by Cole McCade
“Get…get off me, you…you fucking…”
“Monster,” he said gently, his voice rumbling under her palms. “I know, firefly. I know.”
With a whimper, she fell still. He curled around her, and she hated that his heat, his strength, were once again comforting. Stable. Something to counteract the pain she’d put herself through, the pain that was all for nothing, and yet still couldn’t possibly hurt any deeper than the ache of disappointment and failure splitting the very core of her being in two.
Just like the rest of her life, she’d tried to do something and fallen short. Never enough.
She was never enough.
She stared miserably at the smears of her blood against the slate gray of the t-shirt stretched over his chest, darkening it in subtle patterns like strange art. With every step, she counted the rise and fall of his breaths. Seventeen breaths until he turned. Nine breaths until the shadow of the warehouse entrance fell over her; four more before the grinding sound of the exterior door rose and another six before the groan and rattle and creak of the interior door joined it. As they passed, she glimpsed that car again, flashy sleek black emblazoned with an ice-blue firebird on the hood, before she buried her face in Priest’s chest and tried to pretend this wasn’t happening.
But even if she tried to shut it out, she knew the moment the door rolled down behind them, locking her in again and sealing her prison shut.
He carried her deeper into the warehouse; she didn’t lift her head until he bent to set her down. Cold tile kissed the undersides of her bare thighs. She opened her eyes. They were in a partially enclosed corner, and after a moment she recognized the other side of the Japanese screen. The tile under her was the edge of a long, deep clawfoot bathtub. He balanced her gently on the edge, holding her with one hand. The other fished a small Allen key from his pocket, before he buried his fingers under her hair. His touch grazed against her skin; then came a snick and the collar fell away, slithering down her body in a coil of chain before he caught it and dropped it to the floor. She stared at him dully, so very hollowed out inside, the numbness of shock and defeat descending.
But when he pulled on the edges of the shirt she’d stolen, she pushed weakly at his hands, shaking her head. “No. No.”
“This time I cannot listen to your ‘no.’” He caught her hands and set them gently aside, then eased the shirt up. “You’ve hurt yourself. Shhh.”
“No!’
She kicked out, her knees hitting his chest, but he didn’t budge; the shirt pulled up and caught her arms and twisted, trapping her. Panic kicked in hard until she was an animal trapped in a box and she couldn’t think, only struggle and lash and flail—
“Be still!”
It was the first time she’d heard him raise his voice—and it struck her like a lash, the sharp, frustrated worry darkening the edges. He caught her tight, gripping her wrists, and peeled her out of the shirt, then tossed it aside to leave her naked again, small and vulnerable before him. Still holding her wrists, clasping them against his chest, he looked intently into her eyes.
“I will not hurt you,” he said firmly. “I only wish to take care of you. Will you let me?”
“Do I have a choice?” she asked dully.
His lips parted, then closed again. Something odd flickered in his eyes. He released her wrists.
But he said nothing at all.
Silence coiled between them, a quiescent serpent, as he leaned away from her and turned the faucets on. Willow closed her eyes and listened to the rush of water striking ceramic; steam coiled up at her back, stroking against her spine as palpably as fingers teasing down her back, and yet not even her sensitivity had an ounce left, the sparking response tepid and flat. So she’d failed…this time. As long as he hadn’t killed her yet, she always had another chance. Another opportunity. Her ankle was a fucking wreck, but she’d figure something out. Maybe that car, or…she didn’t know. She didn’t.
But she’d spent her life giving up when things didn’t work out, and she couldn’t give up now.
She’d expected Priest to be angry. To shout at her. To punish her. Throw her back in the chair, tie her up, leave her to suffer with her injuries and the humiliation of failure. But he only eased her into the water, those rough hands soft on her body, careful against bruises that were only now beginning to fade in, throbbing sullenly. Hot water closed around her like a sucking mouth, and she hissed, flinching. He lifted his gaze to her.
“Too hot?”
She bit her lip and shook her head. “No. Just…let me get used to it.”
