Steel and Promise

by Alexa Black

  The flogger tore screams from her. They no longer mattered. The sensation coursing through her skin was no different from the thrill she felt when Teran touched her. Where one ended, the other began.

  A silence fell. Cailyn felt the cool air of the room against her body. The emptiness filled with the sting of her welts, sharp now that the rhythm driving it all was gone.

  One of the welts lit with pain as Teran ran a finger across it. Her hips moved of their own volition. Teran murmured approval.

  “Am I bleeding, my lady?” Cailyn managed to ask, her voice thin and strange to her own ears.

  Teran walked over to the other side of the bench. She showed Cailyn her hand, a bit of blood smeared on one finger. “Some.”

  Cailyn’s mouth opened when Teran’s finger touched her lips. There was blood on it, her blood. Still, she’d tasted herself on nobles’ fingers countless times. She closed her eyes, tried not to think too hard, and opened her mouth.

  Teran purred. It might have made Cailyn laugh if it hadn’t unnerved her instead.

  Teran pulled her fingers out of Cailyn’s mouth and wrapped them around her chin. The claws extended with a sharp sound. Cailyn forced herself not to twitch.

  A claw ran along her throat. “So now what, my little one?”

  “Go ahead. Cut me.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’ll keep coming up with more until I agree to it anyway. That’s what you’re doing right now.”

  Teran grinned. “You’re perceptive.”

  Cailyn gave a tired little laugh.

  “But if you only want to stop me,” Teran said, “you might as well leave.”

  “No.” Cailyn swallowed. “I was thinking of it when you whipped me. I want you to.”

  Her own words sounded surer than she felt. Still, every caress had made her wonder about the one that would open her flesh. It would be wrong to leave it undone.

  Teran nodded and pressed her fingers to the metal binding Cailyn’s wrists and ankles. She led Cailyn to the bed.

  Cailyn shivered. Teran stroked her leg. “You’re afraid?”

  “A little, yes.”

  “You’ll like what I have in mind, I think. At least in the end.”

  Cailyn squirmed. That wasn’t reassuring.

  The tip of a claw moved to her thigh. A few light scratches impelled her to open her legs. She closed her eyes. What exactly did Teran have in store for her?

  The steel pierced her flesh, a thin line torn down the length of Cailyn’s inner thigh. She stared in wonder as blood, rich and red, dripped out of it.

  Teran lowered her face to the cut and kissed it. Then she opened her mouth and licked its length.

  It eased the pain a little. Cailyn heard herself moan. She thought of animals licking their wounds and wondered if it gave them a similar reprieve.

  Or did this comfort her because of her desire?

  Cailyn tensed as Teran moved to the other leg. As before, Teran rested the claw against her skin. Anticipation made Cailyn’s skin tingle.

  Pain burst across her body, terrible and welcome. She cried out again.

  When Teran pressed her lips to the wound, she was ready. She relaxed as it soothed her, savored the respite it gave her.

  A rush of sensation thrilled Cailyn’s nerves. She cried out again. Perhaps Teran had been right, after all. Maybe she had enjoyed this.

  Teran’s lips nuzzled the wound. Cailyn’s body rocked with pleasure as Teran pulled away. She smiled with red-stained lips.

  “Thank you, my lady,” Cailyn said, and blinked. Had she really just thanked Teran for that?

  The familiar laughter tinkled through the room. “Little one, did you think I was finished?”

  Teran’s fingers spread Cailyn’s labia. Cailyn froze, but Teran only lowered her head to Cailyn’s vulva.

  Teran gave a low little gasp of pleasure as she licked. Cailyn wondered for a wild, brazen moment if Teran always did this. The thought made laughter bubble in her throat, frenzied, desperate. She choked it back.

  She took a deep breath and willed herself to relax. Her hips bucked harder than she thought they would. Teran’s hands wrapped tight around her, possessive but not harsh. She sighed. Teran made her own soft sound in answer.

  She tilted her hips again, and strong arms pushed her back down. Pleasure surged through her as Teran held her there, her whole body overfull with it, even the places where she had been cut and opened.

