Page 38 of Kept to Kill
She stroked his hand with her thumb and tears welled in her eyes. She couldn’t hold them back. She would have if she could. She already felt more vulnerable than she had since she was a child. She didn’t want to cry in front of him too.
She looked up at him and saw that his head was cocked to one side, a peculiar look on his face as if he was shocked yet mesmerized by her state of awe.
‘Do you know how often I wished for this?’ she asked brokenly. ‘To be able to touch someone – anyone at all – to feel the warmth of their skin and not hurt them?’ She looked back down at his hand and hers, their fingers now inexplicably intertwined. It looked … right. It was so surreal. ‘Why did it have to be someone like you?’ she whispered.
That realization broke her out of the moment and she snatched her hand away with a small cry.
He laid his hand in his lap, looking like she’d just slapped him, and she wondered why she cared after what he’d done earlier.
‘Just lie down in the bed, Lily,’ he coaxed. ‘You’re tired and you’ll not get a moment’s rest on that flea-bitten monstrosity.’ He gestured to the old, faded chair that looked like it had seen many a traveler’s backside over the years.
‘You won’t touch me?’ she questioned, even knowing he could just lie, but she hoped he had at least a shred of honor.
‘Not unless you want me to.’ He winked.
She drew back, hesitated, and then lay back under the coverlet to face him, pointless though that was. What would she do if he did make a lunge for her? What if he did let his ‘baser urges’ take over and ravish her? Would the others stop him or would they simply – she swallowed hard, but not in fear –watch?
Shivering, she drew the covers up to her neck and saw him grin as if he knew what she was thinking. It didn’t matter that they were all three of them beautiful, she reminded herself. They were Dark Brothers. All they knew was how to take whatever pleasures they could from life while robbing everyone else of theirs. The Army was a scourge; she’d heard that often enough from Vineri and his friends – a very powerful scourge whom everyone was in bed with. Though at the moment that was a literal thing in her case. The absurdity of everything that had happened to her since she’d been taken from the tower was enough to make anyone question their sanity.
‘Go to sleep,’ Bastian murmured from the edge of the bed, not making any move to come closer to her.
Unwilling and unable to keep up the fight, she let her eyes close.
When she woke it was still dark and she found she desperately needed to piss. Slowly, not making any noise, she made her way to the bottom of the bed and out of it, careful not to wake Bastian, who still slept on the edge and outside the covers like a gentleman sentinel, the idea of which almost made her laugh aloud.
Getting a handle on herself, she went behind the curtain, where she’d noticed a chamber pot close to the bath earlier. She bent down, feeling around for it in the dark, when she felt someone behind her, standing just a hair’s breadth away. She felt fingers skim over her arse and straightened with a gasp as she whirled around to where the shadow stood. But before she could even take breath enough to scream, she found herself pushed hard against the wall just to the side of the curtain, her mouth covered with a gloved hand and a cold blade biting into her throat.
From here she couldn’t be seen by whichever men were still in the beds, and the light from the embers of the fire gave out enough light for her to see that the shadow … was Mal. Her heart skipped a beat and her stomach felt like it was rising into her chest. What did he want? His eyes bore into hers. Expressionless pits. And then he seemed to decide something.
He kicked her legs wider and she made a sound of distress.Distress.This was what Quin had promised. Had he told Mal to do this to her or was this just how Mal amused himself at her expense? Her eyes found his again, pleading silently for him to let her go. She breathed a sigh of relief as the knife left her neck only to gasp anew as she felt him hiking the long nightgown all the way up to her waist. She began to struggle, but he effortlessly held her with that one hand over her lips, the rest of his forearm pushing hard on her chest to keep her on the wall.
He tucked the swathes of cloth he’d pulled up into the fingers holding her face, the knife glinting menacingly near her eyes, where his other hand held it. She felt something cold between her legs and jerked, trying to close them, but he stood between them, keeping her at his mercy as he pushed at the hole she’d explored herself once or twice before. She was terrified, but there was something more as well, something that made her clench in excitement that she wished she could deny. She shouldn’t want this. Had she been denied so much human contact that she would accept it from the likes of this man, from his Brothers?Yes.The answer came unbidden and made her despair even as she ached for what Mal was forcing upon her.
A muffled sound exploded from behind his hand and his hard eyes snapped to hers again. The emotion she now saw in them made her even more terrified than the void had before. Lust. Even as she thought it, the thick hilt of his dagger popped into hereasilyand she whimpered as he pushed it, more gently than she would have thought a man who was fucking a woman with a weapon of steel capable. She didn’t know what he was trying to do, but it wasn’t hurt her, she realized, confusion marring her features for a moment before he eased it out and filled her again slowly and her eyes closed as she moaned behind his hand.
