Page 30 of A Bond in Blood (Blood Bound Duet #1)

Chapter 30

E ight months.

Two hundred and twenty-four days.

My head laid on Ulrich’s chest while his deep breaths rumbled against my ear. His hand brushed my arm. A touch too intimate for the arrangement we were both most comfortable with.

I sat up, glancing around the room. My eyes found our clothes discarded to the side. Then the blankets, thrown to the ground. Reminders of the lust we’d fallen into after our meal.

“Pondering something?” he asked.

I turned to him, the cream mask he was preferring in recent days illuminated his green eyes.

“What is this?” I asked.

He rose, leaning against the bed.

“A bedroom?” he replied.

I scoffed and slid off the mattress, stepping away from his reach. “We do this nearly every night. Gods, I don’t even know how I can let you touch me when your hands bring so much death each day. Death I’m forced to watch.”

I fell to the ground, covering my face, trying to process this insanity and how easily I was slipping into it. A desperate, foolish attempt on my part to try and piece together this game I was part of—this game I could not fight. Not that I wanted it.

Not when I wanted him.

“Brenna,” he spoke softly, breaking me free from the darkness my thoughts were pulling me down toward.

I lifted my head. “Please.”

“Please what?”

“Stop it all. Please.”

He stared at me, his expression unshifting. The mask of the king slipping over his face.

“That!” I cried. “That! Stop it! Show me something real. Please. I am begging you.”

He didn’t move. His eyes did not even blink.

My chest grew heavy. So heavy I was sure my heart was turning to stone inside of me. My hand landed on my skin. I wanted to understand. There was nothing more that I wanted than to understand why he was who he was. Why his darkness claimed him—and why I was beginning to accept that darkness, rather than run from it.

“Please,” I muttered. “Please.”

I had grown too numb, trying to process all in my heart, to react when he knelt before me. His hand cupped my face; one of those moments of softness that he was prone to show. The moments when I wondered if I could accept him for... him .

“Show me something real,” I cried again.

He shook his head. “Brenna.”

Despite how gently he held my face, his expression was still emotionless. Almost as though he were doing this on purpose—another play in his game.

I pulled away, trying to mask my hurt with rage.

“Two weeks until I must make my decision,” I said coldly, reminding him of my inaction with Bjorn’s sentence.

His expressionless gaze finally broke. Irritation burned in his eyes.

“Yes.”

“And if I do not you will force me to kill this man.”

A nod.

“And if I do not kill him?”

His mouth opened then closed.

“You have no answer.”

Silence.

“You do not want to utter it.”

A nod.

I moved away from him, crawling back in an attempt to put distance between our bodies.

“If I kill you?”

His cream mask was replaced by his shadows. They crawled upward, creating those damned horns he always wore.

“Do not,” he warned.

“If I kill you then you destroy my family and everyone that I love. Only…” My heart broke in two. “They have not come for me. They have not cared. Even when I have given them every detailed depiction of the torment you have put me through.”

I bit back my cry when he moved to his knees, slowly pulling his body toward me. No— crawling toward me.

“I have told them that you have marked me. Branded me as yours even when I leave this island,” I whispered. My hands went back, moving me away from his approach.

“Brenna,” his voice cracked.

“I hate you,” I cried. “I hate this poison of you. The scars from you.” I stopped, standing quickly, and my hand went to my back. “I will never be whole again because of you.”

His approach ceased and he suddenly turned around, baring his back to me.

“What are you doing?” I exclaimed.

Shadows wrapped around my wrist, cradling it while a thick line ran down to the sand. A whip—a whip of his own making.

He pointed to his back and the inked monsters on his skin.

“I have violated a princess of royal standing,” he began.

“Stop,” I replied, trying to shake the whip from my hand, but it only tightened around my wrist.

“I have made her question her sanity.” His shoulders lifted with his breaths. “I have killed before her eyes. I have used her body for my satisfaction.”

“Ulrich.”

He twisted, his eyes burning. “My court has laws for those of us who do these crimes. I have marked you, Brenna. It is your right to do the same in return.”

The shadows pulled my arm upward without my control and I cried out.

“Ulrich! Stop!”

It came down onto his skin with a sickening crack . The noise echoed around us, bouncing off the stone walls of his bedroom.

He didn’t flinch. Didn’t move.

The shadows pulled my arm up again.

“Ulrich!” I begged. “I will never forgive you if you make me do this.”

My arm froze in the air and he turned his head to meet my gaze. His hair hung over his eyes, another mask, blocking me from ever seeing who the man truly was.

“I will never forgive you,” I cried. “Do not force me to become the monster that you are.”

His body shook with my words and I stepped back, covering my lips with my hand as a tear ran down the edge of his mask.

“I have marked you,” he muttered.

I nodded. “Yes, Ulrich. Yes you have.”

