Feverborn
Page 77

The fourteen-year-old had crouched, hidden in a ventilation shaft above Level 4, and closed her eyes, pretending to be the woman he was with. Trying to imagine how it would feel. Being the woman who made that man feel that way. Shivering with a blend of sensation so intense it almost hurt: hungry, anxious, wild, too hot, too cold, too alive. She’d found a large vent in a bathroom, sneaked out for a closer look, and nearly gotten caught.
Lust. It was a blinding thing. One might as well gouge out one’s own eyes. Yet for some, indulged as a surface dance between strangers, it was a way of feeling without having to.
She inhaled and straightened her back. Young. Strong. Untouchable. She focused on radiating all those things, particularly the last.
He’d been working on her for over two hours, after a wasted hour in which he’d insisted she clean up and wait until her clothing was laundered by one of his many employees. She would have sat nude in front of him to get the damned ink.
Then again, perhaps not.
She’d examined the beginning of the tat yesterday with a mirror, looking over her shoulder into another mirror. It was a complex pattern with a brand in the center, layered in gray and black and something else, something glittering that wasn’t any type of ink she’d ever seen. It shimmered in the hollow of her back, seeming to move in tandem with her subtlest shift, like silvery fishes beneath the surface of a lake. Somehow he was embedding a spell into her skin. And she hoped—only one. The devil was multifaceted, and so, too, might be his ink.
It offended every ounce of her being to let Ryodan do such a thing. Yet if he could genuinely track her with it no matter where she went, mortal or Silverside, she wanted it more than any other weapon she might have been given. As she’d recently told an Unseelie princess, there was the devil who couldn’t get the job done and wouldn’t eat you, and the one that could but might. She knew which one Ryodan was. And was willing to take her chances. “This would work, even in the Hall of All Days?” she asked again, finding it nearly impossible to believe. But she would be depending on it.
“Hell itself couldn’t keep me from joining you with this on your skin.”
“Why are you doing it?” He always had motives. She couldn’t divine this one. What did it matter to him if she got lost again? She didn’t buy his line that he didn’t lose things that were his. She wasn’t, and they both knew it. He wanted something from her. But what?
“Figure it out. You’re brilliant.”
“You need me to save the world?”
“I don’t need anything.”
That left want. “Why are you always interfering in my life? Don’t you have better things to do?” It had made her feel special all those years ago, that the powerful and mighty Ryodan had paid attention to her. Solicited her input, desired her around. Though she never would have admitted it and had bitched endlessly about it. He’d thought she had a great deal to offer and would one day be “one hell of a woman.” It had given her a kind of aiming-at point. Silverside, she’d kept aiming at it.
Her faith in his power, his attention to those details he’d chosen to track, had been absolute.
She’d waited.
He hadn’t come.
His hands were no longer moving at the base of her spine. She felt nothing for several long moments, then the light dance of his fingers across her scars. He traced one after the next. She should stop him. She didn’t. It was almost as if his fingers were saying: I see every injury you suffered. You survived. Bang-up fucking job, woman.
“I could remove them,” he said.
“Because a woman shouldn’t have battle scars. The same thing that brands a man a hero marks a woman as disfigured.”
“There’s nothing disfigured about you. Except your aim. Work on that.”
She was silent then. She was wary around this new Ryodan; the one that didn’t push and poke and prod but treated her like…well, she wasn’t sure what he was treating her like, and that was the crux of it. She couldn’t get a handle on how to respond to him when she didn’t understand his overtures. It was like trying to return a tennis ball on a court when someone had changed the rules and you didn’t know which spot you were supposed to smash the ball back into. Once, they’d lobbed that ball back and forth like pros, intuiting each other’s every move. Now when he swung, she spent too much time staring at the ball in the air.
In his office, she’d kissed him. He hadn’t kissed her back. Now he was touching her intimately, with her shirt off, but made no move or comment to indicate it was anything but business. Not that she would have entertained anything but business. Why had he said “Kiss me or kill me” that day in his office? Had it been merely another of his position-clarifying tactics, like the night she’d discovered that, although the Crimson Hag had killed him, he’d somehow come back as good as new and insisted she choose between being disappointed that he was still alive or being loyal to him?
He’d brought her to what she was fairly certain were his private quarters, a spartan set of rooms deep beneath Chester’s. She was also fairly certain it wasn’t his only place and, like her and Dancer, he had many well-stocked lairs in which to retreat from the world.
Ultramodern, ultrasleek, the room was shades of chrome and slate and steel. Black, white, and, like the man himself, every shade of gray. In the room adjoining the one in which they sat was a bed with crisp white sheets and a soft, dark velvet spread. The bedroom had smelled of no one but him, which didn’t surprise her. He would never take a woman to one of his places. It was never that personal. The decor was tactile, complex but simple. The kitchen was white quartzite and more steel. The bathroom sculpted of thick, silver-veined marble and glass. Everywhere she looked, the lines were straight, clean, sharp, hard, like the lines of his face, and his philosophy.