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“Lie.”

To my right.

Dizziness gripped my head and shook it violently. I couldn’t tell one way from another, and I felt like I had been drugged. My senses were smashing into each other, spinning and tumbling over themselves, trying to piece together my surroundings where my eyes were useless.

I couldn’t, though. Nothing made sense. None of the information coming into my mind fit. It was like someone had tossed four jigsaw puzzles into the air, and I was blindly trying to shove them into place.

Silence blanketed the cell once again as I struggled to stay upright. Small whimpering pants tumbled from my trembling lips. I knew there would be punishment for being in the same room with him when he was dying, but I didn’t think that it would be something like this. Who thought of something like this? What even was this? Confusion joined the fray in my mind, and frustrated, weak tears gathered at the edges of my eyes.

Chapter 25

Hours dragged out with nothing but the sound of me struggling against the cuffs. It had probably only been mere minutes, though, before I felt the warmth of a body behind me. Fear lanced through me. Was it The Raven or someone else?

“It is just us now.”

There was still iron in his voice, but there was something else. The lack of sight sharpened my attunement to his tone. The slightest tremble of a syllable, the smallest sharpening of a pitch. I could hear it all, and the rich complexity of those five words had me in a chokehold. I could obsess over every delicious curl of the smoke in each one.

“Let me down . . .”

My voice was soft as warm butter softened further by his closeness. I wanted to melt into him. I wanted to fall into the sea of those rich words and bask in the way they lapped at my shores.

“The rules are still the same, Sóna.” Was that the first time he said my name? It was velvet to every nerve, and I had to choke back an intoxicated whimper. “The only thing that has changed is that it is just us now.”

“Is this a naughty version of truth or dare?” Was that seductress me? I didn’t realize I could ever sound so husky, so needy, so delightfully breathless. “Let me down, Raven.”

“You’re not the one in control here, Sóna.”

His voice was steady, filled with desire, just as mine was but firm.

“Stop playing games and let me down, Raven!”

“I haven’t even started playing games yet.”

I heard his teeth press to his lip and dig in, heard them grind against his flesh. I wanted to bite his lip, too. I felt his chest rise with a deep breath and his head hover just above my shoulder as if he was bowing it in prayer.

And then he was gone. The vacuum of his warmth drifted away, and I felt nothing but the void that was left in his wake.

“Who hired you to kill the King?”

There was a slight waver to his voice, the slightest weightlessness to the question as if he didn’t expect me to answer.

And I didn’t. There was no point. I had already told the truth. No one had hired me to kill the King. Even though I wanted to.

The familiar sensation of a knife found my skin. It didn’t cut, though. Not immediately. It dragged along the exposed flesh at the nape of my neck, scratching and kicking up spurs of ice in its wake. It played there, tracing arcane, unknown symbols into me before dipping down.

I imagined it, a large blade of shining steel against my golden pearl skin and small welts chasing after it. The shackles did not bite, though, even as I bit down on my lip and leaned forward to give him more access.

The jolt of the blade meeting the neck of my dress was a bolt of lightning through me. “Please . . . Raven . . . don’t—”

It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to strip me naked. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to feel his skin pressed against mine. I wanted to feel him, taste him, touch him so bad it was nearly a ball of push pins in my guts churning with need. I only had the one set of clothes, though. And I liked this outfit. Violet had given it to me, and the buttons had been crafted by my own hand as she regaled me with tales of the children she had played with before the war.

He did not listen, though, and the knife plunged down. The petals of my gown split wide like the thighs of a proverbial virgin sacrifice. Every inch or so the blade caught on my skin and sliced a shallow cat’s scratch, and I hissed with delight. Every hiss was met with a nearly unheard scratching in The Raven’s throat until the dress was peeled all the way down and the cold from the cell rushed in to caress my body with unseen fingers.

All was silent, all was still for moments, as I could feel the hot brand of his eyes tracing over my naked back and ass. It traveled up my long legs and settled somewhere near the small of my back. I felt him gathering his strength, felt him pulling himself inward. All my senses and thoughts reached grasping fingers trying to take hold of him and beg him to come closer.

The knife pressed into my wrist and traveled down first one arm and then the other. The dress fell away from me. It pooled at my feet before his boot kicked it away. I let him look at me as the tip of the weapon traveled from first the small of my back, around my side, and then rested over the stinging wound at my belly. I could feel him watching me shiver under his gaze.

The silence drew out between us, the only sound breaking it was our harried breaths as we rode the electric charge of whatever was between us. We had ignored it for so long, and it refused to be suppressed a moment longer. I had never felt this way before. Both outside of my body and so deeply within it that I could feel every cell of my body standing at attention.