by Rhyll Biest
He lifted the hem of her dress to inspect her shins and calves and after a brief examination with strong but surprisingly gentle hands, he pronounced his verdict. ‘Good news is I won’t have to amputate. Bad news is I’m going to have to go deep and my healing juju might feel a little weird to you. Brace yourself, love.’
Love? What was she, a triple-breasted sex worker who’d just blown him behind the bar of his favourite watering hole? She was a princess of Hell, dammit, daughter of a queen so terrible all nine realms trembled when she reached for a hairpin. A queen who would be very disappointed by the lack of blood being shed by her daughter. Valeda maintained a sulky silence as the captain’s maleficence skimmed over her skin, pooled around wounds, and seeped through dermal layers to heal. Now the enemy was beneath her skin in more than one way.
Ack.
She would probably develop a craving for turnips. ‘Thank you,’ she muttered once he’d finished.
‘So how did you come to be taken prisoner by Shax?’ His tone was casual as his healing power continued to tingle and dance across her skin.
She frowned. She wasn’t sure whether she should tell him or not. The room swam around her and it was hard to think.
He looked up from her ankle to meet her eyes. ‘Is it a secret?’
She couldn’t even summon a withering glance.
With a twitch of his broad shoulders he placed her ankle back on the mattress.
‘Why do you care, turnip-breath?’ Had she spoken the thought out loud? It was hard to keep things straight as the room spun in circles, faster and faster. He’d done something to her, something more than healing, she could feel it. A shudder racked through her. What a spectacular nitwit she was; already she’d failed to protect herself from him, and after she died the queen would refer to her as ‘my late, not very bright daughter killed by her turnip-loving commoner husband’.
Though his hands rested by his sides she could still feel their implacable strength on her, and something stirred in her blood. Another unwelcome thought goosed her. What if he planned to lie down next to her, planned to share the bed?
But he remained on his feet, which was strategically wise for him as it offered him the opportunity to look down on her from a great height and remind her how small, stupid and insignificant she was.
However, his gaze made her feel other things too. Loathsome, squishy, melting things best left uninspected.
Her eyes grew heavy and she had to blink to keep them open.
‘Sleep, it’ll speed the healing.’
‘You would like to kill me in my sleep, wouldn’t you, turnip-breath? Well, I refuse to be that obliging.’
‘Such charm.’ His silver eyes gleamed as he studied her. ‘But instinct tells me there’s another side to you, a hidden side you couldn’t crush in your quest to become the plate-armoured, emotionless, ice princess bitch of your dreams. I can’t see it, I can’t hear it, and yet I know it’s there, buried deep. I always trust my instincts.’ His eyes met hers and a thousand miles away her heart quaked. ‘Plus, I should probably give you fair warning—I intend to dig out the real you. I’ll just keep digging and digging until I find her.’
What a dirty, filthy thing to say, to suggest that she was anything less than a plate-armoured, emotionless, icy bitch.
She would have his dark, turnip-loving head mounted on a wall for such an insult. She pictured it mounted above a fireplace. Yet the thought wasn’t enough to keep perfect, distilled fear from blooming in the frozen cavern of her chest. A fear that kept her awake long enough to feel lips, feather-soft, graze her forehead, before a bottomless darkness stole her away.
Chapter 5
Valeda woke to the sound of rattling chain.
Chain?
She sat up too quickly and had to ride out the head spins. She spied a large demon at the end of her bed. He was hard to miss. Black armour, black expression, six feet of bad news.
Bad news, indeed, just like the reluctant sexual awareness that slunk into the room with him, as impossible to ignore as a smelly hellhound.
Adriel knelt by the bed to lift it by one leg and adjust the chain. ‘Ah, Snow White awakes without so much as a kiss.’
She snorted. ‘Which dwarf are you? Kidnappy? Horny?’
He smiled and studied her, eyes intent. ‘I have to return to the battlefront shortly. You’ll be staying here.’
