Page 14 of The Traitor's Curse
“Lucian,” he said, with a shake of his head and something that almost could’ve been a laugh, “if I’d meant my threat, I could’ve done it then. I would have. Believe it or don’t, but the last thing I want is to rule Calatria. As its duke, or as the duke’s puppet-master husband. Why the fuck do you think I left? It sure as hell wasn’t because I was afraid you’d carry out your own threat to put my head on a spike. Which you seem to have conveniently forgotten, since you’re so determined to be high and morally mighty.”
High and morally mighty? I had the right to put his head on a spike if I wanted!
Not that I did, really, although it stung that he hadn’t been the slightest bit intimidated.
But the last thing he wanted…Why the fuck do you think I left?Gods, he had to be lying. Hehadto be. Everything he’d said to me, all of the power he’d gathered into his own hands, the taunts and the arrogant way he flaunted his control over my own army. All of it. It pointed in one direction only.
And yet, if it were true. If it were, and I didn’t understand Benedict at all…
Another bitter little smile flashed across his lips. “I didn’t think you would believe me,” he said. Because my silence had spoken for me, whether I meant it that way or not. “That’s why I’ve never bothered saying it. But I’m not your puppet, either. I’ll help you. I’ll keep you alive to the very best of my ability. But we do it my way. Or I’m walking away.”
Moment of truth—for me, anyway. He’d dared me to call his bluff earlier.
And I couldn’t. It was far too likely that he would walk away, and then I’d have no one at all, not even a stepbrother who might be playing his own long game against me.
Leaning on his strength might destroy me, but at least I’dbe alive. For now.
“Yes,” I said, and the word tasted like ashes. But he still stood there waiting, because he expected more than that. “I’ll cooperate.”
Surely that was my imagination, that flash of relief that passed over his face and then vanished again, leaving him hard and set.
He nodded. “Good. But you’re wrong, you know,” he added, voice dropping back to that low, dangerous register. “There will be pleasure here for both of us. I’m going to make very damn certain of that.”
My vision blurred, hopefully only from exhaustion and anger and not anything more embarrassing.
“Don’t lie to me,” I said, my voice betrayingly thick. Benedict wavered in front of me as if I looked at him through a window running with rain. “You dislike me as much as I dislike you. You want to humiliate me. That’s the only pleasure either of us will get.”
He didn’t quite flinch, and then he shrugged. Maybe that was all. I blinked to clear my eyes, and he came back into focus as implacable as ever.
“Think whatever you want. But take your clothes off while you think about how much you hate me.” He grinned, with no humor at all in it. “Maybe that’ll make it more fun.”
“Your sense of fun is sadistic and bizarre,” I muttered, but I turned away from him and went toward my bed on shaky legs—and then stopped, cold all over, Fabian’s corpse flashing before me on the carpet that Benedict had made pristine again with his magic.
I closed my eyes. Opened them. Fabian was gone.
But it didn’t matter. His ghost would be back the next time I looked, I knew it.
“I don’t think I can do this here,” I choked out, with panicrushing up to scratch at my throat and send a fresh shiver down all my limbs, so far past the ability to keep up a stoic front that I might as well have broken down sobbing after all. “I’m not even sure I can sleep here.”
Actually, I knew damn well I couldn’t. And the thought of getting fucked two feet from where my valet had gurgled his last painful breath had me ready to leap out the window.
“No, I really can’t,” I gasped, as Benedict’s hands landed on my shoulders. I tried to wrench away, but he pulled me against his chest, and he’d said he wouldn’t force me, but—
“Stop fighting me,” he said harshly, and wrapped an arm around me to trap both of mine. “I’m not. We’re going to my room. We’re going, Lucian. Come on.”
I staggered with him as he led me away, not letting me go, supporting me when I stumbled. A nightmare. This whole night, gods, and if they had any mercy at all I’d wake up panting and drenched in sweat any second now, with the murky half-overcast sun shining through my curtains and Fabian opening the door to bring me coffee and pastry and his usual side dish of passive-aggressive commentary.
The hallway was a blur, Benedict’s sitting room a slightly more cluttered blur, and then we were through another doorway. Benedict’s bedroom, a place I’d never imagined going except in the occasional fantasy where he’d been mortally wounded and I had to visit his deathbed to mouth insincere platitudes.
Benedict bundled me into his bed, pausing only to tug off my slippers. His blankets landed on top of me, warm and heavy, as my head sank into a pillow that carried the scent of him, the bright metallic spark of his powerful magic and the rich spice of his body.
“I can wait until morning, but not much longer than that,” he said. “Try to sleep off the shock, Lucian. You have a few hoursbefore I’ll need to wake you.”
Wake me? He didn’t mean to…he hadn’t joined me in the bed. He leaned down over me, face grim, and laid his hand on the side of my neck, right over my uneven pulse.
“Sleep,” he repeated, and where he touched me, tendrils of warm darkness seeped in, as if he’d somehow pushed his fingers into my flesh, reached inside me… “Go to sleep.”
The darkness rushed up into my mind and my eyes and took me.