  Cailyn’s body locked and released, and she found herself staring. She wasn’t sure at what, so she tucked her head and waited.

  She looked down to find Teran propped on her elbows, looking at her. Teran’s smile was still pink with blood. Cailyn’s blood, she remembered, as an aftershock reeled through her.

  Teran leaned over to kiss her. Cailyn breathed the smell of blood and sex and opened her mouth to admit the vivid taste. Teran’s mouth bore down on hers, insistent.

  She wrapped her hands around Teran’s body.

  It was no use, she thought, doing any of this by halves.

  Chapter Six

  Cool ointment soothed Cailyn’s welts. Teran’s touch was gentle for now. She savored it.

  Her legs still stung. She would have liked the gel to cool their burn, but she didn’t feel ready to present the wounds.

  “How are you doing, my little one?” said Teran behind her.

  “I’m all right,” Cailyn said.

  “My lady,” she added a moment later. Where had her manners gone?

  Teran kissed her neck. “Good.”

  A claw ran along Cailyn’s skin. “Turn around and let me see.”

  Cailyn rolled over and rubbed her eyes. She would just as soon have curled up in these sheets and slept.

  Why was she so tired? That had taken a lot out of her, yes, but…

  She blinked and stretched. “Did you put something else in that wine?”

  “That’s against Guild law, little one.”

  Cailyn sat up and winced. “Then why do I feel dazed?”

  “That happens sometimes. Especially with bleeding.”

  She stared at the lines on Cailyn’s thighs. “Maybe you shouldn’t have shown me these,” she said. Her fingertip ran along the bottom of the wound. Sparks of pain flared through Cailyn’s skin.

  Teran watched her wince. “They might tempt me too much.”

  “Gods. Do you ever stop?”

  “No.”

  “What is this about for you, my lady?” she asked. “Why pain, why blood?”

  Teran cleaned her wounds. Then the gel-coated fingers numbed the pain as they rubbed the cool ointment over her thigh.

  Teran’s other hand, still tipped with steel, touched Cailyn’s chest near the cut she’d made there six months ago.

  “Blood? Blood is a part of you, little one. Like this is a part of you.” Her finger traced its way down Cailyn’s body to her vulva.

  She held up her finger. Cailyn’s wetness made it glisten. “Why shouldn’t I want both?”

  Cailyn let out a slow breath. What could she say to that?

  Teran lay down beside Cailyn and wrapped an arm around her. Cailyn turned on her side to allow Teran to better embrace her. Teran had other ideas, her hand resting against Cailyn’s back.

  “Skin is a barrier,” Teran said, the pads of her fingers pressed against Cailyn’s flesh. “Isn’t it strange how much of our lives we spend with skin between us?”

  Five claws extended. They buried their tips in Cailyn’s back. Cailyn cried out and wrapped her hands around herself.

  She pressed her head against the pillow and flexed her back muscles. The new cuts stung. Teran kissed her just above where she had cut. She wiped the wounds with a damp cloth.

  “So that’s what you want?” Cailyn asked. “More access?”

  “Do you want all my secrets at once, little one? If I told you what I’m up to, you might lose interest.”

  “I—”

  “If you did that, ” Clawless fingers traced lightly
down her skin, “you might not let me finish.”

  Finish? Was there more Teran wanted? Cailyn wasn’t sure how much more she could endure. But Teran said nothing more.

  Relieved, Cailyn settled in beside her.

  *

  “Tell me about Mariel,” Cailyn said.

  She closed her mouth as soon as she said it. But somehow the words fit here, in the dark, when she and Teran both needed rest and neither could sleep.

  “You know all you need to know,” Teran answered.

  “I know you cared for him. I know he died. But you said the claws were his idea. You said he wanted you to have them.”

  “He wanted everything,” Teran said, her voice softening.

  “I’m sure he did, my lady, if you spent eighty thousand on implants for him. But how did you know he would? It’s not like gladiators can put themselves on the dark channels.” She chuckled in spite of herself. “Unless there’s something I don’t know.”

