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My answering chuckle was dark, tinged with the kind of mania that I never wanted to openly display. I wished I had just killed them. It would have been the better of the two options, with less mess and repercussions. But my rage had been so sudden and complete that I wasn’t even sure how I had left them.
She stared at me blankly. Her gaze dropped, only for confusion to fill her eyes.
The fear I understood, the discomfort even, but the confusion I didn’t. At least not until she reached forward, plucking a tooth from the lapel of my jacket. I hadn’t even noticed it was there. It still had bits of gum and blood clinging to it, making it look more animal than human.
“I killed them,” I repeated hollowly.
“Because they posed a threat . . .” she said slowly, taking my hand in both of hers and leading me into the adjoining bathroom. It was more ornate even than the study, with marble and gold covering every inch. It was my father’s favorite combination orhadbeen.I was going to have to get used to that.
“That should have been a factor,” I muttered, my gaze darkening. Only once I stood in the middle of the room did she let go of me, grabbing and wetting a washcloth as I watched on. “That’s certainly the reason I’ll give publicly. But, no, it isn’t the real one. I killed them because they threatened you, and they threatened to take you from me.”
The honesty was almost harsh. I could see her wide-eyed gaze rotate back to me through the steam from the hot water she was running. Then, as a form of reply, she started disrobing me. First my jacket, then working her fingers down the buttons of my shirt to undo them, never once stopping in her apparent mission of reading my features.
“Because you love me?” It was a question, and not one I had expected to hear from her lips, certainly not with as much hesitancy as was there.
“Da,” I grunted, my eyes narrowing. “Why would you even call into qu—”
“Because I’m terrified.” Her words were rushed as she grappled behind her to find the wet washcloth and began washing the blood from my face with one corner. “Because we came back and I wasn’t sure whether I could confront you about what I learned, and then we were running for our lives . . . again . . . and then your father was dead, and you were pulling away. And I wasn’t sure if it was because you blamed me or because you were stressed, but I was . . . worried.”
She spoke so quickly it was almost hard to keep up. Her hands gently moved the washcloth again and again over my face until the entirety of the white linen was stained pink. She reached behind her again, depositing the dirty washcloth and changing it out for a spare I hadn’t noticed. The pieces of the puzzle concerning her, and her demeanor were now being filled in, and my own eyes widened a fraction to view hers in a new light.
She shifted, massaging the sides of my neck and my shoulders with the warm washcloth before looking back to me.
“I don’t care that you hated the old man,” I admitted in my shock. “I don’t care that you wished him dead. I would have cared if you had been the one to kill him, but you weren’t. The past is not between us, our parents’ blood is not between us. You are my wife and I am your husband.” The words were almost mechanical, no matter how heatedly I meant them. I knew that it was the most that I could do to even voice them at all. A wall still stood between what I wanted to convey and what I was physically able.
A wall that I had no idea, personally, how to penetrate.
She dropped slowly in front of me, perching on her knees so that she could reach up and begin cleaning my forearms and hands, her head bowed and her voice silent for several long minutes. She went through three more washcloths before she tried speaking again.
“I am your wife,” she stated slowly, as if she was only just agreeing to it herself. “You are my husband. And tomorrow you don’t know what you are going to face, or what I am going to face, and—”
“You will face nothing,” I asserted vehemently. “You will be locked in this room, safe, with Shura standing guard.”
“If Shura is watching me, who is watching your back?” she replied, gripping my wrist. Her eyes were wide with worry and fear, but there was something else there beneath, darkening the blackness of her eyes and dilating her nearly invisible pupils.
My mouth opened, the absence of an answer evident in my lack of response. But before I could voice a single syllable, her head tilted forward, her lips pressing into the skin stretched over my hip. The warmth of the motion startled me, my lips snapping back to a close as she dragged her face from one side of my hips to the other.
Her lips feathered across the skin there, her tongue tracing along the trail of hair that led from the bottom of my belly button and lower. Her eyes lifted slowly, until they were all that I could focus on, even with the heat of her mouth travelling lower and lower in such stark contrast to the chill of the air in the bathroom. Her expression unblinking, she lowered my pants down my thighs.
I knew where this was going, I knew the motions, I knew the intent in her eyes . . . and yet still I was mesmerized by the feeling of it, caught up in the way that her lips parted before she folded them over the head of my suddenly twitching cock.
Her hand lifted even slower than her mouth had, cupping the underside of my shaft as she swirled her tongue around the tip. Each breath against the already excited skin seemed to make my own breath even more labored, as if the oxygen in the room was being eaten up from the way she was now inhaling me.
It was a pretty picture, to be sure: her on her knees in front of me.
Made all the more attractive by that glint of danger in her eyes that seemed to spur her on. I knew what that glint meant, where it came from. She was under the same edge of the knife as I was, facing the same uncertainty. We didn’t have the promise of tomorrow, or the day after.
The only promise we had was in the hot, wet enclave of her mouth and the feeling that passed between us as she drew my cock deeper towards the back of her throat.
Almost without thinking my hands moved to either side of her head, my fingers tangling in the hair to pull her even closer.
She was right. We didn’t know what we were going to be facing when morning came, but I knew that right now, with her here, I was facing only her. It didn’t matter that we were in the bathroom of my father’s office. It didn’t matter that, somewhere, a coalition was meeting with the purpose of killing both she and I.
All that mattered was my cock hitting the back of her throat and the breathy gasps she emitted as it did so. All that mattered was Manya, her heated hands pulling me even closer still, her fingers running along what portion of my shaft wasn’t already between her split, red lips.
