He started walking, and stopped before the shelves. Rose had been trying hard to look at them as little as possible, but now he was actively directing her attention towards them, pretending they weren’t there became impossible, just as it was impossible to ignore his savage pleasure as he declared:
“Every container, from the ground ‘til up here . . .” He made a cutting gesture at waist height, “. . . holds the remains of a man I killed that day. After I freed those of us who remained and taught them how to heal themselves as I had, we killed many more. We preserved their eyes. A tradition of our enemies that we seized as revenge, without knowing that through those eyes, we could steal what was left of the lives we had interrupted and live past any reasonable age. That was a fact we found out years later, purely by coincidence.”
“What about these?” Rose asked, pointing at the flasks that didn’t correspond to the people who had allegedly murdered his people. There were a great many of them. “What did the people behind these eyes do that made you visit death upon them?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged. “One day I noticed that my reserves were depleted. I did not wish to die once the life I was spending ran its course. I went out. I killed a man. I took his eyes and the years he would have had left to live, and when those years threatened to run out, I repeated the process. About a thousand years ago, I fell into the habit of storing them up in advance. That is why I always kill so many at one time.”
“You kill innocents to prolong your own existence. That is barbaric!”
“So it is.” It didn’t seem like that bothered him. “I care about myself above anyone else. That I live from the deaths of others is not something that concerns me. Was that your last question?”
“Will you kill again?”
“I have collected enough life to last me the next few centuries,” he replied, pointing at a neat and dust-free row of identical glass flasks. “I shouldn’t need to kill again too soon. And before you ask, I still have no intention of killing you.”
“Why not?” she asked it distractedly, because her attention was more on the flasks than on him.
There were twenty five of them, and inside, fifty disembodied and — compared with the contents of every other container — disturbingly fresh-looking eyes. Their freshness wasn’t the only way in which they differed from the older pairs, though. The more she focused on them, the more she became convinced that there was something else about them. An impression, a whispering ghost of a feeling that they were alive, whereas all the others felt spent.
As her own eyes travelled over them, Rose focused on the pair on the far left for a second too long. Something started whirring inside her head, threatening to become a headache.
She frowned. She’d thought it was just the killer’s eyes that were a problem, as she had never had similar issued with anyone else’s. Now, however, she wasn’t too sure. Unfamiliar images — memories — started surfacing in her mind, coming from seemingly nowhere.
A strange woman’s thigh, breasts, hair. A bloodstained apron. The soothing, rhythmic sound of a meat cleaver going down and up and down. A quick, messy end in an alley.
Rose shook her head, ridding herself of the lingering ache, and tried to tell herself it was just her imagination.
“Excuse me?” she stammered, snapping out of it and realizing that she’d lost time while the killer talked to her.
“I was telling you that I still have no intention of killing you, the reason being that you interest me.”
Rose couldn’t imagine why. She was not, at least as far as she was aware, a remarkably interesting person.
Then she remembered that he probably meant he found her interesting to lay. He’d said it himself: women who refused him were as rare as to be shocking. If that was indeed it, then it was a tragic irony that her attempts to preserve her tattered virtue were the exact thing that made him so determined to have her.
“I have no other questions,” she said. Then she took notice of what she’d said. “At the moment.”
It was too late to fix her mistake, though. He was already advancing, a dangerous gleam in his ey—
She had focused too long, again….
Pain blossomed from within her forehead, spreading like an exploding star, stark and deep and hot as fire. She staggered, blinded by the intensity of it, and felt a surge of inconvenient relief when he put his arms around her and lifted her from the ground. She didn’t dare to look up. Her brain was a mess of misfiring sparks and images that didn’t belong in it. Images of murders and lovemaking and travels and life, more life than one person had any right to use.
Images of him.
She was laid down on cool tiles. The killer had carried her some distance while she had her eyes closed, so she had no idea what she would see once she opened them, which she did not want to do just now.
He began to take off her shoes. Only then did she decide to sit up and protest, and was taken aback once she saw that contrary to her suspicions, they were not in the room with the bed. They were back beside the pool, although the water inside of it had turned warmer and lacking in either plants or fish. It bubbled, even.
She shot him a questioning look. He grinned.
“I answered your questions. Have you changed your mind about paying the price?”
She wondered what he’d do if she gave him an affirmative answer. Now that the moment drew closer, she found herself remembering the times she’d been spanked at the orphanage more vividly, and that same vividness made her feel queasy. On one hand, there were no children there to laugh at her. On the other hand, there was nothing preventing him from creating a few if he so chose.
Whatever he’d interpreted her silence as, it encouraged him to proceed with the removal of her shoes. Rose pulled her knees together under her chin as soon as he was done, hoping to delay him another precious second. She was mightily surprised when instead of grabbing hold of her and turning her over his lap then and there, he walked off towards the pool.
He took off his own shoes, along with everything he was wearing above his waist, positioned himself in a way that made every muscle of his body spring into flawless definition, and jumped in, disappearing under the steaming surface.
