“This may hurt, Ashara,” he warned, lining himself up to my core. “I wish it would not, but it might. I promise the sting will give way to pleasure if you justbreathe. I will go as slow as I’m able.”
Returning my gaze to his, I let him see the heady, cloying desire there. Wetting my lips, I rose on my elbows to press a single, chaste kiss to his mouth.
He parted me with the head of him, quickly finding the point where we would lose ourselves in each other. Pushing harder, I opened for him, his tip ghosting the source of my aching, insatiable want.
Just as he started to stretch me, the boom of slamming doors thundered through the chamber.
“To your knees!” a brittle, flustered voice barked. “His Holine—”
“Laurels, to your feet,” another voice commanded, harder than stone.
Demetri froze, chest heaving, his length fractionally buried inside me.
“Now!”
Teeth bared, Demetri withdrew, tucking in his shirt and buckling his belt with a contemptuous tenacity. Snapping my legs shut, heat scorched my face. I wrestled with my skirts, letting Demetri help me to my feet, finding most of the laurels already on theirs.
“Light the torches!” Paxiams rushed to collect the burnt sconces, rekindling them and casting light over the sea of flustered laurels.
Some were even more dishevelled than I, their clothes on backwards, hair wild. Mine must have resembled a thundercloud, tangled and rumpled from the floor. Others bore tear-streaked faces, their cheeks flushed purple and eyes bloodshot.
Struggling to right my neckline, my gaze drifted to a mesh barrier now angled towards me, framed by the doors. Atop it, stood three jutting points, their edges glinting in the fresh sconce light.
I had the sudden urge to vomit two chalices’ worth of wine all over the cushions.
The Butcher of Dendra.
“You stand accused, laurels,” he announced, helm fixed upon me. “A druid has been found dead in the templum.” There were teeth to every word. “Murdered.”
Chest rising in shuddering swells, both fists white-knuckled at my sides.
“Someone amongst you has done this, and that someone will be found.”
Chapter eleven
Ashara
The Heathen
Those heathen few whohath forsaken the Blood God, provoke Him unto incandescent rage, its only temperament a rope fusedby a Druid’s whip and a ream of pits’ yarn. -11:43-4 - Book of Dendralis
The chamber filled with whispers, most of them lamentations concerning the wrath of the Blood God.His faithful servant. A druid.Murdered!Skin broiling under the attention of the Butcher’s veil, I broke his stare to glance at Demetri. The sight of him turned my stomach anew. His expression was guarded, unusually so, face blank as if we were back in the chappellum pews, held hostage by one of Capriche’s sermons.
But hiseyes…
Ensnared on the druid, the bark-brown of them had darkened to coal.
Splaying each fist, I smeared two clammy palms down the length of my skirts. Every inch of me feltsticky: hair clinging to my brow, thighs tacky. The feel of him lingered, a phantom between my legs. I returned to the Butcher, to his crown of jagged knives and pauldron-clad shoulders, a crimson robe toga’d over his chest like a great swathe of blood. He fondled the hilt of a sword at his belt, the slow drag of his large, gloved fingers so like Demetri’s, I blazed.
Still, he stared. At me. At Demetri. At us both.
“All laurelian males,” he declared, voice grinding against the Ovidian walls, “are to follow me.”
I forgot myself alongside the rest, mouths opening, only to snap shut the instant the paxiams lowered their spears, the protests dying in our throats at the glint of their points. I reached for Demetri, hunting for the feel of his fingers through the flare of his sleeves.
When our hands caught and knitted, I let myself breathe.
Let them tear him from me. Let them try. Penance be damned.
