The Swan and the Jackal (19 page)

Cassia’s soft lips touch mine and my arms are around her little body before I realize what I’m doing. I grab her against me, pressing her thinly-covered breasts into my bare chest, my mouth collapsing about hers hungrily as I kiss her unlike I’ve ever kissed her before. Her warm tongue tangles with mine, her fingers press into the back of my neck, mine into the flesh of her bottom as I hoist her onto my lap. Pushing her gown up and out of the way, her bare thighs straddle my waist, and still without breaking the kiss I dig my fingers in deeper, moaning into her mouth with anticipation.

She bites down on my bottom lip, breaking the skin. The stinging pain sears through my mouth and travels down into my stomach, warming every part of me and making other parts ache and throb with need. I taste the blood in my mouth, and she just kisses me harder as if wanting to taste it herself, to share it with me.

Gripping her bottom vigorously, I force her hips toward mine, pushing my hardness against her until I can’t stand it anymore and I race to get her panties off. I yank and pull blindly, our eyes closed, our lips still locked in a devouring kiss, until I finally get them off and her naked legs fall around my waist again.

She pulls back and looks into my eyes, her arms draped around the back of my neck. Her lips touch mine again lightly, one hand falling to find the waist of my boxers. Softly pushing her hips against mine, it drives me crazy feeling my cock pressed into her through a thin layer of fabric which feels like the difference between ecstasy and Hell. Moaning against her lips, I raise my ass from the floor enough to give her access to get them off. But impatience takes over and I grasp her around the waist with one hand to hold her steady while wrenching them off the rest of the way myself with the other.

Flesh on warm flesh, she presses herself into me, peering into my eyes with her mouth gently parted. I want to taste her lips again, but I study them instead, the plumpness of her bottom lip, the perfect little indention of the top, just below her nose. Her breath smells faintly of mint. The natural scent of her skin which always sends me into a brief high when I’m this close to her.

“I am yours. Always.” she whispers onto my mouth and kisses me once, pressing the warm wetness between her legs against the aching stiffness between mine. “Even if you can’t love me the way you love her, I’ll always be yours.”

I grab the back of her head in both of my hands and crush my lips against hers, stealing her breath away and replacing it with my own. I ache. Every part of me aches. For her. Only for her.

I need to kill someone to wash these feelings away, but in this moment I can’t do anything but give in to them.

Grasping her firmly around her back, I push myself to my feet with her legs wrapped around my waist, carrying her to the bed where I fall between her thighs.

I gaze down into her eyes—
What am I doing?—
and secure her head with my hands on her cheeks. The warmth from her thighs I feel on either side of me, the softness of her flesh. So delicate. So innocent.
How can I do this to her? How can I do this to
myself
?

“I’m sorry, Cassia,” I whisper and lower my body onto hers. She never takes her eyes off of mine, her fingers dancing against one side of my unshaven face. “I’m sorry for everything I’ve done to you…and for what I’m about to do.” I kiss her deep and hungrily, and slide my cock into her with careful, predatory intent.

The sweet sound of her whimpering as I enter her only makes me want to go deeper. Her thighs tremble at my sides, her fingers dig into the skin on my back.
Break the flesh, Cassia,
I say only to myself.

She does break the flesh and my body reacts in such a primal way that I can’t help but hurt her as I force myself inside of her as deeply as I can go. Her neck arcs and her arms come up behind her, seeking the wall behind the bed. I can’t bring myself to
ask
if I’m hurting her. I
want
to hurt her. I want to feel her breaking beneath me, to see the tears in her eyes, to hear the shuddering of her breath. I want to know that she wants the pain as much as I need to inflict it.

Tiny moans and whimpers move through her throat as I thrust into her. She’s so small and tight that I feel like her first all over again.

All over again…

Almost losing control too soon, I force the feeling of ecstasy back for as long as I can, rotating my pelvis against hers to hit her sweet spot. She pushes her hips forward, her thighs tightening around my waist as if she could crush me with them. “Don’t stop,” she says breathily, “please don’t stop.” And I push harder until she breaks the skin on my back again with her fingernails and it sends me over the edge. I devour her lips as I empty myself inside of her, moaning intensely into her mouth. Her thighs strengthen as I feel her tighten and throb around my cock. She whimpers again, arcing her head back against the mattress, her breathing out of sequence as her body melts into oblivion beneath mine.

What have I done?

I gaze into her eyes, holding myself deep inside of her, and I brush her cheeks with the pads of my thumbs. Her eyes, filled with so much love and innocence, they only briefly detract my need to cut her back with my blade and lick the blood from her wounds. To bond with her the way I bonded with Seraphina.

I
want
to do it.

But I know that I can’t. I’ve taken it too far with Cassia already. I can’t allow myself to take her all the way, or then I would truly be the Devil.

I press my lips to her forehead. She smiles up at me softly.

I’m no better than Seraphina…

Intent on stopping this, I start to pull myself out of her, but her legs tighten around my waist as she holds me still.

“Don’t go,” she whispers, her fingertips touching my lips, her other hand winding carefully within my hair. “Please don’t go.”

She kisses me lightly.

I try to avert my eyes, because I’m ashamed for what I’ve done. It isn’t the first time I’ve given in to Cassia like this, it’s not the first time I’ve slept with her in the year she’s been my prisoner. But it
is
the first time I’ve done it with something more in my heart than darkness.

“Cassia, I shouldn’t have—”

She shakes her head softly against the mattress. “Please stay.” Her smile fades and she suddenly appears dejected, but I feel like it’s not an attempt to keep me here.

It’s something else.

