Shattered (17 page)

“I wonder if she’d be glad to
know she succeeded,” he said as he rose.

“Who?”

“The woman that gave me those scars.”  Nathan turned towards the door, away from Adara.  Pain was something intimate to him now and he had no interest in showing it to a stranger.  But the words he couldn’t restrain so easily, not now that he had let those thoughts so near to the surface.  “She said she’d ruin me and she was right.  She cut a hole out of me that I can’t fill.”

Adara was up a second later.  She wrapped her arms around his middle and pressed her cheek to his back to halt his flight.  Nathan swallowed against the pain in his chest and for the first time since coming home he became aware of his heartbeat again.

And hers.  It beat against his back as she pressed herself to him.  He could feel the heat of her body through their clothes, and even as she let him go and allowed a little space between them that warmth lingered.

“Can I see your scars?” Adara asked, her voice quiet against his back, and Nathan nodded.

She slid her hands along his abdomen, to his side, until her fingers dipped beneath the hem of his shirt and touched his bare skin; then up, lifting his shirt and pulling it from him.  She discarded it to the floor and it fell over his feet.

A shiver traveled down his spine as she traced along the
thin ridges of those fading marks.  He shut his eyes and followed along as she outlined every deeper crack on his broken body.  Her hands progressed downward, to his waist, around to his front.  She stopped upon the knotted drawstring of his pants.

“No,” Nathan whispered and brought his hands down upon hers, lifting them from his waist.

He turned to face her.  There was pity in the blue depths of her eyes and he hadn’t expected that.  Not from a whore.  In a rush all of his words deserted him.

Nathan dropped her hands and turned again, but Adara was faster.  She got between him and the door like her small body might be enough to stop him.  “You can’t keep running from what happened.  You have to face it.”

“What?”  Her words shook him from his thoughts.  He paused just shy of running her down and the two of them stood facing one another, like they had just entered into combat.

She crossed her arms beneath her breasts and hugged her palms to her sides.  “You’re like a ghost here Master, we can all see it.  You’re so wrapped up in whatever happened to you that you’ve shut everyone else out.  You haunt the castle and no one can touch you.”

Nathan clenched his fist at his side and felt the tension in his forearm.  “It’s one thing for my brother, my King, to chastise me Adara, but you’ve overstepped every single line between here and proper.  I don’t expect to be lectured by my brother’s plaything.”

He knew his words were mean.  He felt nauseous rehearing them echo about, he wanted to take them back.  But his anger prevented it, frustration fought down nausea, and he stood by them as stubbornly as he stood before her.  Adara bit down on her lip, shook her head, and stepped out of his way.

“Go then,” she said, in a huff, and threw herself back down on his couch.  “I’ll show myself out before you return.”

She’d win if he didn’t leave and that got him to the door.  But his hand wouldn’t uncoil from his side and rise to the handle, no matter how much he needed it to.  Part of him wanted to flee from here, part of him knew she was right.  The tension of his warring halves crested and sought an outlet, and before he knew it his fist sat against the doorframe, the thud of the impact echoing in his memory.

Adara let out a squeak in surprise and everything came back.  Pain shot up his arm in a rush.

“Shit that hurt,” Nathan said
, a sharp breath between his teeth.  He stared at the blood smeared across his knuckles and watched it drip between his fingers.  He turned his hand over and followed the thin trail of red as it made a line down his palm and disappeared from sight at his wrist.  It seemed almost strange, somehow.

Adara wasn’t as paralyzed by the shock as he was.  She hopped up and grabbed a towel from the bathroom, brought it over and pressed it down over his hand, sandwiching it in between both of hers.  She didn’t say anything, didn’t ask him why.  And he was glad for that.  He wouldn’t have had an answer for her.

She lifted the towel and peeked beneath, from his hand to the fresh stains on his sleeve.

“Well, now you have to buy a shirt that fits,” she said, and she smiled a little, and that made Nathan laugh.  He laughed away some of the burden he’d been carrying since his return without even realizing that weight existed.  It was as if he had been viewing the world through a
window, one whose dirt and grime had accumulated so gradually he never even noticed it, and it was just now that someone wiped a clean path down its center.

Adara hardly came up to his shoulder and he stared down at the top of her head.  She seemed too small to be able to have such an effect on him.  Too scrawny.  But somehow her presence was larger, like everything she did was with the whole of her being.  Even now he could look down at her face and see her brows converge as she dabbed away at his split skin, like mending this was suddenly her whole world.

Nathan’s injured hand hovered forgotten as he brought his other up.  He traced her mouth with his thumb, from one corner to the other, to coax her imprisoned lip free.  Her eyes seemed too blue, too endless and unblinking as she stared up at him.  They’d swallow him up if he let them, and maybe he wanted to.  He pressed his lips down over hers and breathed in the spice from her skin.

There was a hunger that had been dormant these last few weeks that surged to life now.  Adara let out a muffled breath and he took that too, swallowed it down like he might be able to consume whatever made her so alive.  His other hand, still loosely wrapped in the towel, came up to the stone beside her head.  He pressed his body into hers and hers into the wall at her back, trapping her there.

Nathan’s hand trailed down her neck and over her chest, over the small mounds of her breasts, down into the low dip of her waist and over her hips.  He pulled her dress up and squeezed her ass, and she moaned against his chest.  Her hands worked down between their bodies, until they were at his waist again, undoing his pants and pulling him free.

Her fingers wrapped around hi
s erection and slid along his length.  She looked down and he buried his face against the top of her head, into her hair, and let the tangle of her smell grab him too.  It was sweet and intoxicating.

