by Nalini Singh
“Heard stories, we have,” the woman said, “of the far-off realms. Past the plains and the bubbling lakes, beyond the mountains of ice, on the other side of the Great Divide.”
“What do these stories say?”
The woman folded her arms, lowered her voice. “That there’s them lords that come into a man’s house and steal his daughters away. And if she be comely, his wife, too.”
Liliana gave a small, quiet nod. Murdering, forcing carnal acts on those who could not defend themselves, abusing old and young with impunity, her father’s men were monsters clothed in flesh. “Yes, I’ve heard the same.”
“Well, then,” the stall owner said, “the Guardian is plenty better than that even if we don’t like as to be in the castle too much. Ghosts there, you know.”
As Liliana followed Jissa to a stall filled with exotic spices, she couldn’t help but wonder how the man who was the Guardian had managed to retain his honor, though he lived in the Black Castle, handled evil night after night.
A memory of ghosts, watching, listening…perhaps guiding?
“—big nose.”
“Told you she isn’t his mistress.”
Jerked back to the present by the hissed comments of two passing women, Liliana felt her face begin to color. Though she wanted to run, she pretended she hadn’t heard, and waited until the women were otherwise engaged before looking at them.
Tiny and dainty and doll-like, the golden-haired one was a princess dressed in the clothes of a prosperous shopkeeper’s daughter. Her friend was taller, slender, more elegant. Lush black curls swept back from her face with shell combs, her eyes sparkled with the confidence of a woman who knew she was not only stunning, but sensually so.
“Liliana.”
She turned to Jissa. “Are there many beautiful women in the village?”
Her friend’s eyes filled with an unexpected fierceness, the rhythm of her singsong voice wiped away. “Don’t listen to those spiteful wenches. You’re the one he speaks to, not them.”
Only because, Liliana thought, her heart heavy, their parents likely didn’t allow them to consort with the Lord of the Black Castle. No, they’d only allow that when he was ready to make an offer. So she was his only choice, a big-nosed, ugly thing with a limp and no grace.
She’d always known that, been willing to swallow her pride to steal a few moments of happiness, but faced with the village women, women of beauty and sensual sophistication, women who had to have crossed his path, she realized he must know it, too.
Her heart broke with an audible crack.
STANDING ON TOP OF THE highest parapet of the Black Castle, its lord watched Liliana walking up from the village, laughing at something Jissa had said. He scowled. “Why does she laugh?”
Bard lumbered to his side, opened his mouth, sighed. It was as close as he ever came to a diatribe. The Guardian of the Abyss waited, knowing the other male had something to say, but Bard took his time; Bard always took his time, until most of the village thought him a big, dumb mute. It was to both their advantage to let that misapprehension continue.
“Women,” he said, his voice a deep rumbling thing akin to the heart of a mountain, “laugh. Jissa laughs.”
He’d never thought of Jissa as a woman. She was simply sweet Jissa, who jumped if he talked too loudly and smiled when Bard’s back was turned. He tried not to scare Jissa, but she was so timid that, sometimes, it happened by accident. Bard always looked at him with accusation in those deep, dark eyes when it did.
But Liliana… Yes, she was a woman. His body heated within the black armor as he thought of how she’d felt against him in the kitchen, all soft curves and warmth. Exploring the luscious shape of her while she was naked had become not only an erotic desire but a raking hunger. Glancing down, he flexed his fingers and watched as the armor retreated from the backs of his knuckles, coming to a stop at his wrists.
“Armor.” Bard’s bass voice. “Moved.”
“Yes.” He couldn’t touch Liliana with the armor on his hands—it might scratch her. And so it had retreated. “They’ve reached the castle gates.”
Liliana stopped and looked up right then. He was too far way to read the expression in her eyes, but there was an odd stiltedness to her walk when she began to move again, her shoulders hunched in.
There was no more laughter.
