His clawed fingers left crimson marks on the palewood door he slid open, ducking his head as he entered. If not for the low ceiling and creaking of the ship, he might have been in the prince’s palace again. No doors or walls divided the space. Silk screens gave privacy to the bed and the bath. The rear of the chamber lay open to a private deck—and beyond that, the sea.
Only a small distance separated the moon and the water.
A steep flight of stairs descended to the recessed floor of the chamber. Skipping the steps, Maddek leapt down and could stand properly without hitting his head. The jute sack dripped blood onto polished wooden planks as he crossed to the bed.
Yet it was from behind the bath screen that Yvenne emerged—long curling locks unbound, and clad only in a robe. No linens wrapped her limbs. Her cheeks were flushed, her hardened nipples pebbled beneath silk, her soft bottom lip trapped between her teeth as she watched his approach.
He reached into the sack. Fingers tangled in matted hair, he set her brother’s head upon a table. “It is done.”
“I saw,” she said huskily, and held out her hand as if to lead him to bed.
He swept her up into his arms instead, carrying her behind the screen. More steep steps led up to the wide dais supporting the bed. He lifted her onto the platform, where she stood taller than he, his face on level with her breasts. “Where is Vela’s potion?”
“In my satchel.” She caught hold of the spaulders armoring his shoulders before he could go in search of it. “But my sheath needs no oiling.”
Because she had come here to prepare herself as soon as she’d seen her brother fall. Maddek assumed that meant to bathe and to undress. Now he drew her fingers into his mouth, gave himself a taste of the sweetness that lingered at their tips.
Her breath shuddered, a sound of hot desire—and soft humor. “Our bed truly will look like a battlefield as you come to me wearing blood and claws and sword.” With the two fingers on her right hand, she swiped through the gore painting his chest, and her smile diminished to a sad curve. “Though I must pose no real threat, for you do not shield your heart against me.”
What use would such armor serve? Already she had reached in and taken hold of it. “Only a fool would underestimate you, Yvenne,” he told her gruffly.
Maddek had been a fool once.
The slightest smile returned, as if she believed he spoke platitudes. “You used a shield against my brother.”
“The corpse?” His claws skimmed up the outsides of her thighs, bloodied silver over slippery silk. Her scent reached him, faint coconut and stronger anise, as if she’d applied that Syssian perfume to her throat and breasts before his arrival. “My true shield was your warning to avoid his poisoned blades. Else I might think as he wanted me to, and believe that you betrayed and killed your mother.”
She became utterly still. “What do you believe, instead?”
“That you had painful reason,” he said gently, hands curving over her hips. A reason that her brother had wrapped in other lies, perhaps. That a demon had possessed her mother’s weakened body—or she’d been maddened, as Bazir claimed Ran Ashev had been, and Yvenne killed her mother in defense of her own life. “And no other choice.”
Never had her walls erected so swiftly, so visibly. She neither moved nor spoke, yet he could see and hear the barrier she put up between them, in the hardening of her moonstone eyes and the deep slowing of her breaths. A poisonous ache filled his chest. These walls he’d battered down and now they stood again, as if he’d never touched her. As if she’d never invited him in.
Then she yanked on his beard and hissed, “I told you not to believe what he said.”
Not even in bed yet, and already the battle was here, with a pointed blade piercing his heart. “You also said he would frame lies with truth, to better persuade me to his view. That view I saw for the lie it was.”
“Yet your view is still that I killed her?”
“Of everything he said about you, only that held a ring of truth.” And was confirmed by her reactions. First in the throwing of her knife and now because she did not deny it. Every time he’d suggested she had a part in his own mother’s death, Yvenne immediately denied it. Always she’d denied it. Here she only yanked at his beard for listening to Bazir. Hoarsely he asked, “Did you kill her during a failed escape?”
For an endless moment, she stared down at him from walls so high he could not read her face. Then she drew a breath that was agony.
As if suffering. Not at her father’s hands, but at his.
Sudden dread closed his throat. His fingers tightened on her hips, but she pulled out of his grip, stepping back with a cold smile curving her lips.
“I think you like that view. It fits so neatly with the one you already have of me.” Her chin lifted. “Very well. Let us frame it that way. I did kill my mother during a failed escape.”
She would not have. He knew she would not have.
Yet Maddek also did not believe she was lying. In a raw voice, he said, “I cannot believe—”
“Anything I say. Yes, I know. Because I am the foul, treacherous vessel for your vengeance. And you’d best hurry and make use of me. If you do not fuck my sheath full of your seed now, you will have no opportunity again.” Turning her back to him, she bent over the side of the bed and braced her elbows. “You need not even look at my scheming face while you mount me.”
By Temra’s fist. Sheer frustration gritted his teeth. It should not be like this, without resolution between them. With her walls still so high.
Yet little time they had. The moon’s chin rested on the horizon. So he would breach her quickly, then slow until they no longer battled but were allies again.
The low ceiling above the bed would give him no proper room to stand on the dais, so it was on his knees that Maddek settled in behind her small, rounded ass. Her anger with him must have burned away even her shyness. When he swept aside the skirt of her robe, baring her bottom and legs to his gaze for the first time, barely a tremble moved through her breaths.
The only shaking was Maddek’s. Need so hot and urgent that he did not trust the steadiness of his clawed fingers against her most delicate skin. With his mouth he tested her readiness, a long deep lick through her glistening cleft that sent Yvenne swaying forward on a gasping moan that she quickly muffled against the bed. Hot and slick his tongue found her, and when he suckled on her clit, her shaking began to match his.
With more time, he’d have made her come in this way first. Instead he slowly rose from kneeling into a crouch, leaving a hungry trail of openmouthed, biting kisses up over the curve of her ass. The silks tucked into his belt shredded beneath his claws, freeing the steel length of his cock. Anticipation surged down his shaft like the stroke of a tight fist. He reached the edge of her robe and his tongue slicked over the dimple at the base of her spine.