“Your pleasure,” she tells me, working her way closer to the apex of my thighs, “is the most divine thing I have ever known. I would gladly bring an apocalypse upon the men who taught you otherwise.”
I draw in a ragged breath, chest heaving. She reaches out, cupping one heavy breast in her hand, fingers grazing my nipple. I moan, the pleasure singing out in every part of my body intensifying its chorus. And then—andthen—when I think she cannot possibly pull more wonder from me, the Lupa Nox brings her mouth to that hidden place between my legs. That place meant only for my bridegroom. A place for my husband to enter for pleasure, a place for children to be summoned to this world and into the Church.
Instead, it is Nyatrix who claims me.
She starts off slow, drowning me in kisses, but a wolf is always hungry. A bell, an annum, a millennium—then my thighs are draped over her shoulders, her hands gripping my bottom as the Lupa Nox feasts on me.
“Claim your pleasure, Ophelia,” the Lupa Nox purrs, looking up at me, those thunderstorm eyes meeting mine. “Come apart. Say my name.”
I could deny her, I know. But it is unimaginable—that would be the true heresy, my heart cries out, the only real sin in this world.
So I take what she offers me willingly, what I thought I would never have, what I thought I had long ago forsaken. I drive my hips into her mouth, panting, and fall into her storm. And when I emerge on the other side, I slip back into the water, where she cradles me in her arms.
“My perfect girl,” Nyatrix whispers, stroking my damp hair, holding me aloft in the steaming bath. My back presses against her chest, her muscular biceps around my shoulders. “You captivate me.”
I turn my head, resting my cheek against her collarbone, and close my eyes. The last time someone held me in the water like this, I was a young thing, submitting to the Baptisma and its Mysterium-blessed font. Then, the person I trusted—one of the scholae nuns—let me go. Opened her arms and watched me slip away, plunging deeper and deeper into the water to meet my fate.
The Lupa Nox, I know, would never. She would never let me fall, watch me drown, leave me to meet my fate alone. If we fall, I am sure, we will fall together—just as we did from that parapet at the edge of Lumendei.
I lift my face from her chest, tilting my chin back to look up at her. “Nyatrix,” I whisper. “Could you show me how to do those things to you?”
She shifts away to meet my gaze. My pulse pounds as her eyes search mine—a thunderstorm about to break open.
“Is that what you want?” she asks, smoothing a lock of hair away from my face. My pulse pounds as her moonlight-slickshoulders catch my attention, just barely enough illumination to see the asphodel flower blooming across her chest, her dark, pebbled nipples, the sword of a stem running down her hard, muscular stomach.
“More than anything,” I whisper. “I want to worship you.”
“I think,” she replies, one hand tightening around the curve of my waist, “there would be no going back, then. I think that might mean forsaking your god entirely.”
Desire races through my veins, hot as a hearth-fire. “So be it.”
Chapter 43
And so it goes, for days—daylight bells spent poring over the old texts Agrippina brings to our hidden chamber, the nights absorbed in Nyatrix, tumbling into the wide, open jaws of a black wolf with every moonrise.
When I’m working, she does stretches and drills, or works on a bracelet made of Argento’s hair. The braid style is complicated, and when I ask her about it, she tells me it’s taken many anni to learn. It fascinates me that a warrior as powerful and useful as Nyatrix finds the time for leisure; such a thing would never be permitted in Lumendei. All my life, leisure has been equated with laziness—or worse, wickedness.
In the evenings, she reads to me fromMare Regina, too. It’s a story about a woman pirate—a sailor of sorts, commanding one of Sylva’s forgotten ships, taking what she wants for her and her loyal crew. It’s strange; I grew up around so many books. I never thought them rare. But Liminalians adore these common clothbound tales, sharing them on a strict schedule. Lumendei scholae taught me that lawlessness ruled here. But these people have their rules, their morals. And they are willing to suffer for them, too, it seems.
“No, I think I’m going to figure it out,” I assure Agrippina one morning, tearing a round of salted bread in half. Steam curls lazily from the teapot’s mouth at my left, reminding me of hot springs—and the woman I’ve been entering their waters beside.
“No one’s been able to translate these papyri for many anni,” Agrippina says gently, watching me with a guarded gaze. “It would certainly be quite a boon to know more of what our ancestors held sacred. But there are no expectations, Ophelia.”
I shrug her off, fixated on a line in a new papyrus she’s brought me just this morning. Here in Liminalia, hidden deep in the Conclaves, my mind feels clearer, sharper, stronger—more capable than in Lumendei, somehow. No cloying words from Renault, no unsettling threats from Sergio, no incense from the Morning Devotions tickling my nose until my head hurts. Perhaps I’m a fool, but I feel in my bones I’m capable of translating these difficult papyri.
Many of the Cult’s fellows with a knowledge of the older languages died in the Tithing Massacre, leaving the Cult with a host of literature no one could understand. Lost language, it seems, is a shared theme between the Host and the Sepulchyre. So many bells I have spent in the Sanctum beside Renault, focused on uncovering the art of shipbuilding. It transfixed me for many anni, the idea of being able to find a world beyond Sylva, a place waiting out there on the wide seas where I might belong.
Instead, I birthed my own tiny world in the ancient halls of the Conclaves, with Agrippina and Nyatrix and the ever-present ghost of my mother. It is folly, surely, but I feel her here, as though some part of her still walks among the living, guiding me gently toward what I might need to know. Childish thoughts, and yet I let myself have them.
“Where did you find this one?” I ask Agrippina, unrolling the papyrus further. The others she’s brought me are transcribed,illuminated with gold leaf and lovely lettering. This one features scratched-out words and abandoned lines, written in what looks like a rushed hand, a date indicating it’s nearly one hundred anni old inscribed at the top.
Agrippina pauses, leaning back in the chair. A rare stream of pure sunlight breaks through the lingering clouds of Liminalia, highlighting her expression—all the lines in her face deepened, her lips pressed together.
“Your mother was working on this one,” she says finally, her gaze darting away as she smooths her linen skirts. “Just before the massacre.”
My heart leaps into my throat. “Do you know what she was thinking? Are there any notes? Why didn’t you show me this one immediately?”
At the far end of the room, Nyatrix rises from the settee and stalks toward us. Agrippina glances her way and then looks back at me, swallowing hard. “It’s a colloquial form of Old Ceremonia, your mother thought,” she explains. Her hands shake in her lap. “She was obsessed with it. We found it in an ancient section of the Conclaves that has long since flooded. It’s unlike the others, as you can see, and it seemed to have been intentionally preserved, purposefully hidden. I . . . She never translated a shred of it, not for all her incredible intellect, in the four or five anni she worked on it.”
