Juniper & Thorn(68)

He kissed me again with a tender desperation, stroking two fingers inside me. I quivered and bit down on his lip, hard enough to taste the salt of blood. Sevas drew his mouth down my throat and over my breasts, gently circling my nipple with his tongue. His touch was so soft, so sweet, that I could almost forget Dr. Bakay’s knife had ever been there at all.

Finally he entered me, and a fiery braid of pain and pleasure laced from my broken maidenhead up my spine. It hurt, and then it didn’t, and then it hurt again, and sometimes it felt so good that I wished he would never stop. When the ache returned I couldn’t help it; I sobbed quietly, muffling the sound against his shoulder.

Sevas paused at once, blinking at me in alarm, and said, “I told you I can’t bear to make a woman weep.”

I felt sorry that I had upset him, and I didn’t want him to stop. Sevas brought up a hand to cup my cheek, thumb brushing over my lips, and once it was there I felt the urge to taste him, so I took two of his fingers into my mouth.

He let out a long trembling breath and started to move again, slowly at first and then lengthening his thrusts until I could feel how hard his heart was beating through our adjacent chests. With each bolt of pain I bit down on his fingers, hands fisted against his back.

“Do you know what I would do to everyone who ever called you plain-faced?” Sevas panted, lips brushing the shell of my ear. “I would kill them.”

I laughed, and it did something strange to the place where our bodies were connected, jostling us both. I took his fingers out of my mouth. “With your wooden sword?”

“I think you’re making fun of me.”

It was not long before he finished with a groan, spilling himself inside me. Sevas collapsed like a card house, breathing hard into my hair, against my throat. I shut my eyes and felt the seconds drag past as he went soft within me, and when at last he pulled out I opened my eyes and turned my head to look at our reflections.

There was my naked body and my soft, heavy breasts, cut into jagged pieces by the cracked mirror. There were Sevas’s eyes, damp and blue and shining, and chest rising and falling hugely, like something very large was trying to press out from under his skin. The fingers that had been in my mouth were pricked with small wounds, in the shape of my sharp little incisors, just like the gash on my knuckle.

I kissed his cut fingers, as if in apology. Sevas wiped away the mess of blood on my thighs, staining his palms the color of sour-cherry kvass. Already I felt so horribly empty without him inside me. I wished I could catch him there, keep him there, swallow him whole.





Chapter Eleven




There were no windows in the mirrored room and so I only woke when I felt the wooden floor pressing hard against my hipbone, and something prickling at my scalp. I sat up and shook glass shards from my hair. Sevas rolled over onto his back, flinging one hand over his eyes even though it was as dark as it had always been. His lips were wonderfully swollen and it made me flush just to look at him, still unclothed, our bare legs tangled like an extraordinary nexus of tree roots.

I could have stared at him this way forever, and perhaps stayed curled there with him, if not for the pain in my side and the throb of something torn open between my thighs. I gave him a soft nudge in the shoulder and Sevas groaned, lashes fluttering.

The moment he’d sunk himself inside of me a vision had burst across the insides of my eyelids, painting everything in lurid color. I saw Derkach’s hands, huge and hairy, and the flash of a silver belt buckle. It was so awful that I’d bitten down on Sevas’s lip and hoped that as he bled the memory drained out of us both.

And then I’d wanted only to pour myself into the space that the memory had left in him, like sugar in black tea, thinning it and making it sweet. I kissed him back as hard as he kissed me, and with every moment that he thrusted into me, Derkach’s face faded from both of our minds. Now I saw the stain of my blood on his palms, darkened with the hours to a color that was nearly black. I almost thought to lick it off, to see what my broken maidenhead tasted like—it had to be as heady and good as honey wine to make Papa want to guard it like a panting dog—but I figured that would perturb him. Instead I jostled Sevas again, with greater force this time, and heaving a weary sigh he opened his eyes at last.

“Marlinchen,” he said. His gaze traveled slowly over me, over the hair that lay in coils covering my breasts. Last night I had not felt ashamed of them, their softness and heaviness, but now I did, and I was glad that they were hidden. “I’m sorry for making you bleed.”

I wasn’t sorry at all, but I didn’t tell him so. Instead I reached for my gown, torn nearly beyond repair, all the snapped corset laces strewn about the broken glass. As I tried to smooth the pleats of the skirt I felt like a ghost returning to its body, only I was both the body and the ghost. The ghost’s words bubbled up in me. “I have to go home.”

Sevas propped himself up on his elbows, swollen mouth twisting. “What?”

When I’d run last night, tucking the compact into the cleft of my breasts, when I’d turned away from Papa’s outstretched hands, the magic of my long-kept secret breaking this spell, I hadn’t thought of returning. I’d only thought of fleeing from the dragons at the door.

But now I knew I would have to return. I knew it in my marrow and blood. I belonged to that house like one of Undine’s china dolls or the grandfather clock or Papa’s last cat-vase. It had birthed me in all of my ugly, feral strangeness, and so it would have to take me back. Only—