with the lake-water soaked cords of his hair, strewn across his bare pectorals and sticking to his skin. My own hair was soaked and sticky with mud, and I tried not to lean on him, afraid of dirtying up his perfection, though I desperately wanted to bury my throbbing face against his cool shoulder. He was like my own personal ice pack. I held my breath to quiet the snort of laughter that threatened behind a weird kind of hysteria in my silent, shaking tears.

  Nycholas’ breath rushed in slow, steady draws across the dampness of my cheek as he rowed, and within moments our boat lurched again as we hit land. Nycholas got out first and took my fingers in his, and helped me balance as we stepped from the rocky shore to drier land.

  Ahead, in the distance, I could make out a faint light. A porch light? A few porch lights, I realized as we approached a street that ended with a cul-de-sac and a small house, as he had said. Nycholas walked too fast for me, but I tried to keep up as best I could, my feet dragging from chill, fatigue, and fright.

  It was a porch light after all, of a small house. Nycholas strode inside as though the place was his, and I gazed around at the dimly lit trailer-like residence, which was cluttered and clearly had been vacant for a while.

  Nycholas stripped off his wet clothes in the living room and I gasped at the sight of him naked. He heard me gasp and swore under his breath, and then quickly tugged on a pair of sweatpants from the back of the sofa.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, refusing to look at me as he tied the drawstring. “I forgot you might watch me.”

  Hell, yeah, I was watching him, holy shit! Take those off, dammit! He was as glorious naked as clothed, and even more so, his thighs so muscled I could make out the definition of each layer of solid strength beneath his skin. I slipped out of Nycholas’ trench coat and hung it on the coat rack, and then found the bathroom down the only hallway and checked myself out in the mirror.

  Ew. My lower lip was twice its normal size from Nycholas’ massive palm slamming it into my teeth as he silenced me on the boat. Blood had dried from a cut on my forehead in a mass of mud and hair, so I found a towel, wet it – no hot water – and pressed it gently to the wound. Tiny rocks and sand scraped away with the blood, and I was happy I felt so frozen that there wasn’t much pain to experience, only cold.

  “May I show you something… strange?” Nycholas asked from the doorway.

  I glanced at him – shirtless and fucking immaculate, not a speck of body hair – and nodded.

  Nycholas stepped into the bathroom. Close to me. Really close... practically looming over me. For a heartbeat, I wondered if he’d decided to eat me after all. But the heartbeat passed as he pushed gently on my shoulders and spun me around to face the mirror. I gasped.

  He was gone. I did a double-take, stunned, and looked at him over my shoulder to make sure he was still there. In the mirror, Nycholas was invisible.

  I reached out and stroked the vacant glass where I stood alone, muddied and bloodied, staring with shock.

  “Vanity,” Nycholas whispered in my ear, the hint of his voice in his breath low and nothing but sexy. “We’re not allowed vanity, sunlight, freedom, or death.”

  “You’re not allowed to die?” I whispered to the voice that hovered on my shoulder, the breath on my cheek, the lack of reflection in the mirror.

  Nycholas chuckled and swept my hair away from my throat, and then his lips grazed my skin as he inhaled of my scent. Oh. My. God. Terror and lust warred between my legs, and the feeling was like morphine in my veins, swirling my vision before me. I wanted more.

  “We can die. If we lose track of our heads.”

  I tilted my cheek to my shoulder to let him inhale at my neck again, and couldn’t stifle a giggle. “Should make sure you don’t lose track of yours, then.”

  Nycholas hesitated, and then I felt his breath rush along my skin in a rhythm that pricked goosebumps from my scalp to my hips, lower, deeper. Nycholas’ laugh. Oh, God, I wanted more of that laugh.

  “We sinned first,” he said. “Not you. We took the apple in the garden. We cursed ourselves to night, and to protecting you.”

  “How do you protect us?” I dared to stretch my fingers out at my side, reach back, and touch his thigh, the muscles cut and sharp beneath the thin layer of stolen flannel.

  Nycholas responded by resting both of his hands on my hips and squeezing just a little too hard. I knew I might have a bruise on each of my hips in the morning, but I didn’t care, as long as this being - this predator, protector, immortal and friend - didn’t let go, didn’t stop touching me.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. I ran away. I don’t want that life; I don’t want them and their cruelty.”

