Page 18 of Golden Queen
I went to the hall and found a servant. After asking her to have someone fetch me water and towels, I went back into the room and looked at my patient. Something prodded me, more of the same needling itch inside my muscles, pushing me to move.Do something!that feeling inside me seemed to shout.
I pulled out the instruments and assembled them on the tiny table beside the lantern. I noticed my hands were shaking as I took a large swallow of the clear liquor.
A maid knocked, and when I opened the door, she handed me a basin of water and soft, white towels. I thanked her and returned to the bed again.
I tipped the bottle up and took one more drink for good measure, and then used the alcohol to clean my hands, the instruments, and lastly, his lovely, beautiful chest that was so badly marred by the snaking lines of poison.
I tried to brace myself beside him, but I felt too awkward leaning over him. The bed was so small that there was barely room for me to perch at his side. So, I took a deep breath and straddled him again.
The last time had been in the heat of the moment, his hot blood pouring over my hands in the darkness of the city streets. This time, the lantern light was bright, the brothel quiet around me. I told myself the thrill that went through me at being in that position was nothing but embarrassment, but the truth was that I felt him beneath me with some wild abandonment that licked up my spine like fire. He was so...big and solid. It made me slightly dizzy and sent that same heart-lurching breathlessness through me.
The feelings shamed me. He lay helpless beneath me, poisoned for the gods' sakes, by me! And all the while I was enjoying the feeling of straddling him like some lust-addled idiot. "Pervert," I muttered to myself as I got to work.
The first cut was not the hardest one. It wasn't all that bad, really. It was just a quick slice across his skin. But then realizing the insides had healed as well as the outsides, and I would need to get to the depth where the shard must lay, my second cut was the one that had bile rising in my throat.
I thrust down with the doctor's steel blade, plunging through what I hoped was the same trajectory my dagger had gone. When I pulled the blade away, cold, black, oily blood pooled up around the wound and ran down the center of his chest. I was reasonably sure I had found the right location.
I started with the long forceps from the doctor's kit, but I quickly realized I wouldn't be able to see with all the bleeding. Fresh, sweet-smelling red blood mixed with the metallic-scented black blood to stain his chest a dark crimson.
I set the forceps aside and used my hands, suddenly very thankful for my long, slender fingers. The hot, tight feeling of his flesh around my finger shocked me. My hand jerked so hard that I nearly pulled it out as I realized his body was trying to heal the wound around my fingers. I needed to work quickly, or else I would have to cut him again.
I willed myself to calm as I began to feel around inside him, my finger delving into the recesses, running across a ridged line, and then encountering something rounded and smooth. I could feel his pulse beating beneath my fingertips. It was reassuring—to know that he was still alive.
I felt it finally. The mellitrium blade tip was embedded into what felt like muscle. I eased it out of the depression where it was caught, but quickly realized one finger would not be enough to get it out.
So, my third cut was the worst of them all as I sliced through unbroken flesh to widen the hole beyond the original edges. The flesh popped as I cut through skin and cartilage, and the ghastly sound of my knife scraping against bone sent me lunging off to the side, fighting the urge to vomit.
I took several deep breaths until I was sure I would not hurl the contents of my stomach on him, and then I got back to work.
When I had room for two fingers, I pinched the shard between them and carefully pulled it out. I laid it on the bedside table where it sat in a black clot of his blood, and then I turned to splash liquor over his wound.
He surprised me by flinching as the alcohol hit the hole in his chest. I froze for several moments, readying myself for the attack I thought was coming. But he did not stir. His long frame remained perfectly motionless, his big chest rising and falling reassuringly.
His wound continued bleeding, though—a lot. It was pulsing out in time with his heartbeat.
I put my hands on his chest and held my bodyweight against the wound as I waited for the bleeding to stop again.
I never lost that inappropriate female awareness of what it meant to be straddling him, despite my efforts to ignore how warm he was between my thighs. The heat of him was so great that it bled straight through the fabric of my breeches.
It wasn't the heat or the feeling of him between my legs that sent that aching pulse of some indefinable need through me, though. In fact, that strange pressure that seemed to be coiling inside me only increased as I lifted myself up off his hips and pushed my weight down onto my arms. It was his closeness, his very presence beneath me, that gave me such a wanton kind of fire in my blood.
I held myself away from his hips as much as I could, so I did not at first notice what the newfound sensation of something rigid beneath me was. When I did finally understand, it went a long way towards assuaging the guilt I felt for how much it seemed to arouse me to be in such a compromising position with him.
I was not offended at his arousal. I was certain it was just as impossible to control as my own was—or more so since he was obviously still asleep.
Butit was evidence that at least some part of him was aware of me, so I checked to be sure the bleeding had stopped and started to climb off the bed.
I felt his whole body go rigid. Hands grasped my hips, fingers pressing into my flesh for a heartbeat.
Before I knew what was happening, I was moving through the air.
I had no time to process before my back hit the door and a weight pressed my shoulders into the wood. I struggled to force the breath back into my lungs as his face swam before me. I felt a sharp pain in my head that I hoped wasn't a serious head injury.
"What are you doing?" he demanded in a deep, gravelly voice.
I gasped, opening my mouth to speak as he renewed his hold on my shoulders and asked again, "What the fuck are you doing?" His voice was a bit smoother, but no less menacing.
His breaths were much more rapid than they had been when he was sleeping, and his eyes were full of rage and questions. I knew I should have been scared, but I couldn't manage to muster it. Maybe Ihadhit my head too hard. "Calm down. I wasn't...you know...doing anything. I had to get the mellitrium out and...and stop the bleeding." I lifted my bloody hand and pointed to the side table.
