Page 85 of Her Cruel Redemption

I cried out against his hand, for a moment forgetting where I was, who I was, forgetting everything but what it felt like to be filled by him, the way I clenched around him in a blinding crescendo of quivering release, all the way down, unravelled by him until there was nothing left of me. And I felt it in every pulse of him that he was breaking too, in his teeth against my skin, muffling a groan against the curve of my shoulder, hands gripping my hips so tightly, holding me still like he was afraid I would draw away before he was done. As if I could. As if I wanted to.

But after a few moments of exchanging breaths, foreheads pressed together, eyes closed, hardly even time for our pulses to slow, I slammed back into time and place, my rational mind freed by the release of a heartbeat ago.

‘You need to go,’ I urged, still breathless, hands still gripping him. I had to consciously relax them, draw them from him. Push against his chest. ‘Before they catch you here.’

For a pause, it seemed like he wouldn’t. Seemed like he would refuse to release his hold on me. But I didn’t want that, didn’t want him to be caught for the sake of a few moments longer. If he was going to be felled, let it be on a battlefield. Not like this. When I pushed at him again, this time he relented, pulling out from between my legs. Reality seeped back into whatever space his drawing away opened between us.

‘Now,’ I added, voice cracked, desperate, when he seemed to hesitate again. He touched my face, fingers lingering on my cheek in a caress that was too tender for someone I’d been trying to kill only hours before.

‘It would be worth being caught,’ he murmured. And then he was just a shadow in the night again, a breeze through the flap of the tent, and the only sign of him that remained was the utter devastation he’d left behind.

I turned my face into the pillow, bit down around a scream. I wanted to tear apart the tent, call lightning from the sky, break and burn and ruin anything around me becausethatshould not have happened. I was supposed to want to kill him. I was supposed to take any chance I had to do so. How could I pretend that when my body was limp and aching from him?

I listened intently to the sounds of the camp, dreading a sign that he had been spotted, caught, lynched from a tree by a mob of angry soldiers because he’d been mad enough to come here to…what? Had he really just needed a release? Weren’t there other, less dangerous options he could have sought out for that? Less dangerous places he could go? Had this just been another power play? Or had the desperation I’d tasted on him been one that mirrored mine, the same desperation that drove soldiers to the beds of whores, but of a different flavour. A desperation that couldn’t be sated with just any warm body.

Footsteps at the entrance to the tent again, and Mae crept into the room, her silhouette letting me know it wasn’thimreturning in a second bout of madness. I held myself still, willed my heart to slow, forced my breathing to deepen. I hoped she wouldn’t sense my turmoil. I hoped this whole tent wasn’t choked with it. I waited for her to accuse me, for the night to whisper to her what she’d very nearly walked in on. But she got changed and settled into her bed, her breathing quickly evening out as she fell into sleep.

I didn’t sleep. Not really. Only dozed in and out of dreams that I couldn’t tell were dreams. Dreams where I’d woken to find Draven strung from a tree by the neck, a crowd of soldiers and Gwinellyn and Esario and all the others standing beneath him, waiting with a noose to hang me next to him. I dreamed he came back, slipped back into my bed and looped his arms around me, whispering sweet nothings into my hair. I dreamed I’d run after him, barefoot and still a little drunk, chasing shadows through trees, feeling like he was always just ahead, always just out of sight. I dreamed he’d set fire to the tent on the way out, that I’d run from it with flames in my hair, smoke in my lungs, to find the army gone and only Draven remaining, standing in the moonlight, watching me burn.

Chapter Forty

Iwas more tempest than man when I reached Saltarre Castle. I stalked its halls full of something thundering that hadn’t been freed by my late-night wandering into enemy territory and an enemy bed. I could still smell her, taste her, still feel the shape of her in my hands, and I clenched my fists against the savage conviction that I should have dragged her back here with me. Taken her captive if I had to.Compelled herif I had to. Crossed that final line I kept wanting to tear through, because it would make this so much easier on me if I did. I thought back on that moment when she’d collapsed on the battlefield. On the several seconds after I’d picked her up that I’d been about to bring her back with me, as I’d so often imagined doing. I had to grip onto the decision I’d made moments later, to turn back, carry her through the bodies of the fallen until I found the Yoxvese girl who’d been at the negotiating table. To hand her over, sick and unconscious, in a move I was still seething against. To say it had gone against the grain was a fucking understatement. But I couldn’t risk her rage inducing her to use magic again when she woke to find herself a captive. Not when she’d already pushed her body too far.

The fact that I was walking the halls of Saltarre Castle as I brooded on this did nothing to improve my mood. I hated this place. The winding halls I’d never walked as a free man, the darkness that was all I’d known of it beneath my feet. When I opened the door to the room I’d taken for myself,Lidello’sroom once, I found Lester waiting for me, sitting by a fireplace thankfully stoked high against the foggy night. He looked up from sharpening one of his collection of knives, caught sight of me standing there shirtless and dripping with rain, and hiked his eyebrows high up his head.

‘What the fuck happened to you?’

I just glowered at him, thumping the door shut behind me. ‘It’s late. I’m cold. I’m going to bed.’

‘Yeah I should bloody think you’re cold if you’re walking round this miserable place half dressed.Andyou’re wet. Did you go for a bloody swim?’

‘It’s raining.’

‘Fine time for a walk then, I guess.’

I pulled a towel off the dresser, dried my hair and back. ‘How’s morale?’

‘I mean, it’s not brilliant. Some mad witch throwing bolts of lightning was bound to make everyone a little edgy. We’ll all feel better when she’s out of the picture. I think that’s priority number one now.’

I paused in toweling my arms. ‘No.’

‘No what?’

‘No, we won’t make targeting Rhiandra our number one priority.’

He scrubbed at his stubble, grimacing. ‘Look, I know you have… something… for her. A predilection or what have you. But she’s wieldinglighting. Andthrowing it at you. That’s got to change some things.’

‘Like fuck it does.’ Taking a jug of water off the same dresser, I drank straight from it, hoping it would clear away some of the fog in my head. This pulsing, rumbling fog that had rolled in when I’d seen her on the battlefield. It didn’t. ‘I want her left alone.’

Lester stood and stretched his arms high above his head. ‘Fantastic,’ he yawned. ‘I was getting tired of living anyway. Now all that’s left to see is how we’re going to die. Barbequed by your wayward bloody wife, or beaten to death by your generals and your soldiers when you announce that they’re to just look the other way while she’s trying to do the barbequing.’ He wilted a little as he waited for my reaction, probably realising I was serious. ‘Maybe we should just do what we came here for and get out as fast as we can,’ he continued, more soberly now. ‘We don’t need to hold Port Howl. We can burn the place down on our way out the door.’

‘Maybe,’ I muttered, pulling on a fresh shirt, moving over to stand by the fire.

‘You hate it here anyway.’

‘I do.’

‘And it’s cold.’

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