Chapter five You taste divine
892 Words
Lucille POV
I groaned as I felt pain hit me the moment I regained consciousness. I thought I was dead. But the pain I was feeling suggested otherwise. A dull ache in my stomach made me catch my breath in fear. I only felt calm after feeling the warm pulse telling me my baby was still there.
I opened my eyes, slowly almost scared of what I’ll find.
The ceiling above me was carved from dark stone. The light in the room was red and low and seemed to come from nowhere. The scent of this place was unfamiliar. It seems like I was very far from home. That wasn’t a good thing.
Where am I?
I tried to sit up. I made it halfway before my arms gave out, and I sank back into the pillows with a small embarrassing sound. That was when I realised I wasn’t alone.
Someone was sitting in a chair by the window.
He hadn’t moved when I made the sound. He had been watching me. For how long, I didn’t know. He was looking at me straight in the eyes without blinking.
He was…
I don’t know how to explain what he was.
I remember thinking, foolishly, that if an angel and a devil had loved each other and had a child, this would be the child. And I remember thinking, more foolishly still, that whatever heaven had made him had cast him out. Not for being wicked. But for being too perfect to keep.
His hair was black. His skin was pale, the kind of pale that didn’t need the sun. His mouth was a long, hard line that I could not look at directly for more than a second at a time, it was so soft and pink. I wanted to bite it. His eyes were not red. I had been afraid, for some reason, that they would be red. They were a colour I had no word for. Dark. Very dark. And steady on mine.
He didn’t speak.
So I did.
“Where…” My voice came out cracked. I tried again. “Where am I?”
“You are in my chambers.”
His voice was lower than I expected. Quieter too.
“Your…”
“You are in the palace of the black valley.” He let the words sit for a moment, watching my face. “You crossed our border last night, little wolf. You are in the demon lands.”
The room tipped sideways.
I sat up. I don’t know how. My arms were shaking and my head was ringing, but I sat up anyway. My eyes were already moving. Window. Door. The second door at the far wall. The heavy curtain behind his chair that might lead to another room. How high was the window? How far was the door? How far… how far…
“There isn’t one.”
I stopped. I looked back at him.
He hadn’t moved from the chair.
“There is no door in this palace that leads to the outside without passing six others first. There is no window in this wing that is not watched. There is no road out of the black valley that a wolf on foot survives.” He said it like it meant nothing. “I am telling you this once, so you don’t waste your strength on it. There is no such thing as escape from here. Do you understand me?”
I couldn’t answer.
“If you want to live, little wolf… and I am guessing, because you ran from those men last night, that you do… then you will keep your head down. You will do as you are told. You will speak to no one without my permission. You will eat what is brought to you and sleep where you are put. You will not draw the attention of anyone else in this house. Because if you do…” his voice didn’t rise. If anything, it dropped. “Even I will not be able to save you. Do you understand?”
I made myself nod.
“Say it.”
“I… I understand.”
“Good.”
He stood. And sat on the edge of the bed.
“Give me your hand.”
“Please…”
“Your hand.”
I gave him my hand.
He turned it over in his. My wrist was raw where the rope had been. I hadn’t even remembered the rope until I saw the mark, a red ring running the whole way around. He looked at it for a long moment with no expression on his face at all.
Then he bent his head.
His mouth touched the inside of my wrist.
I felt his tongue, slow, drag once across the broken skin, and I made a sound I had not made before in my life. The pleasure from him doing that was overwhelming. Because the wound…
The wound was gone.
I stared at my own wrist. I turned it. I turned it again. The skin was smooth. There wasn’t even a mark left to show where the rope had been.
He lifted his head.
His mouth was very close to mine, still bent over my hand. I could smell him now. Clean. Cold. Like a rose buried in ice.
“You taste divine,” he said.
- Writer
