“Go,” he said.
“No! I’m okay!”
“Clearly.” He paced over to the fireplace and leaned on the mantel, staring into the flames while she fought to get herself under control.
Several minutes passed. The tears would stop, then puke themselves out some more, but at last they dried out, leaving her breathless and a little sick to her stomach. When it was over, finally over, Lan slunk to the bath and splashed a little water on her face. “I don’t know why I did that,” she mumbled.
“I wonder.” He drummed his fingers once, still not looking at her. “Can you finish?”
“Of course I can. I’m fine.”
He grunted, drummed his fingers again, then took a bracing breath and turned around. He smiled, gesturing toward the bed. “When you’re ready, then.”
She went, taking long, forceful strides at first, only to falter and stop when she reached her destination.
He waited a moment or two, then heaved a short sigh. “I’ll mask,” he said, moving toward them.
“It’s not that.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know, damn it!” She sat on the edge of the bed, trying not to squirm at the feel of the coverlet on her bare bottom. She had to remind herself she’d bathed, that it was okay to touch it. Tears threatened again for no reason and angrily, she opened her arms.
He looked at her.
“I’m fine,” she insisted.
“You’re determined. There is a difference.” But he came forward, covering her breast with his scarred hand and pressing her down to the mattress. “But I appreciate the effort and it will be rewarded.” He bent, licking at her nipple. His tongue was black and rough as a cat’s. “I still taste roses.”
“Sorry. They put the lotion kind of everywhere.”
“Did they? Let us test that.” Azrael lowered himself to one knee, licking an unhurried trail along her tense body, now at her belly…now her thigh…and now…
She made a sound. He raised his head, but before he could ask, she said, “I’m fine! No one’s ever…I don’t…It’s different.”
“I like to hear you stammer.” His claws pried her brazenly open; his tongue rasped along her innermost folds, all the way to her clit and back again. “Roses,” he concluded. “They were thorough.”
“S-Sorry.”
“It’s not disagreeable.” His tongue flicked at her clit, teasing it in circular flutters for ages of painless agony before closing his dry lips around it and sucking. At last, he raised his head, then cocked it to one side and said curiously, “Did you know you were wet?”
Lan could only nod, breathing hard.
“That doesn’t happen often. How flattering.” He tasted.
Lan shoved herself back against the mattress, her fists twisting at the coverlet, panting through her bared teeth to keep from making too much noise.
He must have interpreted her struggles as those born of disgust, but while his touch was and could only ever be inhuman, it was not repulsive. What it did was rob her of all power of speech, filling her head with a kind of dark light even as her body locked up tighter and tighter. “Very well,” she heard him say when the assault came to an abrupt end. “I won’t prolong it.”
He rose over her and while she knew what it meant to see his face above her and thought she was ready, still she cried out when he entered her again.
He stopped, only for a moment this time. “You are just going to have to suffer this,” he told her. “But I will be quick.”
Before she could tell him again how fine she was, he began and anything she could have said was crushed in her throat along with a scream of something too feral to be pleasure. Lan thrashed, clawing first at the bedding and then at him, although it wasn’t clear whether she was trying to push him away or pull him closer right up until her hand found the bony blade of his cheek and she surged instinctively up and pressed her mouth to his.
He recoiled, one sharp fang catching on her lip so that she fell back in a daze on the bed with the taste of blood on her tongue.
They stared at each other, both breathing hard.
He was the first to recover, the fires of his eyes blazing as they narrowed. He did not speak, but pulled free of her with a bestial snarl, flipped her roughly onto her stomach and drove back into her with one huge hand between her shoulderblades, pinning her down. He resumed, the whole bed shaking with the force of his thrusts, and Lan bit down on her screams again. With every slap of his hips, she could feel something happening inside her, like a snake coiling before it strikes. The part of her still capable of thought realized this was the loathsome thing he’d warned her about, but it didn’t feel loathsome. It ate her, bite by bite, and she let it eat her, let it burrow in deeper and deeper until there was nothing left and she became it.
It was like fainting, except she didn’t go all the way under. It was like waking up, except she didn’t come all the way out either. It was like dying, then; she died, a little…and came back, changed.
Azrael wasn’t moving. His hand on her back had claws. His breath stirred her hair in gusts, but he didn’t speak.
“Please don’t,” Lan whispered. Whatever it was he’d done to her, it was already fading, leaving a hollow place that seemed so much bigger than her entire body. “Please…don’t stop.”
He made a breathy sound. Not a grunt or a laugh. Lan had been punched in the stomach once; she’d made a sound like that. Then he tore free of her with more violence than he’d ever entered. “Get out.”
Lan’s hands tightened on the coverlet. More useless tears stung her eyes—where were they all coming from? She curled on the bed, suddenly naked and human and stupid.
Azrael stalked over to the door and banged it open, then came back to the bed. He tore the coverlet out from under her and threw it at her as she found her feet. “Get out.”
Lan wrapped herself with shaking hands and left. He slammed the door behind her. The pikemen in the hall looked at each other uncertainly. One of them took half a step toward her, then resumed his post. They ignored her.
Lan went back to her room.
It was not until hours into that awful night that Lan realized she had not insisted on the audience she had, after all, paid for. So in addition to all the other misery she felt, she had the comfort of knowing he’d been right—she had done it for nothing. By that time, she simply couldn’t cry any more, but she went through the motions just the same, braying and hugging her cramping stomach while her swollen, aching eyes stayed dry.
How had she lost control so completely? And to what? Before tonight, she would have been sure there were no sexual mysteries left to discover. She’d been with men she’d wanted more, men who’d made her feel good. Whatever Azrael had made her feel when he’d trapped her in his bed, it wasn’t good. She was nothing to him but a squeeze he hadn’t felt yet, a new toy he could play with and put up any time he wanted. And honestly, that was a role she was comfortable in and certainly the role she expected a dolly to perform, so what the hell had happened?
She couldn’t answer, so she cried. At last, she slept, curled on the floor with her head under the bed and Azrael’s coverlet, not a red one, wrapped around her shoulders.
In the morning, she was awakened by the noisy tromp of boots in the echoing tower stairwell, which gave her enough time to sit up and make sure that everything that ought to be covered was before the door opened. A guard entered and stood aside for two dead women dressed as dining hall servants. The first carried a tray with tea and coffee—real coffee, not just brewed roots—along with real cream, sugar, honey, drinking chocolate, cinnamon sticks and a small caddy filled with spices and flavor extracts. The second brought in three covered dishes, a napkin folded to look like a bird, and a relatively small selection of silverware. The spoon had a ribbon tied around it.