Anjhela stood over Trevarr in the Deeps, unfazed at his silence. Silence from Trevarr was a familiar thing.
“Do you remember?” she asked him. Looking down on him in a way she’d never imagined, and pretending that the sight of him didn’t still reach out to her on some deeply primal level. The beauty of his form, the ferocity of his eye, the clench of his muscle; even the sweep of natural tattoo along shoulder and biceps. The history between them, full of push and pull and pleasure.
He ignored her—or pretended to. But the shackle glyphs flared, revealing his thwarted attempt to draw on his natural energies. No doubt a subconscious attempt to accelerate healing.
Klysar knew he needed it, after earlier questioning had resulted in an expert beating—one she’d halted at the faint perception of an unfamiliar intrusion she had yet to identify. Or he might well have been attempting to keep her away, although in truth he knew better than to try. He comprehended what she was, after all.
He’d helped to make her.
He most certainly knew the physical assault was only a matter of form, for Anjhela had unfathomable means with which to elicit answers to any question. She possessed stolen memories of unbearable pain and exquisite pleasure, and the experience to wield them with precision. She was mendikha.
And because this was Trevarr, she possessed his very own memories, intertwined with her own. Pain and pleasure, indeed.
“Do you remember?” She lowered her voice, made it into silk. Within the gauntlet, her hand flexed; leather creaked beneath the subtle clink of metal bracing. “Back when it began?”
Of course he said nothing. He’d never said much more than nothing.
“Perhaps you don’t remember,” she said, using the cold venom in her smile to obscure her inescapable response to him. She crouched, her movement studiously sinuous, her claw-tipped fingers resting lightly beside the seeping wound above his knee.
If he tensed at her touch, she couldn’t detect it. Cold, darkened pewter eyes held her gaze evenly. Silently.
She closed her hand over the long muscle of his thigh, watching not his expression, but those eyes. Watching for the sign of pain and instead, finally, seeing the brief bright flare of anger. Defiance. Promise.
In an instant she was on him, straddling his lap with her fingers tangled in his hair—jerking his head back to thud against rock, her mendihar hovering and ready to strike, her face so close that her satin-smooth scales brushed his cheek. “When I last mounted you like this, you were already groaning.”
He didn’t react and she snarled, her curled lip brushing his bruised mouth. Unforgivable, to resist her power. Punishable.
She slapped her gloved and hovering hand over his face, covering his eyes; metal claws pricked his scalp, her thumb and littlest finger digging in on either side of his strong face.
“Here,” she said, voice harsh with satisfaction as he finally, finally reacted, tensing in a flinch of atavistic fear.
Finally became prey beneath predator, as it was inevitably meant to be.
“Here,” she said again, her voice still torn with her snarl. “Let me help you remember.”
===
Remember...as it was then...
===
Anjhela slammed a bare hand against the hard study table of the drill room—a fit of temper, a hint of panic. The mendihar sat untouched at the other end of warm Gheharan stone—gleaming with potential, a lurking promise of living mesh and metal. Despair burst through the temper. “I’ll never reach it!”
“If Shahh sees weakness, he’ll use it.”
She startled at the unexpected voice, jerking to face the doorway; her lip lifted in a snarl, quickly tamed. How did he even know she was in the service of Glyphmaster Shahh?
“Good.” He filled the doorway with a lanky height. Not much older than her, and yet a gulf of confidence between them. “That, you don’t hold back.”
She knew right away who he was. What he was. Half-breed like her, and yet nothing like her.
Kyrokha.
Strong body, smoky presence... pewter eyes. His hair tangled thick and dark with a myriad of tiny braids, barely tamed by the crude clip that drew the sides back. Barely tamed. Just like him.
“You don’t belong here,” she snapped, humiliation bringing the sting of tears. Not just here at her drill room, but also not here at Ghehera, where the Tribunal’s mudbloods endlessly strove to justify their own existence.
“No.” He seemed to find some fleeting humor in it. “But you can.”
“You know nothing.”
He was nominally human in appearance. He didn’t have the faint gleam of burnt-brown scales ripping over his skin, the odd yellow cast in his eye. He, at least, was reviled and feared for the strength of what was within him.
Whereas Anjhela was simply reviled. And if the Ghehera’s Tribunal saw fit to use her, she had nonetheless not yet proven herself fit to be used.
“What I know,” he said, in a voice that seemed unaccustomed to talking, “is that we make our choices. Make yours, and then live with them.”
She stared at the glove. The mendihar. The glove and all it represented. Pain and power.
And pleasure.
Or simply pain, if she failed to bond with it. Pain and the humiliation and rejection to follow.
“You wouldn’t be here if they didn’t think it of you,” he told her. So potent in that doorway, so confident in himself. In what he was. “They don’t waste their time.” He caught her gaze directly, until her skin felt tight and her toes curled with tension. He made sure of it, lingering there and almost...almost...
She didn’t know what. But she wanted it.
He made sure he had her, and then he said, “Neither do I.”
===
Remembered...
===
Anjhela withdrew awareness from the glove, sighing as pleasure ebbed away in the tingles from a kissing tongue. But she maintained control...she always maintained control. Especially as she looked down on Trevarr, knowing that the powerful geas shackles just barely kept him in check.
And that his quiescence was, in its way, only another sign of his strength.
It made the pleasure all the sweeter. It made the scent of the dark blood trickling from his face all the more satisfying. It made the involuntary, reactive gleam of red-rimmed eyes just exactly what she’d wanted to see, and the sound of his halting breath just exactly what she’d wanted to hear.
She leaned close and licked the blood from one cheek with a slow, sure stroke of her deliciously pointed tongue. “Do you remember?” she asked him. “Because, my love...I do.”
~~~~~~~~~~