  “No.” Teran laughed.

  “Then what—?”

  “I watched him fight.”

  “Watched him?”

  “He was good. Far better, in fact, than most of the others.”

  Cailyn waited.

  “But I noticed things. His fights went longer than most others. He left the ring with a surprising number of bruises.”

  “He lost to the others on purpose? Just so they would hurt him?”

  “I never said he lost,” Teran said. Cailyn could hear her smile.

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t believe I ever saw him lose. But it took him longer to win than it took others. At first, I thought he did it to draw things out and keep them exciting for the audience. Until, during a fight with another man he’d always seemed fond of, I watched his face.”

  Cailyn bit her lip to keep from laughing. So this was what romance looked like to Teran Nivrai.

  “You wanted him because you’d seen that.”

  “Yes.” Cailyn felt hands on her back. The touch stung the raw skin, a sudden bite that shocked her to alertness. She twitched away, but the hands didn’t move.

  Cailyn expelled a long, low breath. She pressed her flesh against Teran’s hands and waited for pleasure to follow. She’d learned enough, by now, to expect it.

  “I caught up with him between the rounds of the fights. I told him I’d seen the way he looked at Garis. He was nervous to speak with a young noble. Still, he asked me, quivering with indignation, if I thought he wanted a friend to win so badly that he would throw fights. I said, ‘You don’t want Garis to win. You want him to gore you.’”

  Cailyn was glad for the darkness. It would never do for a trained courtesan to let a client see her with her jaw hanging open.

  “And what did he say to you?” Cailyn stammered when words returned.

  “Yes. I don’t think I knew anyone who was as eager for pain as Mariel was.” She sighed.

  Cailyn blinked. Had Teran ever sighed before? She tried to remember, but could think only of the claws and the whips, the way they stung.

  And the haze of pleasure they left in their wake.

  Cailyn wanted to smile, to let herself enjoy the story. But a gladiator and a noble? Most of the nobility would like that even less than retractable claws.

  “Were you happy together, my lady?” she ventured.

  Teran growled. Something sharp pricked Cailyn’s back. “Were we? Of course. Was everyone else? Of course not. But you should have guessed that already.”

  “I did, my lady,” Cailyn admitted.

  “It is one thing to hire courtesans who specialize in it. It is another to be barely of age and running off after your father’s best prizefighter. In the end it didn’t matter, though, because I’d caught the eye of Lord Ben Keriel. As long as I agreed to bear him an heir, whatever else I did mattered little enough. So I did it.”

  “Ben Keriel? On the High Council?” If he’d had a child with Teran Nivrai, everyone would know about it.

  Did helldemons lie?

  “There is only one,” Teran snapped.

  “It doesn’t sound like you liked him much, my lady.”

  Cailyn frowned. Nobles used one another for heirs all the time. Most didn’t play dominance games with each other. The dark channels thrived because the nobles could do things with the courtesans on them that they could never do with peers.

  Not if they wanted to live it down, anyway.

  The pricking at her back stopped. Arms encircled her body. Where once she’d felt metal, now she felt warm flesh against her back. Her skin stung, but the warm softness comforted her. She heard herself sigh in the dark.

  “No. I didn’t like him much.”

  “The rumors…” Cailyn felt chilled. Had they started because the cold young noble of Nivrai hadn’t welcomed her superior’s attentions with enough warmth?

  “Little one, people never liked me, even as a child.”

  “You were like this, even then?”

  “I talked too little for their tastes. Or too much about things that unsettled them.”

  Cailyn managed a dry laugh.

  “I was cruel anyway.”

  “And you felt…”

  “I felt nothing. They weren’t wrong.” She laughed again, bitter, sharp. “Then they found out about me. Not about Mariel, but that I…did things. Probably with someone I shouldn’t.”

  “Lord Keriel told them about you?”

