Her Cruel Redemption (The Dark Reflection #3)

Chapter Fifty-Three

I shivered in the cold, arms wrapped around myself. The black water looked even colder. The wooden planks of the pier loomed above us, casting deep, broken shadows over the water. Somewhere above, a board creaked beneath boots as someone passed.

Draven was already knee-deep in the water, his boots sinking into the mud with every step.

‘Wait,’ I whispered, grabbing his arm as he reached for the next beam. A voice drifted down from above.

‘Nothing there. Tell Margrave he’s clear to cast off.’ The soldier's voice was sharp, edged with impatience. ‘But do another sweep of the dock.’ We held our breath. A pause. Then boots scuffed against the wood, moving away.

‘How deep is it?’ I barely mouthed the words. I hoped it was shallower than it looked. I wasn’t a strong swimmer.

He glanced at the water, at the ship waiting to carry us away. Held out a hand. ‘Just hold on. We’ll use the pilings to guide us.’

I swore quietly as I took his hand. ‘You’d better not let go.’

‘Never.’

The water pulled at me, the cold creeping up my legs with every step, the mud sucking at my shoes as it rose to my waist, my chest, my neck, and when the ground dropped away a surge of panic swamped me. I kicked my legs wildly, scrambling for the next piling as above men were shouting to one another, preparing to cast off. As we gathered at the last piling, I struggled to keep my head above water, my breath fluttering in and out of my chest in frantic gasps, holding on to Draven’s hand like I would sink into the black abyss below me if I let go. That point of contact was the one thing keeping me from flailing about in panic, the one thing anchoring me to a feeling of safety. Because whatever else he was, I knew he wouldn’t let me drown. He had already proven that.

The scrape of the gangplank being drawn aboard was our cue, and we were striking out towards the stern, crossing the gap between the piling and into the open. If we were going to be seen, now was the time, but I couldn’t concentrate on that. I had to just focus on kicking my feet, on gasping down breaths, and blinking through the waves assaulting my eyes. Closer… closer… then… Draven was reaching out, grasping at a rope on the hull, and we were scrambling up the slick ladder. Halfway up, my foot slipped. His hand shot out, catching my wrist before I plunged back into the black water.

Voices drifted from the deck. Sailors shouting orders, boots thudding on planks. We barely had seconds. Draven peered over the railing, then vaulted over in one smooth motion. I scrambled after him, flattening against a stack of barrels as a sailor passed mere feet away.

The cargo hatch yawned open ahead, just as Margrave had promised. We slipped inside, vanishing into the hold just as a voice barked, ‘Check those lines again!’

The hold was dark and humid and stacked with crates and barrels, some lashed down and others shifting with the roll of the waves. I spotted a gap behind a cluster of grain sacks by the wall and we ducked behind it. Only then did I realise how violently I was shaking with cold and adrenaline.

‘Come here.’ The command was soft and accompanied by a pair of hands drawing me over, even though he was just as wet as I was. I couldn’t believe I was on board a ship headed for Aether knew where. With him.

One moment at a time.

Shafts of daylight split the hold. Draven was asleep, his head resting against one of the bags of grain, arm still wrapped loosely around me. I was trying not to wake him. I wondered how long it had been since he slept. Wondered where we were going, what we would do when we got there. I traced patterns in the dirt on the floor, too sore and uncomfortable to sleep, doubts spinning through my head. As the adrenaline had faded away, they had crept in, whispering through my mind, demanding to know how I could justify this choice. What if he turned on me? What if he abandoned me? The sharp scrape of a door opening cut into the silence. Boots on the boards.

‘Come out,’ Captain Margrave’s voice barked. ‘Now.’

I glanced at Draven. His eyes were open, and he was already shifting to rise to his feet. He stood, and I followed, stepping out from behind the grain sacks to where the captain was waiting with folded arms.

‘I’m sorely tempted to throw you overboard here,’ he said, voice gruff. ‘But I gave your friend my word, so I’ll take you as far as the next port. It’ll be a few days. We’re in open ocean now, so if you’d prefer a bed and a cabin, you can have one.’

I raised my brows in surprise. I honestly thought he’d been about to cast us out. But he seemed a little more relaxed now, his shoulders lower, his face less riddled with tension lines. Perhaps the open ocean put him in a better mood.