Rose was left sitting on the tiles, with only the smallest inkling of what was going on and an incomprehensible feeling of abandonment making itself at home in her chest. This latest turn of events was both disquieting and displeasing. She’d only wanted a few seconds of reprieve. Not a full minute, or the heap of unsureness that came along with it. At least when he’d claimed to want to spank her she knew what she was in for.
At the present, she was not so sure.
“Uhm,” she said, once he emerged, wiping his wet hair from his face. The sight made her heart race, and turned thinking into a scrambled game of catching snatches of consciousness, which she desperately tried to squeeze together into something resembling sense.
He was devastatingly attractive. He had a room full of eyes of murdered people. He had tried to please her with beautiful scenery. He could be a foulmouthed scoundrel when the mood struck him. He thought she was interesting and beautiful. He didn’t care at all for the lives of others, or whether he hurt them in a way that wouldn’t affect him in turn.
He had been inside her. He had been inside her!
She was surely going to burn in Hell.
“Join me.” His voice was polite, inquisitive even, but the same couldn’t be said of the way he beckoned her with his finger. The latter was all command, and promised unpleasant consequences in the event it was met with disobedience. “The water is warm, and I know for a fact that it is still winter where you are.”
Both things were true enough. Rose could feel the hot, moist air rise from the pool where she sat, just as she could feel her skin — if she paid enough attention and tried to distance herself from the dream’s events with great effort — shiver from a gust of wind that had snuck in through the badly isolated window. If the pool had been empty, she
would be in it already.
Unfortunately, it contained him.
“Uhm,” she said again.
“Rose . . .” Now his voice had turned threatening too. She shuffled forward, without thinking, and then stood tittering on the edge of the pool, unable to take the final leap. He swam up to her and rested his hand inches away from her left ankle, not touching, but making his meaning clear. He’d strike as soon as she moved anywhere but in. “Do not make me wait too much.”
“I refuse to allow you to seduce me,” she told him, before adding, for accurateness’ sake: “Again.”
“My only intention is to fulfil our deal.”
Not with that smile and in a pool and without a shirt, it wasn’t.
“I will join you,” she conceded, seeing as she lacked a choice in the matter. At least she felt wiser about his intentions this time around. Not wise enough to avoid every single one of his traps, but wise enough to spot the major ones at least. “I shall keep my dress on, though.”
“By all means.”
She dipped her toe in first. The warmth that swallowed it was both searing and delicious, so she submerged the rest of her foot with considerably less hesitation. He watched her progress with a slight smile playing on his lips. She blushed once it dawned on her that he wasn’t smiling out of amusement, or not only out of amusement. He was smiling because her hesitant mannerisms and concerned, vaguely frightened puckering of lips pleased him on some deep, dark level.
He could go to Hell.
She jumped in, and the water closed up around her. It was shallow enough for her to stand with her head above the surface, but only just, and it caressed every part of her in ways the damp heat of the kitchen at the bakery had never been able to. In fact, Rose couldn’t recall having experienced anything similar before. Mrs. Cross believed in the sanctity of cleanliness, and did her best to make sure her charges washed regularly, but her belief in warm water being a necessary part of the process was not as strong.
“Here.” The killer approached, placed a hand on her arm and guided her towards the pool wall. It wasn’t the most untoward thing he’d done to her to date, but there was a peculiar sort of intimacy about it. Rose padded along awkwardly, trying her best to convince herself that it was the omnipresent warmth that was making a limp, pulpy mess out of her.
Her feet touched an elevation on the bottom — steps, which she climbed gratefully. Now the water came to just above her waist, and her freedom to move was much improved. When she turned around, she found him giving her, or more accurately, her chest, his full, undivided attention.
Rose looked down to ascertain what the matter was, and blanched. As delightful as she found the water to be, it had just betrayed her. Or rather, her dress had. The soaked fabric adhered to her every curve like a fine layer of paint, and right now, its most prominent feature was her nipples, which stood to attention like they’d been called upon.
Squeaking, she turned and sank back in the water, leaving only half of her face above the surface and her hair floating around it like strange, reddish seaweed.
He roared with laughter and stepped around her. Rose glared, certain that her inhibitions must seem unbearably ridiculous to him. He had after all seen more, much more of her. That had been last night, though. Last night, when she believed she had made him up to satisfy desires she couldn’t name, let alone entertain in real life.
It still irked her that being real hadn’t stopped him from being up to the task.
One of his hands disappeared beneath the surface. She looked down, but the water was so fogged by its own heat that it turned out impossible to follow it through the shifting milky-white mass. She knew where it had gone a moment later, however, because by then it was on her. She straightened a bit, just enough for her mouth to peek out above water, and enunciated, clearly, ‘No!’
He left his hand where it was — her left breast — but gave her a puzzled look.
“I would have thought that our agreement that I would not touch you had been rendered void by the events of last night. You enjoyed it well enough, at the time.”