He hadn’t spoken to many women. The village ones squealed and giggled when he came near. It irritated him. When he got irritated, he scowled and scared them. He liked that—it made them keep their distance. And if they huddled as they walked, that was fine with him. But those women weren’t Liliana. “Do you see?”
Bard said nothing, his eyes on Jissa.
LILIANA MANAGED TO AVOID the Lord of the Black Castle that night only because there were too many shadows in the dungeons and he had to open the gateway to the Abyss. Ordered to lock herself in the upstairs room that had become her own, while Jissa and Bard did the same in another wing, Liliana didn’t argue. Magical energy could be highly volatile. And when it came to the energy of the Abyss, its lord was the only person who could control it.
“Where did the old lord go?” she muttered, the house shuddering with waves of magic unlike any she’d ever before felt—heavy and brutal and cold—as the gateway was opened.
When the old lord is ready to retire, a new lord is chosen.
“Oh,” she said, heart thundering where she sat on the bed. “Thank you.”
The boy was strong, already sleeping below the Black Castle.
A ripple in the air on the right-hand side of the bed, a formless face that came and went. You carry blood sorcery in your veins.
All at once she knew this ghost understood exactly what—who—she was. “I mean him no harm,” she said. “Please, you mustn’t tell him. He’s not ready.”
Silence.
Ghostly fingers across her face, cold and skeletal. She sat still, let the spirit read her. And breathed a sigh of relief when the shimmer beside the bed began to fade.
He is ours. We will protect him.
A violent pulse of magic, one that made every hair on her body stand up in alarm…and then, silence. Peace. The gateway to the Abyss was closed once again. Letting out a sigh of relief, she got off the bed and unlocked the door. But when she looked out into the corridor, she saw only absolute darkness, all the lamps having been extinguished by the waves of battering power.
She could have easily relit them, but suddenly she was tired. Tired of being her father’s daughter, tired of being ugly, tired of finding herself aching for a wonderful, powerful man who would never, could never, be hers. Turning from the door, she crawled into bed.
EVIL FOUND HER IN HER DREAMS, the Blood Sorcerer’s spidery fingers clawing at her until she bled. “You think to escape me? You are my daughter, my possession!”
Shaking, she held up her hands, backed away. “No. You have no claim on me!”
His laugh made her bones tremble, her throat lock. “I own every part of you.”
Her back hit a wall, and she looked around in panic, searching for a way out. There was nothing. She was trapped within a gleaming black box, her father’s form a cadaverous shadow that melded with the darkness.
“Now you will tell me where you are.” It was a sinister command, his nails knives that dug into her throat. “You’ll tell me or you’ll die.”
That was when she realized this was no dream. It was a spell for which her father had spilled not only innocent blood, but his own. For blood would call to blood, and his ran in her veins. If she died in this nightmare prison, she wouldn’t wake in the real world.
Calling her own magic, she tried to shove him away. But he was protected, had spilled enough blood to armor himself in it. Her power skated off the malice of him with a shrill shriek that sounded like a woman’s scream. Choking as he tightened his hold, she clawed at his wrist. Her hands came away bloody, her nails snapped off.
Darkness began to squeeze the edges of her vision, his bre
ath noxious on her face. “Where are you, dearest daughter?” Lips almost against her own, a terrible kiss. “Where do you hide?”
No. She couldn’t die. She hadn’t brought Micah home.
But her father was squeezing the life out of her, her heart a scrabbling rabbit in her chest. Lifting hands weak and trembling, she tried to pull him off once more, but her fingers slipped, slick with her own blood. No! She refused to give up, refused to surrender. Not to him, never to him. Even if—
A massive surge of power—clean, pure, potent—slammed through her veins.
Drawing it to the surface as her lungs released a final breath, she threw it at her father in a hail of razor-sharp daggers. His scream shattered the black box, sent her tumbling into the dreamscape, shards of obsidian falling around her, cutting and stabbing. Gasping, choking, she used the intoxicating power in her veins to break the final threads of his spell, falling back into reality with a jerk that had her bolting into a sitting position.
