What Lies Beyond the Veil (Of Flesh & Bone, #1)(58)

I swallowed, unable to come up with any kind of response in the face of his wrath. No one in their right mind would threaten to kill a Lord for disciplining a girl.

“He will suffer for every mark on your skin, every moment he frightened you, every tear you shed, before I finally put him out of his misery.” He leaned forward, brushing his lips against the corner of my mouth. Not quite a kiss, not quite not. Everything in me tightened, the fear of the moment dissipating as I shifted with sudden desire to feel that full mouth on mine.

He stared down, as if he knew exactly what flashed through my mind, how the thought of him murdering my tormentor turned me on just as much of the feel of him hard against my belly.

He stepped back as quickly as he’d come to touch me, turning his back and running both hands through his hair as his muscles tensed with frustration. With control. Because I hadn’t asked him to touch me yet, I realized. He’d stayed true to his word, keeping my body safe with him. Even with me naked against him, he hadn’t taken liberties the way most men would have.

I narrowed my eyes on a roadmap of scars on his back, horrific marks of lashings far worse than the ones I’d suffered. The thick, raised white lines covered his back, crisscrossing and overlapping over his flesh as if he’d been whipped more times than I could count.

My dress dropped to the ground, forgotten as I closed the distance between us. I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t seen them before. Had I really been that distracted by his ass?

Yes.

I touched my fingertips to one of the scars in the center of his spine, feeling his body still at my touch. “Who did this to you?” I asked, my voice sounding softer and more broken than I’d ever heard it. Had this been what he’d meant when he spoke of the struggles of his childhood? Of being raised by a woman who hated him?

“Someone who I will never allow to touch you,” he vowed, spinning back to face me. There was no fabric between us when he pressed against me, nothing but the feeling of skin against skin as he pulled me into his chest.

His hands touched my scars, fingers drifting over the pattern as if he needed to memorize every single one. As if he’d need that information one day soon.

I sank into his embrace, drawing comfort from a moment of solidarity with a stranger. We both understood the blinding pain, the feel of our blood dripping down our backs and over our legs. We understood standing in a puddle of our own blood, slipping in it and hanging from our wrists when we couldn’t get our footing.

The snow stopped as quickly as it had begun, but shivers soon claimed me anyway, forcing me to separate from Caelum to get dressed and find a sheltered place to sleep.

I’d never forget the look on his face, the absolute rage on my behalf. My family had loved me, but they’d never promised vengeance for me. No one had ever cared the way he did.

That terrified me.





19





We made our way down past the stone faces and steps in silence. We ignored the tension thrumming between us and the way Caelum’s rage simmered in the air. The snow around us fell more steadily as we traveled, leaving a dusting at my feet as I trudged through the wet underbrush to keep up with him. Darkness fell, leaving me stumbling behind him as he led the way through the woods.

The mountains we hugged grew larger as we walked, behemoths that disappeared into the sky overhead. I couldn’t see the peaks, couldn’t see anything but the bases of them as they changed from tree-lined and welcoming to rocky and jagged before my eyes.

“We’re almost to the caves,” Caelum called ahead of me as I shielded my face from the wind that seemed to tear through me. I shivered beneath my cloak, wondering how he could even be functioning in this cold. “We need to get you warmer clothes.”

I didn’t bother to argue that it seemed unlikely to happen, with us leaving the villages behind us in favor of staying in the mountains. It was far safer this way, assuming I didn’t freeze to death.

“It’s too early for snow,” I protested, glancing up at him and defying the gust of wind that threatened to knock me on my ass.

“The Fae are here, Little One. Everything you thought you knew has changed,” he said, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and tugging me into his side. He used his body to shield mine, guiding me forward through the darkness.

Like so many nights when I’d snuck out of my bedroom to walk through the woods, something in the darkness around us gave me comfort again, reassuring me that it returned in its own time. It wasn’t the unnatural darkness of the eclipse where I couldn’t function; not with the moon and stars shining above us to light the way through the gaps in the canopy.

Even though the darkness was our ally, the cold sank into my clothes, and there was no promise of a night on the living room floor next to the fireplace after I snuck back in to warm me up. There was no Loris to show me other ways to keep warm as the snow fell around us.

There was Caelum, the man who I had a feeling would give me all of that and more, if I let him, but I knew instinctively that I would never be the same if he touched me. He’d ruin the memories I had of fumbling hands and urgent touches, the memory of a friend who gave me something sweet in a harsh world determined to strike me down. I’d already killed him, reduced him to snow before he could drive a blade through my heart and end my life.

I gritted my teeth, the memory of the guards' shock as they studied the Mark on my neck. I’d only seen two others, and given that Caelum’s matched my own, it didn’t seem like they were overly unique, so the reaction made little sense.