With a nod, he rose and moved to a tall standing cabinet against the wall. When he opened the polished wooden door, she glimpsed multiple bottles and vials, surgical tools, gauze, even a sling hanging from a hook inside the door. He must have to doctor himself. He couldn’t exactly show up at the emergency room and ask them to treat the kind of wounds he probably got in his line of work, not without explaining himself.
She bowed her head and stared at her knees, reddened and peeking above the rising water like bony islands in a tiny pond. Her blood was already staining the water, swirling from her fingertips in crimson spirals like bloodsmoke magic. What would the ER staff have made of her, if she’d made it that far?
Would she have told them of Priest, or kept her lips shut and shaken her head and refused to say a single word?
Priest knelt next to the bathtub and shut the water off. When he dipped his hand into the water and caught hers, she lifted her head, staring at him, watching as he wet a piece of gauze and began, one at a time, to clean her fingers with a touch so gentle it bordered on delicate, the pain barely an afterthought.
“You can’t keep me here forever,” she rasped. “My brother—my brother is very important, he’ll—”
“I know about your brother.” Hooded fox-gold eyes watched her as he worked over her knuckles. “I know what kept him away. Do you really think he’ll come for you?”
He couldn’t have hurt her more if he’d struck her. Her fingers clenched in his grip. “He loves me.”
Priest’s lips tightened. He looked down, and one by one pried her fingers apart, nudging until her hand relaxed and he could resume cleaning.
“Love,” he said, “is an illusion.”
Maybe it is, she thought. But it’s the illusion that keeps us all reaching until we find something real.
And I refuse to believe that Dev doesn’t love me.
“You loved someone. Are you saying it wasn’t real?”
“I thought it was.” He considered quietly. “Perhaps I had my illusions dispelled.”
She watched from under her lashes as he finished wiping her fingers clean, dyeing the gauze scarlet and exposing the mess she’d made of her hands. Her fingertips looked as if they’d been chewed to bits, the nails ragged and stained, the skin scraped and bloody. With meticulous care, he coated each one with a salve that burned warm at first, then sank into the skin and went numb, easing the ragged acid burn of the scrapes. Each fingertip he taped with a layer of protective gauze, and she wondered that hands that could be so brutal, so cruel, could touch her with such care.
“Where did you go?” she spilled out, her chest tight. “Did you kill someone else?”
He lifted amber eyes to hers and watched her with dry amusement. “No. I went to the grocery store. Even monsters need to eat.” He wrapped the last strip of gauze, then set her hand to rest on the edge of the bath. “So do fireflies.”
She pinched her mouth up and lowered her gaze to her reddened knuckles. “I don’t want your food. I don’t want anything from you.”
“If you mean to be brave, you must be strong as well. Which means feeding and caring for yourself.”
She peered at him suspiciously. “You make it sound like you want me to escape.”
“What I want is…complicated. I…” He stopped, looking at her strangely, then brushed her disheveled hair back from her face. He lingered, playing his fingers through the strands, wat
ching with a rapt expression on his face, before those unsettling eyes fell to her again. “Help me find a way to save you,” he whispered.
“Just…let me go. This isn’t some force that’s out of your control, Priest. It’s you. It’s all you, and all you have to do is decide to let me go and trust that I won’t…” Words failed her, emotion blocking her throat. She struggled, searching, pleading. “Trust that I won’t betray you. Not every problem can be solved by killing someone. If that’s your answer to everything…” She hesitated, then risked touching him. Risked choosing to touch him, reaching up to catch those fingers in her hair and curl both her hands around his, tangling them together. “Have you ever heard the saying ‘to a hammer, everything looks like a nail?’”
“No.” For the first time, uncertainty flickered across those princely features, softening them into something human. “But…I think I understand.”
“Then don’t you want to be good for something more than this?”
Keen eyes sharpened. “Have you ever asked yourself that, firefly?”
“That’s not fair.” She flinched back, loosening her hold—but he caught her hands, refusing to let her go.