“I didn’t know you were real when I allowed that.” She could see by his expression that he still didn’t understand why that was in any way relevant, so she slid into the same tone of voice she used on thick-headed customers who were unable or unwilling to comprehend price changes. “There is a difference between a sin of thought and a sin of deed. One is forgivable if atoned for. The other is far more serious. I committed it once without realizing I was doing so, which makes it a tad forgivable, but should I commit it knowingly, I—”
“Is that it, then?” he interrupted. “The root of all your objections is your fear of sinning?”
“Yes, I suppose.” She thought about it some more. “In a sense.”
One of his nails started drawing a spiral around her nipple, approaching it more with each turn. Rose couldn’t use cold as an excuse for the shivers the motion triggered, so she suppressed them as best she could. He looked like he was mulling over her response. Hopefully he would stop once he had grasped her point.
She squashed the guilty part of her that hoped that wouldn’t happen too soon.
“Your god is not my god,” he said, at last. Rose’s eyebrows jumped up, and if she were the sort of person who went around throwing oaths, she would have unleashed one right there. It couldn’t be enough that he was a murderer and the taker of her virginity, he also had to be a heathen? “However, any god who would give his people the desires you have and demand that they keep them under wraps? Is not the kind of god I deem worthy of worship.”
“That is not how—”
He swallowed the fledgling theological discussion, and did so quite literally. The rest of her sentence fell directly inside his mouth, and his tongue went past her lips, because she’d failed to close her own mouth in time.
And then she was done for, as she knew from the start she would be once he properly got his hands on her. The notions of Heaven and Hell slid into the background, becoming faded and grey, and the jumble of emotions she’d desperately tried to keep locked down jumped to the front of her mind, eager to take over.
He encircled her waist with his arms and pulled her closer, up another step, so that they were roughly at the same level. A voice in the back of her head kept screaming, trying to call her attention to the fact that although it was all very well that she wanted to damn herself, couldn’t she at least have chosen to do so with someone more reputable, like a beggar or a thief or a someone afflicted with leprosy? The rest of her was far too busy noticing the fact that he didn’t appear to be wearing anything below his waist.
He pushed her against the solid pool wall, hard enough to cause her head to spin. Rose hadn’t exactly stopped objecting to what he was doing. In point of fact, if he were to relinquish his claim on her mouth for more than a second, she would be glad to tell him just how much she objected, which she suspected to be the very reason why he wasn’t doing so. But oh, he could kiss! She was capable of denying everything else, but not something that was such an immediate concern.
Although not the slightest bit as concerning as what he was doing with his hands.
The dress he’d put on her might be the prettiest she had ever seen, but the quality of the fabric and workmanship that had gone into it left something to be desired.
It tore easily under his fingers, like it was made out of paper. Scarce seconds ago, Rose had been aghast at the thought of letting him glimpse her breasts while they were covered, but his proximity, his relentless teasing of her lips, his clever tongue, had a way of making her forget her shame.
She whimpered loudly as soon as they came up for air. She’d been wrong, so wrong. He was nothing like an infection, more like a drug. Something addictive, that she could will herself to stay away from when she wasn’t actively being tempted, but made her fold fast and hard as soon as it was pressed into her hands. The sensation was not unlike that of falling.
“I thought . . . y
ou said . . .” Words were difficult all of a sudden. She looked at him. He was breathing rapidly and filled with obvious tension, and hanging on her every word, waiting for another denial he could squash. “You were about to spank me, wasn’t that right? Not . . . this.”
“We will have plenty of time for everything.” He caressed her wet hair and ran his fingers through it, sorting out the messy tangles, and God help her, she was leaning into his hand, as if he’d just said something that put all her fears to rest. “Of course, if you wish me to start with—”
“Nooooo!”
“Well then.” He whirled her around, pressed her belly against the tiled wall and bit her earlobe before speaking into it, very softly: “There is another thing that I would like to try. However, it will require you to trust me.” An impossible request. There was no trusting him. The very nature of his present actions made him untrustworthy. “Either that, or your permission to do with you as I like no matter how much you might object later.”
Was it possible that he didn’t know that was precisely what he had been doing all along?
“Will it harm me?” She was glad for the shake in her voice. If she had sounded anything resembling eager, she would have died of humiliation on the spot.
“Not as much as it will please you. Or so I hope.”
A piece of Rose’s earlier fear returned. No matter how the killer had behaved towards her in the short time they had been acquainted, he had exuded confidence in everything he did to her, and now she was looking for that confidence in lieu of a safety net, and could not find it.
Its absence concerned her. She was already at war with herself about how to reply to him — reason said she ought to tell him to bugger off, the pulsing world of madness between her legs urged her to thrust herself into his hands no matter how frightening the prospect might seem. She didn’t need his uncertainty to muddle things further.
The Darker Side of Love (A Dark Erotica Boxed Set) Page 47