Her head falls to the side and she looks out at the room as silence descends between us. I wait patiently, though hanging onto her sudden change of mood with an
im
patient and conflicted heart. I feel like what’s left of my world is about to be pulled from underneath me.

“I was ten-years-old when I met Seraphina,” she says in a distant voice that seizes every fiber of my consciousness. “She was my best friend…until she murdered my parents and was sent away.”

A tear moves from the corner of her eye and pools around her nose, resting in that little indention above her lip.

I swallow down her words and say nothing because there’s nothing more to say. I know now that everything is lost and I’m never going to get it back.

Chapter Seventeen

Cassia

Fredrik carefully raises his warm body from mine and sits upright with his back against the wall. His legs are moved apart, arms propped on the tops of his bent knees. He tilts his head back. His beautiful, stubbly face appears crestfallen and defeated as he gazes out at the room.

I lift up and position myself between his legs, the side of my naked body laying against his chest. I can still feel him moderately hard as his manhood presses against my lower back. I love to sit between his legs. He makes me feel safe. And I melt into him when I feel his warm, solid arms wrap around me from behind.

“My mother and father were very loving people,” I begin. “They would never hurt me. But Seraphina didn’t like them. She said they were evil and that she wanted to help me get away from them.”

I pause, attentive to Fredrik’s heartbeat thrumming through the muscles in my back. I feel the breath from his nostrils warm against the top of my shoulder as he releases a long, deep breath from his lungs.

Still, he doesn’t speak, but holds me very close to him, and I tell him what happened exactly the way I remember it.

Twenty-three years ago…

I thought the girl who moved in next door was a little strange. I never saw her around her parents. I didn’t even know there was a little girl living next door until months after they moved in. I was alone in the shed behind our house—I spent most of my time there because it was quiet—when I heard the girl singing in the backyard. I crept out of the rickety metal door, trying not to let my father know about my hiding place, and snuck around the side to peek through a slit between boards in the big wooden privacy fence that separated our backyards. She had jet black hair cut just below her shoulders. And she wore a pair of pink shorts with a whimsical rainbow printed on the left thigh—I had a pair just like them and was intrigued by that otherwise insignificant detail.

She was sitting on the grass with a stuffed animal of sorts in her lap, tucked in-between her crossed legs. Beside her was a thick coloring book. I thought that was strange, too, as we looked about the same age and I had already grown out of coloring books. She scribbled furiously across the paper with a crayon while she sang quietly to herself. She had a beautiful, melodious voice.

I pressed my face farther against the fence, trying to get a better glimpse of what she was coloring, but she was a little too far for me to make it out.

But then she sensed she was being watched and the singing stopped. Her head shot up and she just sat there for a moment, listening for sounds. I didn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe. I don’t know why I was trying so hard to remain unseen because I really wanted to talk to her. Maybe a part of me—the part that knew how dangerous she was before the rest of me did—was afraid of her.

And then she saw me. I only moved an inch because my back was starting to cramp, but that slight movement was enough to give me away.

She watched in my direction for a minute before rising to her feet and approaching me, the stuffed animal—a raggedy, dirty lamb, I noticed as she got closer—in one hand and a red crayon in the other. She left the coloring book on the grass.

“Hello,” she said, tilting her head to one side as if to see clearer through the uneven gap in the boards. “What’s your name?”

“Cassia Carrington,” I answered. “What’s yours?”

“Seraphina.” She smiled toothily.

I smiled in return. I liked her instantly.

She sat down in the leaves next to the fence and I did the same and we talked for a few minutes.

“I haven’t seen you at my school,” I said.

“Nah, I’m home-schooled.”

I watched her through the gap in the fence, only able to glimpse the dirty lamb in her lap and the tip of her index finger tracing around its little beady black eye.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“I’m ten.”

“Me too,” she said. “But my birthday is almost here, so I’ll be eleven.”

“I just had my birthday. My mom bought me a new bike.”

“That makes me older than you,” she said with an innocent air of authority in her voice that actually made me feel sheltered. “But I don’t have a bike,” she added sadly.

I never had any brothers or sisters and had always wanted one. It was hard being an only child, especially when I had no friends, either. At least not until Seraphina. And in ten minutes of talking to her, I felt like I not only finally had a friend, but that older sibling that I always wanted, too.

It took me a moment to realize there had been something sad in her voice when she said she didn’t have a bike.

“Hey, you could come over and ride mine whenever you want,” I offered.

I heard her sigh. “Thanks,” she said, paused and then added, “but my dad doesn’t like for me to go to other people’s houses.”

“Oh.” I flicked the end of a twig with my middle finger and it shot across the grass. “Well, maybe I could come to
your
house.”

Seraphina was quiet for an even longer moment.

“They don’t like that, either,” she finally said, “but we can still be friends.”

I wasn’t sure how that would work out seeing as how a fence separated us and she wasn’t allowed to have company or to go anywhere.

But we made it work.

Every day after I got home from school Seraphina snuck over into my shed through an opening in the fence that we made at the end of the backyard. I had used a hammer from the shed to loosen the nails on two boards so that we could slide them out of the way and easily put them back in place to make it appear that nothing had ever been moved.

Seraphina and I spent a lot of time in my shed, playing with Barbie dolls and stuffed animals. I even started coloring again and I found that I really liked it.

We were inseparable, like sisters. But as the weeks wore on, I began to see just how different we were, how different our parents were.

One afternoon, the rough voice of her father yelling her name from the back door, caused Seraphina’s whole body to shake like she had been stuffed in a freezer. She ran out of the shed as fast as she could and scrambled on her hands and knees across the dirt and leaves and rocks toward the secret opening in the fence. I guess she was afraid if she ran upright that her father would see her from the back porch.