Chapter 9: Reading in the Dark
The private chambers were warmer than the vault, and smaller. That surprised her. She had expected a prince's den to be vast, all vaulted shadow and towering ambition, and instead it was a single vaulted room with a low bed of black furs, a shelf of salvaged mortal books, and runes on the walls that pulsed violet like a slow, private heartbeat.
"You collect books," she said, running a fingertip along a cracked Spenser.
"I collect you," Malakor said. "The books came with the room."
He had carried her up the stairs. She had let him, legs still liquid, her skirt still rucked wrong, his seed and the vault's mess drying tacky on her thighs while the Keeper's warning sat in both their chests like swallowed glass. Someone had whispered their arrival. He had not spoken once on the climb.
Now he set the bond-turning book on the bed. It lay there thin and scarred, its spine like a healed wound, and the first page was whispering. Not words yet. Her name, over and over, in a voice like her own read backward.
"You were promised a fourth," he said.
She turned. He had backed her toward the furs without appearing to move, his shadow pouring ahead of him across the floor, and when her calves hit the bed's edge the shadows took her wrists and set her down, gentle as a librarian shelving a rare thing.
"Malakor. The Keeper said someone leaked us."
"The Keeper said. And we sealed the Court's wards behind us an hour ago, and no one will hear you scream here but me." His claws caught her chin. His amber eyes had gone wide and black, fangs already lengthening. "Fear and duty, little moth. I can taste both. The duty can wait until I've finished what three orgasms started."
"And if I refuse?"
He laughed. It was a real laugh, startled out of him, and she felt it land in the bond like a warm stone dropped in cold water. "Then I will spend all night convincing you, and you will still be begging me to stop by dawn without meaning it. You learned that in the Bonding Chamber. Pain and worship, both directions."
The shadows peeled her clothes away, seam by seam, unhurried. Cold air on her bare breasts, her nipples hardening, and he watched every inch of skin as it appeared with the attention of a man reading a text he intended to annotate.
"Open your legs."
She did. The violet runes washed over her inner thighs, over the slick, used flesh there, and she felt herself clench under his gaze, empty and aching.
"Good girl." He knelt. Four hundred years old and he knelt between her thighs like it was owed to him, like her legs were a territory he had conquered and was inspecting for damage. His breath was hot on her cunt. "You took two strangers' cocks in your mouth and a scroll in your sweet little cunt and you swallowed like it was scripture. Now I'm going to take my time, and you're going to read to me while I do it."
"What?"
He nodded at the book. "The pages. Aloud. Every word, while my mouth is on you. If you lose the line, we start the chapter over."
"From the beginning?"
"From the beginning."
"You're insane."
"I'm thorough," he said, and dragged his tongue up the full length of her slit.
The first stroke of it nearly ended her. She was raw from the vault, oversensitive, every nerve still singing, and his tongue was rough at the edges, cat-rough, lapping through her folds with obscene patience before circling her clit and settling there like it had signed a lease. She moaned, arched, and the shadows tightened at her wrists in warning.
"The book," he said against her clit, the vibration of it making her buck.
She scrabbled for it one-handed, the shadows letting her, and the cover fell open in her lap. The first page had finished learning her name. The text lay there in ink that was still wet, and it was in her handwriting, and she had never written any of it.
"The," she read, voice shaking, "the bond that was made in fear and sealed in blood may be turned as a river is turned, not broken, if the bound speak the turning words while," his tongue pressed flat against her clit and dragged a slow circle, and she lost the line entirely.
"While," Malakor prompted, wicked, not stopping.
"While both remain willing." She gasped it out. "The turning does not free. The turning does not enslave. The turning makes the leash a cord of two strands, and neither strand may be cut while the other holds."
He suckled her clit then, properly, lips sealing around it, and her back bowed off the furs. The runes on the wall flared. Through the bond she felt his greedy satisfaction at every shudder, his hunger climbing, and it came back into her doubled so that her own pleasure fed his and his fed hers, the spiral already spinning up.
"Keep reading," he growled, and thrust two fingers into her soaked cunt without ceremony, curling them against the spot that made her see violet afterimages.
"The turning words are seven," she managed, panting, hips grinding shamelessly against his mouth. "Spoken in sequence, they, oh fuck, they bind the essence of the bound to each the other's, to each other's keeping." His fingers were relentless, scissoring her open, wet sounds filling the chamber louder than her voice. "Malakor, I can't read while you're doing that."
"You can. You broke wards with worse." He added a third finger. The stretch burned sweet. "Continue, or we start over, and I will be less gentle the second time."
"The turning words are seven." She forced it out between thrusts. "Spoken in sequence, at the turn of midnight, they reverse the current of the bond so that the wielder feeds as the fed feeds, and the bound commands as the binder commands."
Her orgasm came up fast, inevitable, a tide she could see from a long way off. He felt it too, through the bond, and he slowed his fingers just enough to hold her at the edge, cruelty and patience in the same motion.
"Keep going."
"Where, where was I."
"The wielder feeds," he said, lips brushing her clit with every word.
"The wielder feeds as the fed feeds." She was sobbing now, the book trembling in her grip, the ink on the page rippling as though the words were embarrassed to be overheard. "But the final line of the turning may only be spoken while, while one of the bound holds the other's life in their hands."
His fingers stopped.
The chamber went very quiet. The runes pulsed violet, slow. On the page, the ink was rearranging itself, the sentence rewriting around her ragged breath, the words shifting like the book had been waiting for her to reach them.
"Malakor." She looked down her own body at him, at his fangs, at the wet shine of her on his mouth. "What does it mean, holds the other's life in their hands?"
"Finish the page," he said, and his voice had changed. Quieter. Older. "All of it. Then we will see what it wants."
She read. Her voice steadied itself by main force. The last lines were shorter, and the ink was colder to look at.
"The final line is spoken with a hand upon the throat of the bound, and the life held fully in the will of the holder. If the holder is the bound who was bound, the turning completes in light. If the holder is the binder, the turning completes in shadow. If the holder hesitates, the turning fails, and the bond turns instead to ash."
The page went still. Her name sat at the top of it in her own handwriting.
Malakor rose from his knees. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, unhurried, and his amber eyes were doing something she had never seen them do, something small and careful, like a man doing arithmetic he did not like the answer to.
"Midnight is four hours off," he said. "And I still owe you a fourth."