To look into the face of the Lord of the Black Castle.
His eyes burned with black, and when he shoved back her hair to bare her face to the lamp that flickered on the nightstand, she didn’t resist. “You bleed.” It was a harsh statement.
Leaving her to stride into the bathing chamber, he returned with a soft towel in hand. She raised her fingers to her throat, felt the welts, the stickiness of blood. Shocked and shaky, she didn’t protest when he put the towel to her throat with his right hand, his left tightly fisted.
Her eyes locked on that fist.
Tugging at his fingers, she felt a dark wetness. “What did you do?” She stared at the massive gash across his palm. “What did you do?”
The hand holding the towel to her neck flexed, pressed again. “You do blood sorcery.”
Shuddering, she understood. He’d seen her trapped in the nightmare, given her the surge of magic she’d needed to get herself out, his blood heady. Her own was paltry in comparison. Elden itself ran in his veins. “Thank you,” she murmured, even as she took a second towel he’d dropped on the nightstand and pressed it to his cut. “You shouldn’t waste your blood. It holds incredible power.”
The Guardian of the Abyss gave her a look filled with such fury that she froze. “So I should’ve let you die, Liliana? Is that what you would will of me?”
She’d insulted him. “No,” she said at once. “But you’re far more important than me.” Far more. “If you die, what will become of the Abyss?”
“There will be a new lord.” Anger continued to glitter in the eyes become winter-green once more. “There will never be another Liliana.”
Her heart kicked, stopped, and when it started again, it belonged to him, this Prince of Elden become Lord of the Black Castle. She couldn’t stop the trembling of her lower lip, couldn’t stop the tear that rolled down her cheek. For the second time, she was crying in front of him when she tried never, ever to betray such vulnerability.
The Guardian of the Abyss made a rough sound in the back of his throat, and then she was being scooped up and settled on his lap, against the cool chill of his armor. When he ordered her to continue keeping pressure on her wounds, she obeyed, even as she refused to let go of the hold she had around his palm.
“You’re still bleeding,” she managed to say through the tears. “I can taste the power.” It was rich and dark and tempting. So tempting. The sorcery she could do with his blood… No. She threw aside his hand and the towel at her throat to huddle into herself, horrified. “Let me go. I’m evil.” The Blood Sorcerer’s daughter, after all.
Strong fingers against her face, his arm holding her tightly in place. “The blood you taste is freely given,” he murmured in her ear. “It intoxicates.”
She shuddered, because he was right. The exquisite beauty of it ran through her veins, curled around her senses, threatening to make her a slave. “Please.”
“Have you smelled blood that is not freely given?”
She thought of her father’s tower room, of her horror as she sat bound, unable to help his victims…and then later, when he’d stolen her will, forced her to assist. “Yes.” A low, quiet word. “I was a child,” she whispered, wondering if he would believe her. “I’ve never spilled innocent blood of my own free will.”
“I know.” Fingers in her hair, massaging her skull. “What did it taste like?”
“Putrid, vile, spoiled.” She’d thrown up the first time, had had her face pushed into her own vomit as punishment. “Nothing like your blood.”
“That was because it was stolen. Do you see, Liliana?”
Oh. “Then you must not give your blood to me freely,” she admonished. “I’m apt to become drunk on it and murder you in your bed.”
A rumble against her cheek, vibrations that… He was laughing. The Lord of the Black Castle was laughing, as if she’d said the most absurd thing. So when he lowered his head and kissed her, she was too startled to do anything but part her lips under the bold thrust of his tongue.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE SHOCK OF SENSATION MADE her whimper.
He raised his head. “Do you not like that?”
It took time to find the wit to speak. “I’ve never tried it before.” Ives had attempted to kiss her, his breath foul. She’d managed to avoid that indignity, though it had cost her a broken cheekbone.
“Neither have I,” came the startling answer.