  The longing in his voice rocked my heart, and I turned to see his expression, since the mirror refused to show me this beautiful, tortured man who devoured my human friend right in front of me and made me row a damn boat. His eyes were narrow as he watched me, and I rested my palms on his chest, touching his
skin, feeling the softness over steel, his whole body velvety and solid, the best of delicacy and strength.

  “Your brothers. I saw them. Do they care about you?”

  Nycholas watched my lips as I spoke, and licked one of his fangs before he answered me. “As much as they can. The master doesn’t let us remember anything for long. He kills our memories to keep us obedient.”

  “Yet you broke away from him.”

  Nycholas nodded. “No choice. I’m displeased to be a slave in any way.”

  “You’re a free spirit.” A smile warmed my cheeks and I grimaced at the pain in my lip.

  Nycholas’ cold finger stroked my lower lip. “I broke you,” he said.

  That earned a full-blown burst of a laugh from my mouth and Nycholas startled at my volume. “Sorry,” I said. “I love the way you talk.”

  Nycholas cracked a crooked, half-grin. “I didn’t mean to break you. And I’m sorry I’m a little bit stupid when I talk.”

  I shook my head and touched his chin with my fingertips. “You’re not stupid, Nycholas. Not even a little bit. You’re… breathtaking.”

  He pulled back just a bit, puzzling at me, his eyes never tearing from my lips. “Breathtaking?”

  I rested my palm against his chest and felt the thick thud of his heart, slower and heavier than mine, as though his black blood ran more like glue than water. His fingers roamed over my forehead, picking off bits of grass and dirt. I turned back to the sink and washed my face thoroughly, ignoring the intensity of my throbbing head, even though all my body wanted to do was sleep.

  I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want to miss a second of this night – this impossible encounter with an immortal, a man-eating snake… I had to be insane.

  No part of my body cared if I was insane. I squeezed my thighs together as I toweled my face, feeling Nycholas still behind me, watching me.

  His hands never left my hips. I straightened and gazed back at him over my shoulder. “So you don’t want their life. What do you want?”

  He hesitated and didn’t make a sound as his thumbs circled along the skin just above the back of my pelvis beneath my shirt. How could soft and cold feel so good together?

  “I shouldn’t say.”

  “Another rule?”

  Nycholas chuckled that breathy sound that made me want to taste his tongue, or lick his face, or any part of him that he wanted me to slurp with my mouth. I shook off the thought of me swallowing him whole as I tried to focus on our conversation.

  “Not another rule,” he said.

  “Then tell me.”

  “You will probably slap me, and then run away,” Nycholas said.

  I giggled and reached up with my uninjured hand to touch his cheek and press his chin against my hair. He let a hint of a groan leak out through his sigh, and I wished, with every fiber of my suddenly bat-shit insane-with-hormones body, that he’d tuck his hand between my thighs and squeeze.

  “I won’t slap you, or run away. My legs are too tired, and I don’t want to hurt my other hand on your face.”

  Nycholas twisted me around to face him again and scooted me up onto the bathroom counter, my legs splayed wide, his hips tucked between them. I gasped. “You can slap me if you wish,” he said, his voice breathless, though he hadn’t panted once when he ran with me clutched to his chest. “Can you make me a promise you won’t run away? I’ll catch you, if you do.”

  I smiled at Nycholas, admiring the depth of concern that crinkled the corners of his black-veined temples. “I promise.”

  Nycholas took a deep breath and reached up to stroke his hair back from his scalp as he sighed. He let his hands fall to rest on my thighs – again, the perfect mixture of too much pressure and not enough pain.

  “I meant to eat you,” he said. “But you know this. Your colors distracted me.”

  “Why did you come back for me?”

  Nycholas’ chest rose and fell quicker as his nerves visibly increased. “I wanted you.”

  “But not to eat,” I said. It wasn’t a question: I didn’t need to ask. The temptation of this forbidden thing hovered in the room between us, and heat lanced through me from my eyes to my core.

  He shook his head, his golden cords sweeping slowly over his arms and half-covering his chest. He didn’t blink, just watched my mouth as I spoke.

  “Will you poison me, if you touch me that way?”

  Nycholas shifted and cleared his throat. “What way?”

  Had I misunderstood? No. Nycholas was shy. I refused to lose my nerve. Somehow, his predatory nature – the danger he posed to me – enhanced the feeling brewing between my thighs, made me want it more…

  My voice came out stronger than I expected. “My body. Naked. With yours.”

  Nycholas sucked in a breath and he slipped his hands beneath my shirt again, cradling my back, pulling me slightly forward in my sit on the counter. “No. If our mouths meet… open… then, yes, you’ll sleep.”