She didn’t even know where ‘here’ was. It was a fortress of some sort, but whose and where? And was she alone or not? All the questions bubbled up but she refused to give them voice. Let turnip-breath see how little she cared. She would escape more quickly without him around to breathe down her neck.
‘But before I leave, I could use some information about your brother, Paimon.’
The wrecking ball of her brother’s name hit hard, a thousand-ton memory smashing against her protective wall.
She gasped and shook her head as something slipped through. Gristle. Gristle between her teeth.
She clenched her jaw against the ghost of a thick, greasy taste and the needle-sharp claws scratching at her brain.
The captain moved to stand by her, one hand sliding under her hair so that the heel of his palm rested on her nape. ‘You won’t divulge his secrets?’
Her skin prickled. ‘No.’ She meant to say ‘no, I can’t talk about him or my head will implode’, but the pain of the wall warping and buckling in her mind prevented further words.
The captain’s uncompromising brows lowered. ‘The only reason he’s gone to war with our realm is so his legions can cross our territory to rip you and your family to shreds. Don’t protect him—he has no love for you.’
How wrong he was. She closed her eyes against nausea. Dark memories clawed at the wall and poked their bristly, bloodthirsty tongues through the raw cracks in her mind, urging her to remember something being chewed and swallowed, something dark, warped and bloody.
Bile rose in her throat. She swallowed it and mentally fled, burying her thought processes in knowledge and facts. There are two hundred species of rose in Hell, although botanists from different realms disagree on the exact number.
Pressure mounted behind her eyeballs as something tried to scoop them out from the inside. The bat-winged sulphur rose is the most common, its geographic spread encompassing almost all of Hell—
A hand closed over her shoulder and shook her. ‘Look at me. Whole legions will die if you don’t share what you know. Soldiers I like and know a whole lot better than you.’ His hand slid to the base of her throat and he half circled it, oh so lightly and yet with just enough pressure to be interpreted as a threat.
Her eyes flew open to find his lean, wolfish face terrifyingly close to her own, his gaze granite hard.
‘Tell me his weaknesses and strengths. Tell me.’ He thrust his face almost cheek to cheek with hers.
She winced not at his demand but at a sharp, splintering sound—the sound of a mile-long shelf of ice splitting in two, a glacier calving. She pictured the halves crashing into the ocean, the frozen water swamping and slopping about. Was she hallucinating? Nothing in the room appeared broken. But just as she decided it had been her imagination, a coppery taste flooded her mouth and blood—warm and sticky—trickled from her nose and eyes.
***
Adriel blinked. Navy blood ran from her eyes and nose, down to her jaw, past the lips that remained so firmly pressed together. The cascading rivers met and became one as they ran down her throat.
He swore softly and made a futile gesture to dam the flow with his hand but she pulled away.
‘Hands off.’
Though her face retained its habitual icy mask of composure, he recognised that mask for the front it was. When his own eyes had bled just a few hours ago it had hurt like a bitch. What could possibly make her weep blood as if something clawed her insides?
Him? His questions?
A greasy comb of guilt pulled through him. She wasn’t being stubborn. She was in pain—acute pain—brought abo
ut by his questions. Yet the haughty little troll would never admit it or ask for help. And he had to help her. A fork of navy dripped from her chin to splash her ivory bust. She raised a hand to keep it from staining the neckline of her wedding gown.
As if that mattered.
She was being attacked from within—like himself. His skin crawled. ‘Have you been cursed?’ He’d sensed something when he’d healed her cuts, a trace of power that didn’t seem hers. And though he’d focused on the lacerations on her lower legs, a niggling sensation had gnawed at him, hinting that the lacerations were the least of her worries. The real damage lay deep beneath the skin, as invisible as blood in groundwater but just as harmful. ‘You can ask me for help, you know. I’m your husband not your enemy.’
‘You are both, turnip-breath, and you wish me dead.’
The words fell like an axe. Yet the insult held no sting, as he now recognised those for what they were, a way of maintaining distance. But her belief that he wished her dead cut deep. ‘For all your cleverness you don’t understand me. I’ve no desire to see you dead.’
