Anjhela stood back, breathing hard. Trevarr’s battered body stretched out between chains, his breathing uneven, his consciousness fled.
Just a mortal, after all.
Even if he had once kept her alive during the vulnerable, frightening transition of mendihar absorption—and had used only his touch, the rarity of a pointed phrase, and his mere presence to do it.
But she’d known how little he understood what those things had meant to her survival. To her. For if he’d known, he surely never would have simply...
Gone.
Her pleasure faded, leaving only the ache of her arm, the glove fully absorbed back into gleaming skin and her own neat, tough nails once more tipping the fingers of elegant hands.
She was mendikha. She controlled his life now. She controlled his pain and she controlled his delight. And yet with his every silent look, he reduced her to the weak and frightened thing she’d once been. Afraid of the mendihar, afraid of Shahh’s black dripping glyphs, afraid of herself.
Anger licked up through her fatigue. Show him who you are. Show him what he lost when he walked away. She leaned against the cell door and studied him with eyes slitted and arms crossed.
He’d always been unreasonably tall. Now he’d filled out into his height, his bare shoulders broad, torso matured into flat planes and hard muscle and defined sections—pectorals, abdomen, and a flat belly braced by hard obliques.
Not a man of excess body hair, her Trevarr.
Her Trevarr.
Back in their beginning, he’d been leaner and nowhere near through growing into himself, his muscling less developed, his overall frame rangier...his features still striking, but lacking the harder lines maturity had brought them.
Then, they’d enjoyed each other mutually. He’d been fierce and lusty, not so much giving of his body as giving her lease to play with it. Never touching her with any special intensity, such as the kyrokha were said to do.
Legends. Exaggerations. Just like his hunter’s prowess, or he would not lie chained here before her.
She waited until awareness returned to his darkened gaze, and then spoke. “If I touched you just so,” she said, her voice made of rough silk, “would your body still leap for me?”
But he hadn’t spoken beneath the mendihar and he didn’t speak now. For all the things she could put into his mind, she couldn’t force anything out. It didn’t matter that she could bring him to an unwilling completion, playing his mind just as she played his body. It didn’t matter that they both knew she eventually would.
It was, after all, what she was. What she did. How she beguiled and twisted and corrupted, turning pleasure into pain and back again.
It was what he had helped her to be.
Yet none of that would truly touch him.
Nothing of what she’d done ever had.
And now she saw him grown even stronger and harder than she’d imagined he could be, commanding the room in spite of injury and helplessness. And she saw something different in his eye, in the hard determination and even in the resigned acceptance of his inevitable death at her hands.
She recognized it in him, amidst a spear of hurt and even something of despair.
For no, she had never truly touched him.
But someone else had.
~~~~~~~~~~