Page 43 of The Deathless One
He was really here. Holding on to her like she was a lifeline, and he didn’t know how to let go.
“I shouldn’t—” His guttural words cut off as she interrupted him.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine, I shouldn’t—”
“Just… Stay still. For a moment.” Eyes shut, she tried to memorize the feeling of him.
His hands were broad and strong, though swollen. She could feel howpainful they must be for him. There was a give to them that skin shouldn’t have, especially not fingers. And as he shifted his grip, she felt the creak of his joints. But even through all that, there was a sense of strength in his touch. She knew without a doubt that these hands would have been beautiful if he had not sacrificed so much for power.
His fingers were long. His palms were not necessarily broad, but graceful. In another world, these would have been the hands of a pianist, or an artist. A man who had hands that made people look at them and think of devilish things.
“If I keep my eyes shut, you feel almost real,” she whispered. “Can you feel me, too?”
“I can.” Though he admitted it, he sounded like he was in pain.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why can I feel you like this? I’m not… I don’t worship you. Not like Sybil. I’ve seen her leaving offerings at your altar, grisly dead things that she finds out in the sand. I don’t do that.”
Swallowing hard, she waited to understand. She knew perhaps some of it was because of what he claimed she was. A gravesinger. A witch who had no spell book, because apparently none of them wrote down how they did things.
Oral tradition, Sybil had said. Gravesingers weren’t allowed to keep anything in any kind of tome or grimoire. They were supposed to tell others how to summon the Deathless One, and therein lay a large problem. But the Deathless One knew the spell required to resurrect himself.
“Nightmare,” he rasped. “If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t be so surprised, now would I? Gravesingers are a direct line to their patron, but I have never stayed dead for this long.”
Jessamine was afraid to open her eyes. Because what if she did and he disappeared? What if she opened her eyes and realized that she had imagined all this? She wasn’t even sure what that would mean if she suddenly woke up on her pile of rags and realized her mind had conjured this entire thing.
“I just don’t understand why you can touch me.”
“Neither do I.” She heard the sound of a click, almost as though he’d swallowed a little too hard. “Do you want me to stop?”
She should. The idea of this villainous god touching her should make her want to sprint out of the room. But instead, all she could focus on was that scarred thumb gently moving against the inside of her knee. The delicate skin there felt like it was on fire.
And a wayward thought whispered through her mind that she wanted him to slide his hands higher. To know what it felt like for those calluses to touch even softer, slicker skin.
“No,” she whispered. “And that frightens me.”
His hands disappeared, and the stool he sat upon suddenly fell and slammed into the floor. Flinching, she opened her eyes to see him standing so far on the other side of the room she almost didn’t notice he was there.
All the details of his body had disappeared again. He was an undulating mass of dark shadows that twisted and warped the more she looked at him. Almost as though he’d lost all control over his body—or perhaps he didn’t want her to see him.
Gripping the bottom of her stool, she stayed right where she was. She couldn’t take the words back, nor did she want to. Jessamine had spent her entire life simpering and pretending to be something that she wasn’t.
She knew how to flirt. She knew how to quirk her eyebrow and have a man on his knees before her. It was the sign of a good princess if she could manipulate men. Her mother had trained her to capture their attention. Plenty of visiting politicians and neighboring countries thought it was luck to get a few moments with a royal princess, and she would perform dutifully.
But this was the first time she’d said something like this and really meant it. She hadn’t minded the feeling of his hands on her knees. Every time he touched her, it felt like some wild and wicked thing unfurled its wings inside her body. It stretched underneath her skin, awakening for the very first time in her life, and she was deathly afraid to admit she liked it.
Eyeing him, she wondered why that answer created such a visceral response in him. And she feared it was perhaps not a good thing.
“Why did you come here to talk about Benji?” she asked.
His voice was a low rumble of emotion as he responded. “I found the boy myself. He’s staying in a place called the Owl’s Nest. I don’t know where it is in the Factory District, but I suspect it’s on the outskirts, considering how shabby it was.”
“Thank you for finding him.”
