AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Many things.” Faenir tore his hand out from under mine and forced himself from the chair, taking me along with him. He was strong. His grip on me was assured and placed to keep me from falling out of his hold. Instinctively I wrapped my legs around his waist as he stalked over to the bed, all without dropping his gaze from mine. “And all can wait until the morning. What I want from you tonight is for you to sleep. Rest and allow yourself to heal after what has happened to you. If you still feel the same about me, come dawn then I welcome you to pick this up where I regrettably stop it. If not, then we will put this all behind us.”
I narrowed my gaze, burning holes through him. “I am not the delicate flower that you believe I am. You could pick from me from the root and still I would bloom. I know what I want…”
Faenir lowered me to the bed, depositing me into the cloud of sheets and then stood back at the bedside. “Not once did I imagine you to be delicate. However, I have waited hundreds of years for the chance to feel. I can wait a few more hours if it means I will not need to add the worry of your regret to my mind.”
“I do not regret anything,” I replied quickly. Desperately.
Faenir looked back at me, rolling back his shoulders as he exhaled his reply. “You will.”
FAENIR
I could have taken Arlo, torn the clothes from his body and explored him in ways my mind had tortured me with. I wanted it with such boiling, undeniable desire that it set my skin aflame.
But that would have been wrong to do so.
Not even hours before Arlo sat upon my lap, slowly rocking himself upon me, had he wished me harm. He had looked at me with such disgust and hate that I had once believed I was accustomed to. His feelings could not have changed so quickly. I would not let him make a decision that he would spend the rest of his days regretting.
My conscience was already broken; with that regret upon it, I feared it would shatter completely.
I waited for him to fall back to sleep. Then I waited a few more moments to know that the nightmare that had thrown Arlo into my arms did not return. Only once his breathing had slowed and his face melted into placidity did I leave.
Each step away from the room pained me. I was breaking his promise, leaving him alone when he begged for me not to again. Part of me expected him to wake suddenly and call out my name, the idea alone was not enough to keep me though, not when my body and mind needed cleansing.
I could not have sat in that room whilst his touch still teased across my skin. Most indulgent of all was the wetness of his tongue. It took everything in my power not to touch my neck and feel the dampness on my skin. If I allowed myself to truly focus on the closeness of his lips and the way his teeth grazed over my neck, I knew I would not have found the restraint to stop myself from devouring him.
Years without touch had not made me a stranger to it. It made me desperate for it.
I walked through the unkind corridors of Haxton in search for the only place with the power to clear my mind. A place of quietness and death.The Styx.
Keep your distance, Charon,I speared the thought across the great lake towards the loyal spirit that lurked within his boat.
His reply shuddered through the link that tethered us,As you wish, Master.
Leaving Haxton behind I kept my focus on the dark expanse before me. At night the Styx looked like glass, cut through with obsidian so dark that it mixed seamlessly with the sky. One began where the other ended.
My clothes littered the ground as I closed in on the water. I tore my tunic free with one hand. My trousers came next, undoing them at the waist before they fell to my ankles. I gripped the hard erection that Arlo had cursed me with, forcing it downward in hopes to banish it; just holding my cock urged it to throb harder.As I reached the shore my toes curled as the freezing water rushed over them in greeting. I did not stop, walking until the water covered my nudity in a cloak of darkness.
Shades drifted towards me, grey slithers of shadow and mist that formed figures. They cut through the water, encouraging me to join them. But they would not take me as they had with Arlo.Even the dead feared my touch.
I let the water slip over my head until I bathed in freezing, endless darkness. Only when the Styx closed over me entirely did the voices start, the shades screaming and pleading for freedom. Begging. Crying. Demanding that I set them free from this place.It was the distraction I needed. At last, my cock softened in my grasp. The water of the Styx did what I required, ridding Arlo’s touch from my skin.
When not a whisper was left did I finally forget.
There was no room for thought in the Styx, not as the dead distracted me with desperate pleas for freedom, not when I allowed them to punish me for what I had done to them.
That was what this place was, a prison for the souls I had stolen. A reminder of the monster that Arlo convinced me to forget.
18
Ihad, unwillingly, entered into a tournament of silence. Days passed in a slow and torturous dance of stubborn quiet and close proximity. Faenir, although never straying far from me, hardly spoke a word since that night when I had clambered onto his lap in hopes for more than just a seat. And I, stubborn as Auriol had always told me I was, refused to be the first one to speak either.
It had been three days, although it felt more like an eternity. I counted by scoring marks into the stone flooring beneath my bed using a knife I had stolen. It was becoming a game to store Faenir’s silverware like a magpie, hiding it beneath the bed alongside the single vial of vampire blood. I felt carrying the vial around in a pouch at my belt would only raise questions, ones I was not prepared to provide answers to.
When Faenir would leave me alone I felt as though I could breathe properly. It was not that I despised his company, but the silence drove me mad. I longed for him to ask me other questions that did not relate to the rate of my healing or how he fixated on the fading bruises across my neck.
I replied with short, one-word answers yet he still did not seem to understand, or care, that there was a taut string of tension, and it was mere moments from snapping.
It was on the third morning, with the long oak table between us, that the string finally broke.