This time, after he pulled it from her, he took it out entirely and she felt her hips straining for it without her permission. Seeing his very surprised expression that she had enjoyed something that was clearly meant to be some sort of punishment, she looked at the knife he held in mortification. It was practically dripping with the evidence of her arousal. Her eyes widened as helickedit, letting out a small hum of appreciation. And then she was leaning against the wall alone, Mal having disappeared as instantly as he came. She sank to the floor, breathing hard but trying to be as quiet as possible. What had just happened? What had he done? What had she done?
The place between her legs tingled as she relived it for a moment and she shivered in pleasure simply from the memory of Mal taking her with aknife. What was wrong with her? How could she have liked what he’d done? How could she hope that he did it again? Somehow getting her legs beneath her once more, she stood, found the chamber pot, and finally did what she’d come here to do. Gods, even the sensation of weeing made her want to finish what Mal had started.
She made her way back to the bed, half afraid and half hoping Mal was lying in wait for her in the main part of the room, but then she saw his form lying in the bed next to Quin and she sighed, not really sure if it was relief or longing that she felt. She climbed into the bed carefully and got beneath the covers. Only then did she pull up the nightgown herself and let her fingers drift to the thatch of curls at the apex of her thighs. She slipped them into her folds, aching for release. She spread her knees and did the things that she knew would relieve the throbbing of her sex, if only for a short time; she touched herself in the ways she’d only ever done in the dead of night, high in her tower when no one else could see or hear her. Except now she did it in the same room as three deadly mercenaries who she almost wished would hear her muffled breaths, wake, and finish what Mal had begun, even though she knew it was impossible and that the reality would definitely not be the girlish notions that danced in her head.
The force of her release stunned her and she bit down on her knuckles as her body shuddered beneath her fingers. Sated, she withdrew them and hesitated only a moment before she did what she’d never done before. She tasted herself.
The next morning brought with it an itch much different than she’d felt in the night, though just as unwelcome. As soon as she became aware, her skin began to burn and tickle almost unbearably. She sat up and scratched her arms, but the sensation only worsened. Her face and neck, her hands. At first she wondered if there were perhaps fleas in the nightgown she’d been given, but the skin that had been covered by it was fine. The bed, then. She wrinkled her nose in distaste and looked around the room, intending to ask Bastian if he was the same, but she was alone.
She got out of bed and went behind the screen, taking off the nightgown and washing in the now-cold bath while trying not to remember what Mal had done with her in this very spot in the night … and her reaction to the dangerous killer. She shivered and told herself it was just the freezing water she was sluicing her arms and face with. When she was finished, she dried herself off, but the itching hadn’t abated. In fact, it was worse. She tried not to scratch, but it was impossible; her skin felt like there were insects crawling all over it. Noticing her freshly laundered clothes folded neatly on the table, she donned them hurriedly. The Brothers’ belongings were gone, and she entertained the idea for a moment that they’d left without her and she was free to go where she willed now, but she found that instead of happiness, dread coursed through her. Would they abandon her up here in the north with no money, no gloves, and very little idea of the outside world? If she was no longer any use to them, of course they would.
Her breath quickened as she left the room, imagining navigating herself to Kitore, and for what? So someone could brush by her on a busy street, die horribly, and she be labeled a witch and killed? Now that she’d seen some of the outside, Lily was even more aware that she was woefully ill prepared for life here. She doubted she’d last a day without the Brothers’ protection, though their price was steep.
She practically ran down the stairs and through the door into the tap room, belatedly realizing that it was heaving with people, shoulder to shoulder on benches around tables; more than she’d ever seen so packed-in together. She gasped and leapt backwards, feeling the wall behind her as she edged along it, away from the groups, who, thankfully hadn’t seemed to notice her or her odd behavior.
She slid down the wall in the corner, trying to formulate a plan that was more than simply to wait here. Her escape route back to the other room was now cut off by more people, and she saw that one or two had seen her and were casting questing glances in her general direction.
And then the most terrible thing that she could imagine happening in her worst nightmares happened. One of the daughters of the proprietress approached her. Lily froze. She couldn’t move, couldn’t force any intelligible words from her lips. The girl was asking her if she was all right, but all Lily could do was try to nod – unconvincingly, it seemed, because the girl, who couldn’t be much more than fourteen winters, stepped closer and her bare hand rose towards hers.
Lily could only watch in mute horror as it slowly got closer and closer, and though it seemed like she had so much time, she couldn’t … she shrank away, praying to the useless fucking gods that this girl would just back away and go off to find her mother instead of trying to help a monster.
Chapter 8