Her hands went to the head of his cock and his entire body shu
dder.  He growled into her hair, brought his other hand beneath her ass and lifted her up, pressed her harder against the wall and pushed himself into her.  Her legs went around his waist and she tensed around him. Her breath came out in a sharp yelp beside his ear as he buried himself inside her in one sudden thrust.

Nathan pulled back and she whimpered into the shallow of his neck.  He felt her quiver against his chest.  But she brought her arms up over his shoulders and pulled herself tighter to him.  He knocked the air from her a second time, a single solid breath, a moist wave that rolled over his skin.  It sent chills down his back.

Her nails dug into his shoulders and her body clenched around his cock.  That sharp sting spurred him on.  He groaned against the wall as he moved in and out of her.  She took heavy breaths from between her teeth, grunting against the discomfort of being taken so suddenly, but Nathan was consumed by a need that went beyond sexual release.  This was survival, because she was right, he couldn’t keep living like this.  He buried himself back into her one final time and his whole body shook as he came inside her.

He
shut his eyes and let his forehead rest against the wall.  The stone was cool, like it’d been within Robin’s room.  But his cheek pressed to the side of Adara’s head and he could hear the echo of her breathing.  It was this that was real now.  He was wrapped around her, arms encircling her, body against her, and she was his center.  He felt the flutter of her pulse at his core.  He smelled cinnamon.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Nathan whispered.  He was afraid to pull back, afraid to look at her.

“Don’t be ridiculous Master Nathan,” Adara laughed, and the ripples shook through her body and into his.  Her hands came free from his neck and she pushed back against his shoulders so that their eyes could meet.  Her cheeks were rosy and she banished some of his fears with her smile.

He
let her down and she tugged her dress back into place, for all the good it did her.  He could see her little nipples through the fabric, each one perched atop less than a handful of breast.  When he looked back at her face she was staring at him, waiting for some command and Nathan had to remind himself he was in charge here.

“Go get cleaned up,” he said
.  That seemed to do it.  Adara flashed him one last smile and slid out from between him and the wall.

Nathan let out a sigh and brought his hand up, like he might run it through his hair, only to realize it was still tangled up in that towel.  He shook his head at himself.  It was only one night.  He could survive that.

***

Robin moved around her old room, reliving the old memories that came back with each new object her hand passed over.  The old ivory comb on her vanity had been a present on her ninth birthday, the silver and gold hairpins beside it small treasures Denrick brought back from his travels to the capital.  A hand mirror lay face down beside it and she traced over the intricate carvings on its back without lifting it.  She didn’t want to know what she might see there on the other side.

She moved to the armoire and her hand brushed the handle, though she didn’t look inside.  These didn’t feel like her things.  She felt like an intruder through a past that wasn’t hers. 

Robin sat down on the edge of the bed and sighed at the room.  Lily was hardly an hour gone.

A beam of light that shone through the center of the curtains cut across the floor and stopped at her feet.  She touched her toes to it, and then further, testing the warmth of the summer sun through her boots.  That did more than all the objects in her room, that brought back memories of a time before life here, when she had been dirty and poor and happy.

For the first time in twelve years she cried for them.  Her grief was voiceless and she stared at the sunlight across the floor as her tears fell, one after another.  It made that straight line of light wavy and blurred, until it shone across all of her vision and she needed her hand to clear it.  Tears glistened on the back of her glove.

Nathan had touched her there, upon the cheek, and she tried to remember how it felt.  But it was amazing how fast the memory faded.  She shut her eyes and touched her face, but opened them again when she realized it wouldn’t
be the same.  Leather was a poor substitute for the warmth of a hand.

Robin took the end of one ribbon between her teeth and pulled, then the other, and worked free the laces with her thumb.  She cupped her chin in her hands and shut her eyes again.  If nothing else she could pretend.

“Robin.”

Denrick’s voice shattered her fantasy.  She had no idea how long she’d sat there, but when she opened her eyes the beam of sunlight had moved away from her feet.  Her boots were planted in shadow again.

Denrick stood in the door, arms folded across his chest.  His voice matched his face and both were stone.

“
Come walk with me.”

Robin nodded and stood.  She was nearly beside him when his eyes swept down from her face and over her body.

“Put your gloves back on,” he said, and disgust crept into his voice.  It was in his face too, in the frown on his forehead and his flat, tightly pursed lips, in the elevation of one side of his nose.

“Yes m’lord.
”  Her voice sounded so quiet that it wasn’t even her own.  She pleaded with the pressure in her chest to abate, begged it to relent enough that her voice wouldn’t crack, that she wouldn’t stumble over her words.  “Please, will you help me?”

His expression held as he took the gloves she held out.  He stared at her hands and she at his face as he worked the leather up her forearm.  She could feel his aggravation in how tightly he pulled the lacing.  More tears, new tears, threatened behind the rigid visage she wore, but she refused to let them fall.

“Thank you m’lord,” she whispered, and only then did Denrick look up at her.  She couldn’t read him, but she swore he meant to say something.  Or maybe it was only that she wished he would.

He stepped aside for her and made a gesture towards the door, as he might for a lady of some standing, deferring to her the privilege of departing first.  But Robin was under no
illusion as to her position.  She was the lowest of life in the castle, and beyond, for the only purpose in her existence was to cause pain.  Somehow the thought gave her strength, for there was no further that she could fall.

Robin didn’t know where she was suppose
d to go.  She walked from the room and continued to walk, assuming at some point Denrick might take the lead, but every time she slowed and looked back he simply paused and returned her stare.  He said nothing, so she didn’t either, and eventually she led them outside.

T
he sky overhead was blue but out on the horizon sat the first threat of rain.  Robin knew how quickly a storm could roll through in the summer and she stuck to the path that circumvented the castle along its outer wall.  That pathway was lined with trees, like a mock-forest might hide the places in the wall that were already crumbled in disrepair.