  If our mouths fucking meet, good God, fuck me now. His constant groping of my skin - hands roaming across my aching body, firm like a massage rather than a caress - wasn’t helping me keep my thoughts sorted and carry on a coherent conversation. All I wanted to do was drink in his voice and melt into his touch. “But I won’t die.”

  “Not unless I bite you, and poison your blood.” Nycholas stroked the front of my throat with the backs of his knuckles. “Which I will not do.”

  I licked my lips to wet them for speech, but Nycholas ducked his head to get a closer look at them as I did, his breath even more rapid than before, and I couldn’t remember what the hell I wanted to say.

  “In three nights,” Nycholas whispered, never taking his eyes off my mouth, “the master will come for me. He so rarely leaves his home, the Pit. He will come this time, because I dared him to.”

  “Your brothers will tell him where you are?”

  Nycholas nodded. “In three nights, I will let him have me. I will be done running. But… when I saw your colors, I thought… that I want to feel your colors before I die. All of your colors.” His hands slid back down my hips to my upper thighs and he spread his fingers, squeezing me again.

  My voice was barely a squeak. “If I say no?”

  Nycholas shook his head and pressed his thumbs harder into my inner thighs. “Please don’t say no.”

  My heart roared in my ears with lust and panic, wanting and fear, vacillating heat and chill, and the cocktail of furiously warring emotions in my system was enough to put my libido on overdrive. Instinct and arousal battled between my legs – the urge to flee mingled with the urge to pounce. Arousal – hot and liquid and spurred on by this big, muscled, inhuman man – was dangerously close to winning.

  I knew he could kill me. I knew he could eat me. I knew his master could find us and rip us apart, and I knew Blair would be looking for me, looking for Freddy, wondering what happened…

  But I couldn’t bring myself to say no, not with those thick thumbs pressing deeper into the crevice between my legs, daringly close to my center, where I wanted him to sink every ice-cold velvet inch of steel he possessed while he grabbed me with such possession.

  “I will blank your mind and take you home in three days, if you’ll let me,” Nycholas said. “Please.”

  The desire in his tone melted any motivation I had to argue with him. The way he said please. Like I was the last thing he wanted, the only thing he had left to look forward to. But… to forget Nycholas… to have never known this gold and pale and dark god who wanted me so badly… “Don’t make me forget,” I whispered. “Let me know you. Let me feel you and remember you, Nycholas.”

  Nycholas stepped just a little bit closer – there wasn’t much room to spare – and slid his hands further up, his palms resting on the fold between my hips and my thighs, those seductive thumbs of his on my lower belly, just above my pubic bone, pressing. I lost my breath again.

  Nycholas leaned forward, and I tilted, expecting a kiss… but he rose higher than my mo
uth and touched his lips just barely across the skin of my forehead. The chill of his breath smoothed my eyelids shut and I shivered, leaned into his kiss and let his massive arms envelop me in an embrace. Exhaustion took over my body as I slumped against him, and even though all I wanted was to lift my hips, wrap my legs around his waist and throw my head back with the glory of his pleasure, I couldn’t move.

  “It’s nearly morning,” Nycholas said. “I forget you’re so breakable, and I’ve used up your energy tonight.”

  I shook my head, my nose brushing his bicep. “I’m okay.” I heard the exhaustion overpower the conviction in my voice.

  “Are you saying yes to my request?” Nycholas’ voice rushed through my hair, and I shivered.

  I nodded and scooted my face closer to his arm. I kissed his bicep with parted lips, tasting his skin, which was so smooth on my tongue I didn’t have a single memory in my battered brain to compare it to. “Yes.”

  His arms tightened around me, squeezing my shoulders, hurting just a little bit, but I loved the feeling, the intensity. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Such a gift, you’ve given me.”

  I kissed him again, and heat scorched from my heart to my thighs as I snuggled further into his embrace, his breathing quick and his heartbeat pounding against my ear.

  “We’ll sleep, first,” Nycholas said. “By nightfall… if your heart still wants what my heart wants… you’re mine, for three nights.”

  I nodded against him and couldn’t open my eyes, the low hypnosis of his deep voice lulling me into something close to sleep. “Yours,” I whispered.

  I didn’t feel him lift me from the counter and I didn’t see where he laid me down as my head fell against something soft and silken, but I breathed deeply of the aroma of a steel man and let sleep have my weary soul.