“Look at what you do when you are willing to fight for something.” His thumbs traced the hillocks of her knuckles, lingering on each point of redness, the stains of blood still spotting her skin in places. “This blood on your hands? Is beauty. Is strength. It makes these hands more lovely. Why have you never bled for something you wanted before?”
“Because there’s nothing I’ve ever wanted enough!” she shot back. Why? Why did he keep pulling and pushing at her this way? “I never had a chance to want anything. Most little girls…most little girls want to be rocket scientists and brain surgeons and roboticists and princesses and lion tamers and…and…” The words fought each other to get out, tumbling fast and bottlenecking to stop up in the back of her mouth. Her hands shook, and she clenched them against Priest’s. “I wanted to be everything. That’s what’s in the soul of a little girl. Everything. We have a thousand people inside us, and part of growing up is taking all the little bits of those thousands of potentials and turning them into the person we become. The one we want to be for the rest of our lives. But I never…I never got the chance. I never had the chance to find out which piece of everything belonged to me. I was six when I started to realize I’d never get to even try to be an astronaut, never be a particle physicist, never build machines that reached the sky. Most little girls don’t have to fit the puzzle pieces of their dreams into the picture of reality until they’re at least teenagers.” She looked up at him, some part of her begging. Needing him to understand, even though she didn’t know why. Maybe because…because if he understood she hadn’t yet had the chance for her life to start, he wouldn’t be so quick to see it end. “Six, Priest. Six. When you give up at six, what’s left to fight for?”
“Everything you never had,” he answered without doubt, husky voice soft, accent lilting and soothing. “Why did you give up, firefly?”
“My father needed me,” she whispered, and when he drew her closer, when he rested his chin to the top of her head…she didn’t fight him. She hurt like every bruise she’d taken to her body was reflected on her soul, and even some comfort was better than none. Her eyes closed, and she tucked against him with the water-warmed barrier of the bathtub between them. “I love him and he needed me and he was always there for me, and I wanted to be there for him. That’s…that’s why I tried not to mind. None of this is his fault. It’s just life, and sometimes life sucks and you do what you need to do for the people you love because you love them, and it’s okay.”
“Do you truly mean that?”
“Yes,” she answered, then more fiercely, “Absolutely.” She pulled back, meeting his eyes. “If that’s what you’re looking for, if you’re trying to get me to say I hate my father because he’s sick and he needs me…I won’t. Maybe I’ve resented the situation, because I’m tired. I’m always tired. But I’ve can’t bring myself to resent him. That’s not who I am.”
“Ah,” he said, and simply let it go. Let her go. Only that ah before he withdrew, sinking back on his haunches, and dipped a hand into the pocket of his jeans. A delicate bauble slipped into his hand: a tiny oval pendant in translucent red, dangling from a fragile filigree mounting and thread-fine chain, both in deep gray metal. It was amber, she realized when she caught sight of a mote of something inside, some kind of insect. An insect trapped in amber, and stained as red as blood.
He folded the pendant into her palm, and curled her fingers over it. She frowned, looking down at it; the chain coiled over her fingers, the water on her skin beading on the stone. Inside was a firefly, its wings extended, caught forever. “…what is this?”
“The other reason I left.” He shrugged. “Glass fireflies were not so readily available. But you can still see the light through crimson amber.”
Her heart flipped strangely. She clutched her fingers around the pendant and looked away; the heat of the steam against her cheeks was too much. “I…I didn’t even know you could dye amber red.”
“It’s naturally occurring. Cherry amber; it happens when it crystallizes at high heat.”
“…God, you’re like a creepy encyclopedia of psychopathy and useless trivia.” She choked on a tired laugh; she’d doubted she’d be able to laugh with anything like humor, warmth, ever again. Laughter was a rote thing with nothing behind it, a desperate reaction to feel anything other than fear. “Why would you give this to me? Why would you get this for me?”
“Because I wanted to…” Again that struggle. As if he didn’t have language for what he wanted to express, and she wondered if it was difficulty with English or difficulty with emoting at all. “I wanted to give you something you love.”