“There are women in the village who are not maidens.” And who would surely have attempted to seduce him, this sensual, dangerous creature who held her in his lap.
“They stink of fear,” was the unforgiving answer before he clamped strong fingers on her jaw. “Let’s try it again.”
The second time was just as big a shock, but she didn’t want him to stop. So she dared touch her tongue to his. He groaned, his fingers tightening on her jaw. “Again.” Licks against the roof of her mouth, his tongue stroking against hers with a sexual intensity that was utterly without restraint.
She was drowning in him, in the storm of erotic rain after a lifetime of drought. “Stop.”
“Are you sure?” That hand on her jaw turning her toward his mouth.
“No.” It felt good, his kiss, so good.
When he claimed her mouth again with that same raw energy, she shuddered, bracing her hand against the black armor that kept them from being skin to skin. It was warm now, almost like skin—and it was one sensation too many.
Breaking the intimate contact, she buried her face against his neck. Even that threatened to overwhelm her, his skin hot, his scent different. Male. Pushing against the solid wall of his chest, she scrambled out of his lap, landing in an ungainly heap on the bed, her skirts rucked up over her knees.
His eyes lingered on the exposed length of her legs.
Face filling with heat, she struggled into a sitting position to push down the fabric. “You mustn’t.”
“Why not?” A big hand closing around her ankle, tugging her forward.
She tried to pull it back. He held on. “Micah, stop.”
Time froze.
No, no, no, she thought. She couldn’t have made such an elemental error after all her hard work. “I—”
“Micah,” he murmured as if he was tasting the name. “Yes, you may call me that.”
She let out a sigh of relief. It wasn’t quite an acceptance of the identity he’d once had, but at least he hadn’t rejected it out of hand. “Will you let go of my ankle?”
He moved his fingers on her skin, just enough to send a shiver up her body. “I want another kiss.”
“You can’t simply ask for a kiss.”
“Why not?”
That stopped her. She had no answer to his question. All she knew of courtship—from what she’d seen of it among the courtiers—was that it was an intricate dance. Nobody ever said what they meant, everything being communicated through coy glances and delicate touches.
It had always seemed a horribly painful thing to her, she who had none of the feminine
graces and couldn’t effect a coy smile on her best day. “I suppose,” she said, “it’s better to be direct.”
“Good.” The hand on her ankle tugged again.
She fisted her hands in the sheets to stop herself from crawling all over him. “Just because you ask doesn’t mean I agree to it!”
Tendrils of black speared out from his eyes, beautiful and lethal. “If you didn’t like it, tell me. I’ll kiss you another way.”
Heat uncurled low in her body, so sinful and wild that she had trouble stringing together her words. “I don’t know if I want to be kissed!”
Scowling, he tightened his hold. “Why are you lying, Liliana?”
Oh, mercy. “Because you confuse me,” she blurted out. “Kissing is… I need time to get used to the idea.” That you want me even though you know about beauty, even though there are other women out there you could take to your bed.
He tugged at her ankle and, unbalanced, she fell onto her back. Gasping as he came over her, bracing his palms on either side of her head, she fought the urge to spread her thighs, cradle him with sumptuous intimacy. “I will,” he said in that gentle voice that was so effective at chilling people’s blood, “give you until tomorrow morn to get used to the idea.”
It made her shiver, but not because her blood ran cold. “I want till the morn after.” Before, she might have argued with him about the order, but now she’d learned that that wasn’t the way to get what she wanted with Micah.
“No.”
She made a mutinous face.
“Tomorrow eve.” His tone said that was his final offer.
“If I decide I don’t like kissing?” she asked, because he was big and overwhelming and made her lose all sense of self-preservation.
A slow, slow curve of his lips had her toes curling into the sheets. “Oh, you like my kiss, Liliana. I felt your tongue stroke against mine.”
“Micah!”
He tilted his head to the side, the black retreating to reveal winter-green luminous in the dark. “Am I not supposed to say that, either?”