Page 50 of Jailer to the Death God
“I bite my cheek sometimes when I’m anxious,” she gasps. “I’m sorry.” Her eyes are like frosty stars, icy pools brimming with blue tears.
I kiss her again, deeply, soothingly, and she hums with relief.
But kissing her isn’t enough. I need her—I need her skin. Both of us are too heavily clothed. Too many layers.
My claws pick apart the knot of her overdress, and I lay it open. She’s wearing another, thinner dress beneath. I want to claw it away, ravage it into shreds until I get down to her quivering flesh, to the source of her true scent. I need to bury myself inside her—my face, my cock, my fingers, all of me. Maybe then I can find some peace from the crawling unrest in my body.
But I pause, and Macha’s words snake through my mind.
You may fuck whomever you like in the mortal plane—in fact, I’d encourage it if you don’t want those chains you wear to become excruciatingly heavy and painful. But you can’t fall in love.
What I’m feeling isn’t love. It’s the most purely selfish lust.
Lust for the Queen I have agreed to marry. The Queen I must protect.
She is hurting, wounded by grief, softened by wine, rendered reckless by the attacks of the hounds tonight. She is not herself.
I rock back, kneeling upright on the bed, still astride her thighs. “My apologies, little Queen. I understand this is not part of our arrangement.”
She slides out from under me and sits up, rubbing her forehead. “No. It isn’t.”
“I think it best that I find relief elsewhere then. And you should as well.”
“That’s the thing,” she says. “People will expect us to be faithful to each other. Any rumored infidelity could be a problem.”
I clench my teeth, struggling with the impulse to throw her back down on the bed. I have not touched myself since the night I came accidentally—I’ve been too busy, too weary, too proud to indulge. Perhaps I should find relief that way. But it won’t be the same, not without her living body, her eyes, her hair. Her scent.
“If you want to take someone to bed, you may,” she says. “You’ll need to be secretive about it, though. Put the guards in the hallway to sleep while you’re entertaining the woman—or the man—and be sure whomever you choose won’t speak of it.”
She’s staring away from me, into the fireplace.
“And you?” I ask. “You’ll invite someone else to bed?”
She pinches her lips together. Shakes her head. “I can’t.” She slides off the bed, pulling her overdress closed again. “You should go now. We leave at dawn tomorrow. It will be a long day.”
Reluctantly I swing off the bed and head for the door. When I look back she’s standing rigid, silhouetted against the firelight, gazing into the flames. Alone, trapped, and hungry, just like me.
A pulsing ache throbs through my heart.
But I leave the room without another word.
23
Arawn and I leave the palace just as sunlight begins to leak into the sky. The air in the courtyard practically cracks with the sharp cold, and inside the carriage isn’t much warmer. Before we depart, Hessie runs out of the tower into the courtyard, handing us warm buns wrapped in greasy paper and two bottles of hot tea. I thank her and wave as Farley loads the last of the luggage. Flanked by six guards on horseback, my carriage rolls out of the palace gates and into the city, heading for the west wall.
I open my planning book immediately, and while I’m working, I sip the hot tea. I wore fingerless gloves today for this exact purpose—so I can hold pencils and turn pages more easily. I’ll be exhausted later, but for now my brain is buzzing with manic energy, obsessing over the details of the day, going over and over my notes to discern if I’ve forgotten anything.
I have planned this excursion down to the hour and sent messengers ahead to let the outlying villages know where and when to present their sick. We must keep to a strict schedule in order to have the best chance of saving the maximum number of lives.
Despite my best efforts, I know there will be some people who arrive too late to the meeting points—people who will die because Arawn and I had to move on and give our time to another village. They’ll curse me as an uncaring monarch, never knowing how much it grieves me that I must make these choices.
Arawn is sitting across from me. Staring, as usual. His big frame is engulfed in an enormous coat I ordered for him a couple days ago. I decided it was a priority, since he feels the cold more in his current form. A coat will serve him better than a cloak. Besides which, he looks damn majestic wearing it. Also ridiculously handsome.
“You seem unhappy,” he rumbles. I’ve noticed that his voice is even gruffer and deeper than usual in the early mornings. The roughness of it sends little tremors through very sensitive parts of me.
“Unhappy is my usual state of being, I suppose.”
“We are going to save more of your people. And you’ve just announced your engagement. You should look happier.”