“Oh.” A tight fizzing settled in the pit of her stomach. She curled her hand against her chest; the chain dangled against her skin, spilling between her breasts. “Are you trying to comfort me?”
“Perhaps.”
“You’re like an emotionally stunted child. You don’t make sense.”
He spread his hands as if in helpless acceptance. “Often, not even to myself.”
She didn’t know what to say. Was she supposed to thank him? He waited, watching her. Watching for her reaction? Watching to see if she liked it? How could he do what he’d done to her—
—what you wanted him to do to you, dirty thing, dirty thing—
—and then think he could buy her off with trinkets?
She traced the polished curve with her thumb, looking down at the tiny thing resting in her palm. In its own way it felt like an apology, but she didn’t want apologies from him. Not when every hint of kindness he showed her was immediately counteracted by cruelty, humiliation, unwavering dominance, the threat hanging over her head. Apologies meant nothing when he said Help me find a way to save you, and wouldn’t face that the answer to that was entirely in his hands.
“I hate the color red,” she whispered.
“I love it.”
“Why?”
He touched her cheek—the lightest contact like a kiss, but she looked up at him. He caught a lock of her hair, twining it around his finger, holding it before her eyes. Red. Her hair as red as blood, as red as the smoldering embers of a fire glimmering in the dark. Softly, he brushed the cool strands against her cheek, then let go. Her hair fell to tumble against her jaw and cling to her damp shoulders. He rose.
“Finish your bath. Do not try to run. I’ll bind your ankle once you’re clean.”
He disappeared around the screen. His shadow moved against the paper squares, before she twisted to watch as he reappeared beyond the edges. He strode to the crucifix on the wall. His fingers stroked over that collection of whips and floggers; he selected a riding crop from among the gleaming leather, then stripped out of his shirt, tossing it aside in a flex of muscle, in a twist of the reddened lines marking his back. Yet it didn’t click what he intended to do, until he sa
nk to his knees before that crucifix, bowed his head, and parted his lips on that soft, whispered, ritual prayer.
Dread built in the pit of her stomach. She curled her fingers against the edge of the tub, the pendant dangling over the edge. “Priest…”
The riding crop snapped over his shoulder. The leather loop at his tip licked across his skin. She flinched as if she’d been struck, her flesh bitten by the lash.
“Priest, why are you—”
He cut her off with another snap. And another. Again and again, those cracking sounds like something billowing and bucking in a storm wind, over one shoulder then the other and then back again, each one leaving a mark as red as lipstick kissed against his flesh by the riding crop’s sadistic mouth.
“Stop!” she begged.
The lash came down again. His back tightened in a shudder, fine flexions of sinew trembling. He lifted his head and looked over his shoulder, one slitted eye finding her, heavy and pensive.
“I left you to be harmed.”
Aching steel bands wrapped around her heart. He was punishing himself for her? It…he didn’t make sense. “It’s not that bad, I…I—” But the lash came down again, and she cringed. “Priest, stop!”
But he didn’t stop. He didn’t stop, and if anything he only struck himself harder, the sound as terrible as the crack of a palm against flesh, like the strike of an abuser turned back on himself until it filled the room and bounced from every wall and Willow wanted to scream. She curled into herself and covered her ears; the chain tangled in her fingers bit into her cheek, the pendant dangling against her skin in a damp, cool kiss and moving in rhythm with those horrid, painful slaps. She couldn’t stand it; she’d do anything to make it stop, if he’d—if he’d—
“I’ll stay!” she cried out.
He froze. The riding crop stopped mid-arc, held upright in his hand. Slowly he lifted his head, watching, waiting. Breathing hard, she lowered her hands from her ears, staring at him.
“If you stop,” she continued, choking on the words. “You don’t have to chain me up. I’ll stay. You have my word on it. Until you make up your mind, until you figure out what to do with me…I’ll stay. Willingly.” She didn’t even know if it was the truth or a lie. She was too scrambled up inside, and even as she promised that voice inside sniggered at her, called her dirty thing, called her stupid, weak, pathetic. She shoved it down. “But I…I need to ask you one thing. Please.”