Lashes spiky with navy blood lifted as she met his eyes. ‘Then don’t ask me any more questions about … him.’ She winced as a fresh tide of navy swelled at her eyes.
Her pain made him want to snarl but he was also a realist. ‘That could be difficult. We’re at war.’
‘Then do what you must, turnip-breath.’ She looked away.
Why did it feel as if he’d just thrown her a lifeline and she’d set it on fire? Why? Why would she do that? He studied the inky blue wash streaking her cheeks, her once brilliant, glittering aura and her skin with its illusion of frost both now dull and waxy. He’d agreed with his brother to leave her with a guard in the fortress, where she could cause no trouble. But seeing her now—stripped of power, weak and bleeding—he couldn’t do it. Only a complete centaur’s prick would leave her in that state.
Plus, she was his quarry gone to ground and, like any good burrowing-hound, he couldn’t abandon her until he’d dug her out. And didn’t it make more sense to keep her at his side so he could work out why the mention of her brother’s name made her weep tears of blood? If her own brother had cursed her, then that would make her a stronger ally than he could have imagined, especially if he could heal her. Once he found a way to heal the curse—and he always found a way to achieve what mattered to him, whether that was luring a she-demon to his bed or crushing an enemy in battle—she could help him defeat her brother and free him of his curse.
Her scent, clean and fresh, wafted to him and he found himself leaning closer to take another sniff.
‘I told you not to do that. I’m not some turnip you can caress and sniff whenever you feel like it.’
Caress? In a heartbeat his thoughts took a sensual turn and he pictured her wrapped in his sheets … and then he pictured her wrapped in him, her glorious hair spilling over his belly, his chest, his face.
While she … she wasn’t even looking at him, her gaze firmly fixed on the door and her mind no doubt considering how to get to the other side of it. He couldn’t blame her for that, wanting to escape, but the way she managed to put a million miles between them when he was standing right next to her—that rubbed him the wrong way. It was like she wore a shell, a shell of distance and disdain, that she carried around and hid inside like a snail.
The shell irritated him. How to shake it free? By keeping her in his campaign tent, lying by his side as he rested between battles?
Yes, that would bring the snail out of her shell.
He would keep her close—very close. That way he could also work out why she got beneath his skin, and how he could get beneath hers. A bad idea, he knew, but sometimes those were the most fun …
***
Valeda stared at the iron door without seeing it. Did I really just use the word ‘caress’? What was I thinking? Turnip-breath will get all excited and try to hump my leg. Then it’ll be even harder to get rid of him. Harder. Why did I have to use that word?
She glanced at him. He was so large and intimidating, she’d bet he thought he could solve any problem with muscle and rage. But not hers.
‘Get ready to travel.’ His deep voice filled the room, so rough it scraped her nerves and made her shiver.
‘I thought you said I was staying here.’
‘Change of plan. I’ll take you to the Eighth Realm for a formal meeting with the ruling family.’
Hello, opportunity. Though pleased with his change of mind, she frowned. ‘That bunch of asocial psychopaths. Why?’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘First of all, I don’t think anyone from your family should cast the psychopath stone.’ He took up the slack of her chain and with bare hands broke two links apart, the casual display of power making her wince. If he could do that to thick iron, imagine what he could do to her bones. And as for that thing with his eyes she’d seen earlier …
In her experience glowing eyes never boded well. Still, the chance of escape made remaining in his presence worth the risk.
Adriel tossed the excess chain to the floor where it landed with a clank. ‘And second, you’re living proof our king has the support of your realm and legions. I’ll use that to try to drum up military support from their king.’ He gave the short piece of chain attached to her collar a playful tug. ‘You can think of the trip as your honeymoon if you like, and the collar as a wedding gift.’
‘Some gift.’
He tipped his head to one side. ‘Always with the attitude. I know you’re secretly ecstatic just to be near me.’ He stroked her cheek with one long, lean finger, eyes intent.
