Page 17 of The Illuminated
“I need you to be an image of strength today.” He made a come-hither motion with his fingers, and I forced myself to obey. “You are to wear this.”
I bit back a retort to his command, taking in the most extravagant of the gowns he’d commissioned for me. It was midnight black and full-bodied, with golden, shimmering rose vines down the front that complimented Lucius’s trademark black and gold look. It did indeed look fit for a queen—but more like the queen of the underworld than one divinely ordained.
“Do you need Mrs. Violette to hide your mark?” he asked. “You could say it’s her specialty.”
Oh.Suddenly Lucius’s strange tenderness toward Mary made a lot of sense. She must’ve concealed his mother’s abuse, and ironically, her own.
“That’s dark,” I murmured, and he snapped his gaze to mine. “But no, I can mend it.”
He waved a hand dismissively. “No, no. Violence is a rare occurrence in my castle. I was referring to marks of an erotic nature,” he said, his eyes darkening.
My mind flashed to Christine on her knees before Lucius, and then to my stolen glimpse of a scene straight out of a BDSM erotica at the witchy sex party, and I felt understandably sick. Of course, the literal sadist was a sexual sadist as well. Pain was his ultimate pleasure, as he’d made clear over and over again.
Nope, I couldn’t even think about it. I was doing little to hide my disgust.
“Don’t pretend to be scandalized,” he said. “Not when you submitted to Daelon so easily.”
I paled, my whole body tensing. My glare only seemed to amuse Lucius, evidenced by the curl of his lips.
“Please leave. I’m not in the mood to hear about your revolting sexual predilections.”
“Hmm. And what would it take to get you in the mood, again, exactly? Because I’ve heard after all his pining, you offered Sebastian little.”
“Maybe I don’t feel the need to be constantly involved in mindless hedonism like everyone else here,” I snapped.
Lucius stood close to me now. Too close. He looked down at me with an infuriating smirk, but his eyes told a different story. He was looking for something—something I kept locked away and out of his grasp. I feared he would keep searching for the truth about Daelon and me until he found it.
He threw me a deadly grin. “Maybe you’re just bored of whatthe othershave offered you. I can hardly blame you. Some of us need to play games that are far more thrilling.” He trailed his long fingers across the gown’s bodice before letting it sway back to its position on the rack.
I held in a breath, realizing his energy had shifted. Just like when Christine knelt before him, it took the shape of a predator luring its prey with whispers of lurid and depraved promises. It was all-consuming and monstrous, like the call of a siren to a lost sailor or a hit of heroin to someone deep in the throes of addiction. I wanted to back away, but I couldn’t let him know I felt it. Like a medium who could see the demon in the corner of her room, I felt compelled to claim blindness to protect myself from attack.
“Well,” he said, his tone low and his blue eyes stormy. I could nearly see the lightning strikes of his immense power in their depths, could nearly feel the way it had burned through me when he’d given me a taste. He lowered his head so that his mouth was at my ear. “Maybe it’s best my Queen doesn’t allow herself to belong to anyone else in any way. It would be aperversionto give yourself to someone weaker.”
I wanted to shove him away, to remind him that I was not an object to be gifted, claimed, conquered, or whatever the hell else he could dream up in his twisted, power-drunk brain, but soon, his cool breath was merely an apparition in the wind, his form vanished by a slight of hand.
A weight dissipated from the space he’d once held, like the lift of a suffocating smog. I suddenly understood the hypermasculine appeal of punching walls. Or the teen-angst-reminiscent act of screaming into a pillow.
Unable to allow myself to do either, I settled for a scalding hot shower. I leaned my head against the cool tile, disturbed by the sudden influx of thoughts of sex and power that infected me like a virus: visions of Daelon’s flexed muscles, the look he gave me when he wanted to punish me, to remind me he owned me, the feel of his body pressed against mine, his lips on my skin, his hand on my throat… they overtook my brain like malware.
It wasn’t the thoughts of Daelon that disturbed me; it was the fact that Lucius had drawn these images out of me, and worse still, that it was frighteningly easy to replace Daelon with Lucius in these visions. Like there was something that drew me to Daelon that Lucius also possessed, something wrong and twisted that I just wanted to deny and repress and never think too hard about. I thought of Christine kneeling, imagined her pale skin marked red, and then Lucius’s lips at my ear, and the scream finally came.
I nearly screamed again when I found two nervous-looking servants in my quarters, halted only by the unmistakable mark of my power in their auras as they turned toward me. I secured my white robe, letting out a breath as I recognized Amaya, a survivor of my coven and sister to Seraphina, the witch hauled off to the dungeons for practicing the old ways in one of the cities. She had beautiful, delicate features, light brown skin, and bouncy black curls that came to her shoulders.
“The King sent us,” Amaya said. “You’re alone, right?”
I nodded. “Sorry, what was your name again?” I asked the other witch, who was short and curvy, with a warm, tan complexion and long brown hair.
She did an awkward curtsy before Amaya threw her a puzzled look, shaking her head. “Sorry, just instinct,” she said, straightening up. “Um, I’m Santana. I was taken from the Dianic Mountain Region.”
I nodded and smiled apologetically for forgetting her name. I was going to need to see a map at some point, though I wasn’t sure Lucius would ever allow me near one.
“We brought you breakfast,” Santana said, gesturing to the platter sitting on the vanity by the windows. It held a small bowl of porridge, a cup of water, and a plate of exotic fruit artfully arranged, aside from a strange gap to the left.
Amaya skipped over to the platter and popped some kind of melon ball into her mouth. Well, that explained the empty spot.
“I told her to quit picking at it,” Santana muttered.
“I was just checking it for poison, ma’am,” Amaya said, in an exaggerated accent that sounded sort of like human Scottish.