  “He said things. Some were true. Others were things he thought he knew. People were eager for stories. If I had claws, why not have the tail of a beast or demon? And if I had a tail, why not horns or spines or wings? Even those who weren’t so gullible could believe enough to despise me. And Mariel was no fainting boy, eager to be ordered around, only wanting the whip as a sign of it. Between the things my mysterious lover wanted and my age, it was easy to paint me as unnatural.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it, my lady,” Cailyn said.

  Teran laughed. “Don’t be. I encouraged it, as long as no one knew who Mariel was.”

  “You encouraged it?”

  “It came as no surprise that a demon didn’t dote on her son. I had no need to bother with a man I despised. And Mariel and I could do anything we wanted. We were already beyond the pale.”

  Cailyn said nothing. Was all that really wise?

  Teran moved against her. “Do you know, he taught me fighting forms?”

  Cailyn remembered the muscles in her back, tight and small. She probably still practiced them.

  “I can believe it,” she said.

  Steel wound in her hair. Lips pressed against her neck, kissing the skin the claws had exposed.

  Cailyn wanted to ask more. A big gladiator who almost always won. How did a man like that die so young? But Teran lay silent beside her. Cailyn couldn’t break that silence. Not to ask why Teran grieved.

  She waited to see if Teran would move, or speak again, or whisper lusty words into her ear. Nothing came. Cailyn closed her eyes and waited for sleep.

  Chapter Seven

  Light flooded in from the wall-length window. Cailyn sat up, rubbed her eyes, and looked around. Teran, it seemed, had already gone.

  She yawned and stretched. She shouldn’t have overslept. She shook her head, thinking of how her teachers at the academy would gasp in horror if they heard she’d done it. But Lady Nivrai had gotten up before her once before. Left her alone then, too.

  She walked over to the window and looked out at the garden, the flowers ringing the fountain a vibrant shock of color. Her hands itched to open the door, leave the endless white on gray.

  On a whim, she raised her hand to the glass. It was probably a door with a fingerprint lock on it.

  The footsteps were quiet, but she heard them. She turned, ready with an apology to Teran, but it was only a young man in Nivrai gray.

  “Lady Nivrai is waiting for you in the bathing pool,” he said. “If you’re ready, I’ll take you there now.”

  Cailyn ran a hand through her h
air. This gave her no time to arrange herself properly. Still, if she’d woken up beside Teran she would have looked just the same.

  The young man extended a hand. She took it and he led her away. She thought of the two servants she’d seen clear the table before, quiet as ghosts, and wondered if he was one of them.

  He pressed his fingertips to the gray door in front of them. It slid open to reveal a bright room with a large pool of water in its center. Over the pool hung a videoscreen. Cailyn couldn’t see what played on it, but low music hummed out of it.

  Teran stood in the pool. The water rose halfway up her thighs. She was naked save for a harness. A gray dildo jutted out from it.

  Cailyn remembered the rumors. She could easily imagine Teran fitted with wings, water sluicing down them as she rose from the depths. Or picture those same wings enfolding her body like the cloak she’d worn when they’d first met.

  She caught sight of the glint of the claws, then looked back at the harness and dildo. She could easily imagine them as more modifications, a strange metal apparatus that snaked out of Teran’s skin.

  “Hello, little one,” Teran said.

  “My lady.” Cailyn inclined her head.

  Cailyn walked to the pool, the tiles slick under her feet. As she walked down the stairs into the pool, Teran put out a hand to stop her. Her claws flashed twice, scoring lines just under Cailyn’s breasts.

  She moved to let Cailyn pass. Small streams of Cailyn’s blood billowed out into the pool as she walked into the water. Teran’s eyes narrowed, glittering.

  She gestured. “Come here.”

  Cailyn walked to the edge of the pool. At a gesture from Teran, she bent over the ledge. Teran’s arms wrapped around her hips and held on for a moment. Then the tip of the dildo pressed at her opening and plunged in.

  Cailyn pushed herself back on the invader and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she looked up at the screen in front of her. Light played on it, circles of soft color that pulsed in time with the music. The display lulled her into a slow rhythm, the colors changing with the sensation inside her.

  Teran’s claws dug into her hips, pricked the skin. Low sounds ran wordless into her ears as Teran moved faster.