The whip was gone as quickly as it had appeared. He remained unmoving in his spot, with his black blood running down his back. My hands balled at my sides. I wanted to feel disgust, or to feel nothing at all, but I could not shake my heart’s need to understand.

It was too much—too overwhelming.

So, I turned on my heel, walking right out of the bedroom door. Leaving him startled and naked on his knees. I could have run, like so many times before. The motion was becoming as part of myself as my skin and breath.

Instead, I walked slowly through the halls, allowing this cold darkness to wrap around myself and my senses. Knowing he was not going to follow, at least not immediately.

No, he was sitting in his penance; this much I knew.

After months of learning every secret passage of this palace, I was grateful for my knowledge while I avoided any eyes or hands that may have tried to reach out to my unclothed body.

If I were truly slipping into madness, if I were truly allowing his depravity and hate to spoil my soul, then I would move through his court like the whore they all believed me to be.

I rounded the corner, passing Olen who let out a startled yell, removing his hands from the man kissing his neck.

“Brenna!” he yelled after me, but I kept walking, not acknowledging him.

His shouts continued, but they were not close. Of course they weren’t, Olen was bound to check on his king . Not the woman warming the ruler’s bed. Soon his words became distant, and my hands shoved open the doorway leading to hallway three.

I walked down the stairs and my tears built until I was standing in the clock room, spinning in place like a nymph that had lost her mind.

Naked in all of her glory.

“Brenna!” Ulrich’s voice echoed around me.

I refused to find him, to acknowledge his choice to follow me. I turned to hallway twelve, needing to cleanse this all from my mind, body, and soul.

His voice repeated my name as I walked away, but I would not respond. I could not respond.

The door to the beach slammed open and my steps grew even slower against the heavy sand. I was mere feet from the water when his hands wrapped around my waist, pulling me against him.

“Let me go!” I begged. “Let me go!”

To my surprise, he released me, and I continued my determined path, flinging my body into the water. I gasped and the cold liquid flooded into my lungs.

I fell, allowing it to envelope me. Begging the Gods of the sea to cleanse me of my sins.

My body grew weightless around me. My sins lifted away from me.

The sins I welcomed—him—he was the sin. He was the poison. The tonic I consumed daily. The green eyes that held me captive. The inked skin that hypnotized me in his bed. The smooth voice—terrifying me and calming me at the same time.

I opened my eyes, barely able to see under the dark surface even with the bright moon above us.

Until he was before me. I pulled my head from the water, gasping in my breaths while he rose slowly.

His shadows were still wrapped around his face, a mask of his own making. Still blocking me from seeing his features, but it was different.

Alive.

“I have hurt you,” he said quietly.

I nodded.

“I do not know how to reckon any of this, Ulrich,” I replied. “I do not know how I can ever return to who I was before I met you.”

He was silent. Just like before. No emotion. No sound.

Until a brief flash of what appeared to be a genuine emotion went across his gaze. A moment of vulnerability.

Despite the weight the expression forced against my lungs, I could not reply. I could not acknowledge it. There was no empathy in my heart for whatever it was he had felt in that moment. Not when he had done all that he could to beat my former empathy, and who I was before out of me.

Not when I was unsure of when the vulnerability would change.

Or even more terrifying: that I did not know if I wanted anything inside of him to change.

“Banishment,” I whispered, voicing my choice for Bjorn’s consequence. “I choose banishment.”

Ulrich remained quiet while I backed away, swimming through the water until my feet were in the sand once more. I only looked back once, finding him staring at me with the moon high above him.

He was a magnificent image at that moment; almost godlike, perhaps something more than a God stared at me.

I let out a shaky breath, retreating back to the safety of my prison, leaving him in the frigid water.

When I reached the clock room, Olen was there, holding a cloak out for me. I fell into the strength of his embrace as he wrapped it around my shoulders.

I stared up at him, tears running down my cheeks.

“I chose banishment,” I cried.

He nodded his head, patting my shoulder. “Yes, princess.”

“Olen,” I whispered.

He bent, scooping me into his arms. Cradling me gently.

“Yes?” he asked as I laid my head on his chest.

“He has poisoned me,” I cried. “He has gotten into my veins.” I met the beast-man’s eyes. “Why do I want more?” I asked.

Olen’s expression strained with unrecognizable emotion, and his head glanced up toward one of the hallways then back to me.

“I do not know princess.”

“I cannot stop it,” I cried. “And I do not always know if I want to.”

Olen turned toward hallway three and I looked up, finding Ulrich at the end of the hallway I’d come from. His hands trembled at his side while he met my eyes.

Then I was carried away, watching the Unseelie King disappear in his shadows while a rage-filled shout, one that I wondered may have been regret, followed me and the man who carried me. Reminding me why I could not fall completely into the madness.

Even when my heart wanted nothing more.