Chapter 14: Volume 1- [ - 14 ]
The words were quiet. Conversational, almost. The kind of tone one uses when discussing the weather over tea. And that, somehow, made them worse.
"If you lie to me again, Martha, I am going to kill you. And I want you to understand — truly understand — that killing you would not be the most inconvenient thing I do this week."
Martha’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. The tears streamed freely now, cutting channels through the dried residue still clinging to her cheeks, and she pressed herself against the wall as though she could pass through it if she pushed hard enough.
"My lord — my lord, I am like a mother to you — I have cared for you, I have stayed when everyone else — I only came here because the knight — he said he would hurt me if I did not help him — I was forced, I was—"
"Shut up."
The words dropped like stones into still water. Martha’s mouth snapped closed.
"If you are really like my mother," Caelum said, stepping over the knight’s body without looking down, "then let me suck your boobs."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing Martha had ever heard.
"I — what?"
"You heard me." He was closer now. Close enough that she could smell the mineral water on his skin, could feel the heat radiating from his recently bathed body. "If you are my mother, then I want to drink. I want the milk. Give it to me."
’Milk — he is — the boy has gone mad. He has completely lost his mind. The stress, the loneliness, the — it has broken something inside him. I need to get out. I need to—’
He grabbed her dress.
The uniform tore with a sound like tearing paper — the neckline ripping downward, the fabric splitting along the seams that had been straining for months under the pressure of her generous chest. Her breasts spilled free — heavy, pale, massive, the kind of breasts that belonged on a fertility statue rather than a living woman, each one larger than his head, capped with wide pink nipples that were already darkening at the tips in the cool air.
Martha cried out. Her hands flew to cover herself, but Caelum caught her wrists — one in each hand — and pinned them against the wall above her head with a strength that she had not known he possessed.
"LORD — suck — please —"
She was babbling. The words had lost all coherence, fragments of pleading and shock tumbling from her lips in no order. Caelum tilted his head, studying her face with an expression that was — she realized with a chill — not madness at all. It was calculation. Cold, patient, amused calculation, wearing the mask of emotional devastation like a man wearing a costume to a party he had already decided to leave early.
"You betrayed me," he said, and now his voice carried the trembling weight of genuine hurt — performed so perfectly that Martha, even in her terror, felt a twist of guilt somewhere beneath the fear. "I trusted you. I gave you everything. And you were going to rob me and leave me to die in this empty house."
"My lord, I — I was not — I would never—"
"You were." His grip tightened on her wrists. "I heard you. Every thought. Every greedy, contemptuous, patronizing thought. ’Fool. Idiot. Pathetic boy.’ That is what you think of me. That is what you think of the lord who fed you and housed you and called you family."
’He heard — how could he hear — that is not possible. People cannot hear thoughts. He is guessing. He must be guessing. But how — the accuracy — every word—’
"Everything you think," Caelum repeated, leaning closer, his breath warm against her ear, "I hear. Every word. Every cruel, self-satisfied little monologue you run in that scheming head of yours. So I will ask you one more time — and I recommend you choose your next action very carefully — are you my mother, or are you my enemy?"
Martha’s body shook. A sob escaped her — genuine, raw, stripped of all performance. The wall was cold against her bare back. Her torn dress hung from her shoulders. Her breasts, freed and heavy, rose and fell with each ragged breath, the nipples stiff from the air and from something else, something she refused to name.
’I am going to die. He is going to kill me. This boy — this monster wearing a boy’s face — he is going to kill me in this treasury and no one will ever know—’
"Wrong answer," Caelum said, and released her wrists.
She slumped. He caught her — one arm around her waist, drawing her against him, her bare breasts pressing against his chest through the thin towel, her face pressed against his shoulder. He held her the way one holds a crying child — firmly, securely, with the careful strength of someone who could crush but chooses not to.
"Shh," he murmured into her hair. "Shh. I am not going to kill you. Not tonight. Not if you listen."
She listened. She had no choice. Her body had gone boneless against him, her resistance emptied by shock and terror and the strange, disorienting warmth of his skin against hers.
"Here is what is going to happen," he said, his voice low, intimate, almost tender. "You are going to sleep. And when you wake up, we are going to have a conversation about your future. A ’real’ conversation. Not the performances you have been giving me."
He pressed something to her neck — his thumb, she thought, a pressure point — and the world went black.
Martha woke on a bed.
Not her narrow cot in the servant’s quarters — a real bed, the one in the lord’s private chambers, with its heavy curtains and feather mattress. The room was dark. Night had fallen. A single candle burned on the nightstand, casting a low amber glow across the ceiling.
She was lying on her back. Her torn uniform had been removed and replaced with a thin sleeping shift that clung to her skin. She could feel the fabric against every inch of her body — could feel it with a sensitivity that was wrong, too intense, as though her skin had been stripped of a layer of armor it did not know it was wearing. The air itself felt like a touch. The fabric of the shift felt like hands.
’What did he do to me?’
"Heat," she whispered. "My skin — everything is — it feels—"
"I oiled you."