Page 95 of Angel in Absentia
A hand snatched her wrist. Clea felt the grip like steel around her skin before he yanked her into the water. It crashed over her. Clea thrashed against the force and the water, twisting the knife,refusing to release it as two hands slammed her up against the water’s edge. Her back crashed into the edge of the pool as she gasped for breath.
She blinked through the sting of the water, strands of hair guiding it away from her face as she took in the sight of him, glaring as she regained her breath. She swallowed against her fear as the knife trembled in her clenched hand. His hand was closed over hers, synching the knife into her grip as he kept it raised near her throat.
Blood seeped from his bare chest and slid down into the water, guiding her eyes to the red trail that made its way from his elbow. The blade had nicked his skin in the struggle, a small cut on his wrist creating a red line down his arm.
She looked for hate in his eyes, catching her breath and swallowing hard as she tested the grip he had on her other hand. His eyes were black in the intensity of the light around them. It changed slowly to silver as the light of the blessing dissipated, leaving torchlight reflected against the steam of the water. His body was pinned to hers, and she breathed heavily with the adrenaline, waiting for him to kill her. She deserved it, after all, because this treachery she had committed was the deepest betrayal of them both.
His eyes were unreadable as her chest steadied with more even breaths. Clea maintained a face of poise, prepared to face her death with dignity.
He released the hand buried under the water. “Heal it,” he demanded, his voice low and rough.
She consented only to avoid extending the moment they were now in. Every fiber of her being rushed to escape it. She pulledher hand from the water and lifted it to his other arm, keeping his eyes as she traced an adrenaline-laced finger over the cut and healed it. Her gaze remained determined. She had been prepared for the risks of failure and felt little fear, even now. She moved next to the thing she hated to see the most, the deep, seeping wound above his chest.
His eyes watched the act of healing, perhaps wondering how the gentleness of those fingers had just stabbed him a moment before. How had he caught her hand, despite it all? Maybe he wasn’t surprised.
They both watched that wound mend, watched her shaking hands close the evidence when the true wound still bled between them.
He watched where the wound had been, where the rest of the blood dripped and vanished into the obscure fog of the water.
“It is law,” he said, “that a drop of Insednian blood is worth a life.” His eyes flickered to hers.
She remembered that law. Of all of the Insednian laws uncovered in her studying, she remembered that one.
“Do it then,” she demanded, heart racing as she anticipated his next move, chest rising and falling rapidly under the veil of a now-soaked dress. The blend of her own guilt at her betrayal and failure broke her down.
His free hand wrapped into her wet hair. Clea followed his grip with her own, hissing through clenched teeth as he pulled her head back, pressing the knife to her throat as he bent her back over the edge of the wall. Her arm twisted back so that the edge angled toward her, the blade pressed across her neck and downher collarbone. She felt its edge with each heave of her breath, her eyes lingering on the bell only a foot away from her face. What panic would she incite by ringing it now? She imagined it would only cost more lives.
He leaned over her, his lips brushing the shell of her ear as he whispered, “Do what?” There was more than anger in his voice now. The words made her shudder, but not wholly out of fear. Beneath those hurrying feelings stirred something else, something that in every other place had been deniable and strange.
“Kill you?” he murmured against the column of her neck, lips so close that he kissed her with the words and allowed his face to brush her skin, savoring the touch of their skin with his newfound senses. She stirred restlessly under him as if the sensation were more grating than the fear of impending death. This was not fear. It felt like something much worse.
“Free you from any real penance?” he said, and this time he did kiss her, his lips pressing lower into her neck, asking, inviting, drawing out those feelings that made her short of breath. She felt the marveling hunger in every brush of her skin, slow and patient. It savored a newfound ability to feel the world, to feel her. She hoped he’d pull the knife across her throat and end her there, the want he stirred in her more unbearable than the sacrifice of martyrdom.
“Let you die a martyr?” he asked, his tone turning from gentleness to harshness as the brush of his lips transformed into a bite that mirrored his anger, sending a stroke of pain through her that felt deserved. Her breath caught as she leaned into the sensation that might quiet the warmth clouding her mind like a boiling storm.
It did not. When the pain faded, the storm grew fiercer, incited into a fury that caused her to strain away from him, her breathing taught, her eyes aching toward the bell as if it might transport her anywhere else where she wouldn’t be so transformed.
The silence that ensued was a miserable and timeless exploration into her own body, every second of inaction another inch of her skin consumed by the heat of a pounding, aching heart. She felt his chest against hers with every breath. She’d never been such a victim of hunger and want, and yet each passing second transformed her in a slow torture.
Something in his eyes flickered and her hair loosened in his hands. Her eyes locked into his as one thumb moved to graze the line along her cheek and then she knew he saw it, the faintest line of silver in her eyes, perhaps briefly exposed in the flickering torchlight.
“Do it,” she demanded, closing her eyes before she could see the anger completely fade from his expression. She leaned into the pressure of the knife. She yearned to feel it claim her. One sharp, searing wound and she would melt into the water around her. It would be one moment of violence and she’d be free from all other penalties.
Instead, his lips captured hers so tenderly that she forgot what she’d come here to do. His hand released her hair as he kissed her with so much gentleness that she forgot the knife in her hand, forgot it held her throat. In the press of his body and the slow dance of his kiss, she forgot what he was.
The hunger and sensations she’d spent so much time restraining, alienating, and training back broke through herin a tyrannical flood that claimed everything else in its path. Humiliation, she knew, would be what killed her now. Her free hand moved across his chest searchingly as his fingers raked over her in every discernable way, aching to feel again, reaching and stroking and grabbing with the want of a man who’d only just been freed back into the sensations of life. The sense of his dwindling control only incited her own toward a world where control was no longer a word. She kissed him back, any restraint lost in the sense of his hunger, hunger that inquired into her, and her body responded by blooming open to him without any more objection. He defeated her entirely, the knife of his kiss infinitely more deadly than violence.
The most humiliating thing would be to kill her now, and she urged it. The knife was still at her throat; he held it there as if he would cut her open at any moment. The light of Loda extinguished, but not before exposing and relinquishing everything to him.
What a clever victory. Maybe he’d planned it all. She didn’t care.
One last figment of her dignity sprang forth, without even the strength to demand. She pulled away from his lips, finding his eyes only so that he could see the genuine nature of her dismay, see it and perhaps grant her the smallest mercy, if he had any mercy left.
“Do it,” she begged now, her voice almost a whimper, and beneath it all, her apology, the reconciliation that she didn’t care about anything else anymore, that here was the only place she wanted to be.
His forehead was pressed to hers. “Ever the martyr,” he whispered, “you made me a slave in ways you’ll never be able tounderstand.” He spoke against her lips. His eyes burned. “But I’m going to make you try.”
She felt him yank the knife as he kissed her again. The blade seared down the front of her body, cutting her dress open before he wrestled it into the water and wrapped her body tight around his with the strength of both of his arms.
