Chapter 13: Volume 1- [ - 13 ]
I rose from the tub, water streaming from my body, and reached for a towel. Behind me, Martha stood frozen, her face and hand and apron matted with my cum, staring at nothing, her internal voice a static-filled silence that could not quite form words.
’What the — what — he just — on my face — that was — what the hell?’
I wrapped the towel around my waist, tucking it securely, and turned to her with a gentle smile. She looked — there was no other word for it — wrecked. Not in the way Elira had been wrecked, flushed and trembling and hungry. Martha looked like a woman who had been hit by a cart and was still lying on the road wondering what had just happened. Her hair had come loose from its bun. Her apron was stained. A thick glob of cum clung to her lower lip, and she had not yet wiped it away, perhaps because she had not yet registered that it was there.
"You may use the tub after me, if you like," I said kindly. "The water is still warm."
And I left her standing there, open-mouthed and dripping, in the steam-filled bathing chamber of a dying house on a cliff above a grey sea.
The hallway was quiet. The evening had settled over the manor like a held breath, the windows dark, the torches unlit, the only light coming from the thin moonlight that filtered through the cracks in the shutters. Martha’s footsteps echoed off the stone as she walked, her internal monologue a churning river of grievance and greed.
’That idiot. That disgusting, perverted, brainless idiot. On my face. On my ’face.’ If he were not the key to the treasury — if he had not already given me—’
She touched her cheek. The cum had dried to a thin, tight film that pulled at her skin when she moved her mouth. She had washed, briefly, with the used bathwater — a humiliation she intended to add to the long list of grievances she was compiling against the young lord, a list she would never present to anyone but would treasure privately as proof that she had earned every coin she was about to steal.
’Forgive him,’ she told herself, smoothing her uniform, retying her hair. ’Forgive him, because tonight you take everything, and then this house and its foolish lord can rot together.’
She walked through the hallway, her thick hips swaying with renewed purpose, the iron key heavy and warm in her apron pocket. At the junction where the servant’s corridor met the main hall, she paused and called out softly.
"Young sir? Sir Aldric?"
A young knight — one of the capital-assigned garrison, a man in his early twenties with a soft jaw and softer morals — emerged from the guardroom, scratching his jaw. He had been dozing. "What is it, Mistress Martha?"
"The young lord has given me access to the treasury," she said, keeping her voice low, her tone conspiratorial. "I need someone to help carry the count. Strong arms. You understand."
The knight raised an eyebrow. "He gave you the treasury key? Just like that?"
"Just like that," Martha confirmed, and her smile was the smile of a woman who had spent twenty years in service and had finally found the lord stupid enough to make it all worthwhile. "The fool trusts me."
The knight snorted. "Incredible."
"Incredible," Martha agreed. "Now come. Let us see what there is to see."
They walked together through the darkened hallway, their footsteps synchronized — her heavy, deliberate tread and his lighter, curious stride. The treasury was located in the eastern wing, behind a heavy oak door reinforced with iron bands, at the end of a corridor that smelled of damp stone and disuse.
"Do you really think he is that foolish?" the knight asked as they walked, his voice carrying the kind of disbelief that is not quite disbelief because it is too busy calculating profit. "I mean — the treasury? To a maid?"
"Indeed," Martha said. "Indeed, he is. Why would he not? He thinks I am his mother. He thinks I care for him. The boy would hand me his own heart if I asked him to cut it out."
The knight laughed. Martha laughed. Their laughter echoed off the stone walls, bright and cruel and utterly confident.
They reached the treasury door. Martha produced the key, fitted it to the lock, and turned. The mechanism clunked heavily — old iron, reluctant, then yielding. The door swung inward.
The treasury was small, windowless, lit by a single candle Martha had brought. The light caught the contents and threw them into warm, glittering relief: stacks of gold coins in wooden trays, a strongbox containing jewelry — a woman’s necklace, a signet ring too large for the current lord’s fingers, two silver candlesticks — and a small leather pouch of uncut gemstones that had been in the Veyne family for four generations.
The knight’s eyes widened. Martha’s eyes widened.
’Look at it. All of it. Enough to live comfortably for five years, maybe more, if I am frugal. And it is mine. All mine, because a sad, lonely boy handed me the key and asked me to wash his—’
She took a step forward. Her hand reached out toward the nearest stack of coins.
And then the light shifted.
Not the candlelight — something else. A shadow that should not have been there, falling across the doorway from behind them. Martha turned, the motion slow, her instincts screaming something her conscious mind had not yet processed.
The knight behind her had stopped breathing.
He had stopped breathing because a brick — a single, heavy, rough-fired clay brick from the collapsed garden wall — had just connected with the back of his skull with the wet, dense, sickening sound of stone meeting bone.
Martha’s eyes found him — found the knight, Sir Aldric, the young man who had been laughing with her three seconds ago — as he crumpled. His knees buckled first, then his torso folded, and he fell forward onto the treasury floor with a sound like a sack of grain dropped from a height. Blood spread beneath his head in a dark, widening pool. His eyes were open. His mouth was open. Nothing behind either.
Behind him, filling the doorway, silhouetted against the dark hallway, stood a figure in a towel.
Martha screamed.
The sound tore from her throat — raw, high, animal — and she stumbled backward, her heel catching on the edge of a coin tray, sending gold scattering across the floor with a bright, incongruous musical clatter. She hit the wall. Her hands flew to her face. Her eyes, already wet, flooded with tears that she could not have stopped if she tried.
"No — stop — STOP—"
The figure stepped into the treasury. Into the candlelight. The towel was wrapped around his waist, knotted loosely, his chest bare and damp, his ash-grey hair hanging in loose strands across his forehead. His amber eyes caught the candle flame and held it, and in that light they looked less like eyes and more like the heated points of iron being lifted from a forge.
He was smiling.
"Lord —" Martha’s voice broke. She slid down the wall, her legs giving way, her whole body trembling. The treasury key clattered from her pocket onto the stone floor. "Lord, please — I — he forced me — the knight — he made me come here — I did not want to—"
Caelum looked down at her. The smile did not waver.
"Don’t fuck with me."