She stiffened. ‘Don’t do that.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Do what? Touch you?’
There was nothing gently bred about him, nothing civilised. ‘Stroke me like some pet hellhound.’
He studied her with smoky, unapologetic eyes. ‘Oh, hellhounds are far superior at manipulation than you, princess. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that sometimes if you roll on your back your belly gets rubbed?’
She allowed silence to voice her disapproval at his choice of words, and she could almost taste his disappointment at her lack of response. How he loved to scratch and paw at her in the hope of flushing out a reaction.
He twitched one shoulder. ‘Come. You need to dress for travel.’ He swung the heavy iron door open and motioned for her to follow him.
She stepped into a stone hallway and hurried to keep up with him, having to take two steps for each one of his. His sword belt, weighed down by his sword and dagger and other assorted weapons, pulled his tunic tight over his torso and hips, and her gaze followed his form as he strode ahead.
If he weren’t such a turnip-loving pain in the neck she could have admitted that his physical form was … interesting.
She almost collided with him as he abruptly paused to scoop up two faun drumsticks from a platter in the kitchen. He tossed one to her. ‘We’ll travel light with just a personal guard as escort. I can’t afford to divert more than a handful of soldiers from the battlefield.’
Starving, she tore into the drumstick. An escort? Of his soldiers? She swallowed hastily and wiped the juice from her chin. ‘I want a weapon.’ She wasn’t accustomed to protecting herself without her demon power, and fists could only hold off so many demons at a time—as her encounter with Shax had proven.
He paused in a doorway to look her up and down, his expression impenetrable. ‘A weapon?’
‘I assume you’re not going to take this collar off or allow me to juice up, so how else will I defend myself if the enemy attacks?’
An implacable hand took her elbow to guide her towards a door. ‘You assume correctly. There’ll be no more disappearing on me. But if I give you a dagger, can I trust you not to plant it in my back?’
She smiled at him sweetly. ‘Surely the Captain of Bloodshed and Slaughter isn’t afraid of a tiny, little she-demon with a tiny, little knife?’
He glanced at her as they stepped out into a ston
e courtyard watched by four moons, his expression unyielding. ‘The black plague virus was also tiny. Look what it did.’
She blinked. Was that a compliment? Probably not, but it warmed her nonetheless. She frowned. That was no doubt his plan: to wheedle and coax his way into her good graces. Well, she had none. Nor did she have any other weaknesses he could use.
Having finished her drumstick, Valeda looked for some place to dispose of the bone. But maybe she should hold onto it in case she had to gnaw it into a shiv?
Adriel gently plucked the bone from her hand and tossed it willy-nilly over his shoulder before pulling a dagger from his belt and extending it to her, handle first. As she reached for it he jerked it away, his unwavering gaze locked with hers. ‘Promise me you’ll only use it to protect yourself against enemy demons or horror birds.’
‘Horror birds?’ She glanced skywards.
‘A biological control experiment gone wrong, courtesy of the last rulers here. They bred horror birds to reduce the number of scurtbeasts, which worked, but now that there’s not many scurtbeasts left they prey on everything else, including demons.’ He paused by an empty barrel.
‘What do they look like?’
‘Horror on wings.’ His lips curled into a smile as dark as Hell’s perpetual night.
‘Thank you, that’s very specific, very helpful.’
‘You’re welcome.’ He pressed the cold dagger into her outstretched palm. ‘But don’t worry about the horror birds, princess, I’ll protect you. I promise not to leave your side for a single second.’
She grimaced. ‘Great, now I really am afraid.’
He winked at her. Actually winked.
‘Buck up. Since we’re going to make a lengthy trip we need to juice you up a bit.’
Hope seeped into her and she tilted her head to look up at him. ‘You’re going to let me teach you something? How about the dangers of too much testosterone?’
‘Cute, but we’re in a hurry so we’re gonna do this my way.’ Without warning he wrapped her in an embrace, his impossibly hard arms slamming her to his chest and crushing the air out of her.