We followed him up the steps, emerging onto the deck into a sharp blast of sunlight and brisk, salty air. Sailors called to one another and laughed, their voices full of humour, and I craned my neck to take in the sails above, bloated with wind as they took the ship soaring across the ocean. There was no land in sight, not in any direction I could see. Just endless stretches of sea. And the hope that poured into me at the sight was euphoric, because if there had ever been a chance at a new beginning, then surely it was on the open ocean where the land-bound past couldn’t follow, and the horizon promised new possibilities at every turn.

The sailors eyed us curiously as Margrave led us across the deck, but there was no hostility for now, not with the captain’s treatment of us signalling that we were welcome aboard. Even so, it was a relief to reach the cabin he was letting us take.

‘There’s food,’ he said, motioning to a table where a small basket had been set. I spied a bottle of what I hoped was wine poking out of it. ‘I don’t want you in the mess, so I’ll have more brought. It’d be better for the crew to have as little to do with you as possible.’

‘We’ll keep to ourselves,’ Draven agreed. The captain gave a brisk nod and then he was closing the door on us, the sound of his boots fading away as he returned to guiding his ship. I crossed to the bed and sank onto it with a sigh, relieved to rest my aching body on a softer location than the floor of the cargo hold. Relived that we wouldn’t have to hide the whole time we were aboard.

‘What are we going to do when he boots us off at the next port?’ I asked, rubbing my eyes with my hands, mind beginning to dart down the path of what the future held.

Draven hadn’t moved from the doorway. His eyes were shadowed as he watched me, his jaw lined with more than a few days-worth of stubble, his hair scruffy where it had rubbed against the sack he’d been sleeping against, the dark fabric of his shirt and pants streaked with pale lines of salt. And the aching that always filled my chest when I looked at him felt softer, now. Warmer. Less shot through with rage and fear.

‘What?’ I asked, a shiver of doubt creeping into my voice. What was he thinking, with all that raw pain gleaming in his eyes? ‘Is something wrong?’

He approached, crossing the cabin to stand before me. Slowly, he offered his hand.

I stared at it, baffled.

‘Hello,’ he said. He cleared his throat, tried again. ‘My name is Draven Soveraux,’ he continued, his voice a little steadier. ‘I’m the son of a kidnapped Yoxvese woman and a cruel king. I’ve spent half my life in captivity and the other half seeking vengeance for it. I’ve killed and tortured and commanded armies and started wars. I’ve had magic and lost it. Had a crown and lost it. Had you .’ He paused, swallowed. ‘And lost you.’

I felt like I could hardly breathe. My heartbeat was strange and fluttery and buoyant. ‘What are you doing?’

‘What I should have done in the beginning.’ He moved closer, his hand dropping lower, seeking out mine. I let him take it as he crouched before me, sinking to his knees. ‘I have used you and kept secrets from you. I’ve hurt you and made you my enemy. And I’ve spent far too long pretending that I haven’t loved you since the moment you looked up at me from that street corner and offered to sell me something when you had nothing left to sell.’

I was shaking my head. Something brittle in me had snapped as he’d spoken, and I was suddenly riddled with fear, wrapped tight by that hissing voice that warned that this couldn’t be real. ‘What is this?’ I demanded, the fear raising my hackles and making me want to shut down, block him out, build up the walls around me so he couldn’t reach me. Because if I let myself believe him, what would happen to me when he revealed it had all been a lie? How would I survive it? ‘You think we can just start again? Just run away and pretend none of it ever happened? And what’ll we do with ourselves if we do? Build a house? Have a baby? Forget this was ever our life?’

‘If that’s what you want,’ he said simply, earnestly. It struck me back into silence. ‘If you want a safe, settled life, I’ll give it to you. I’ll build you a house in a shaft of sunlight and bring you tulips every day. I’ll hold you through your nightmares and kiss every place I’ve ever hurt you. I’ll give you thousands of new memories until the old ones don’t ache anymore. If you want me to get on my knees and beg for your forgiveness every night for the rest of my life, I’ll do that too. Anything, Rhiandra. Command me and I’ll do it. If you want another palace, I’ll build you one. If you want to burn the world down behind us, I’ll light the match. I don’t care what future we’re chasing, so long as it’s one where we belong to each other the way we should have from the start.’

I was trembling. I couldn’t stop. It was one thing to save his life, but another entirely to believe in the future he painted. To pin all my hopes on something that was so dependent on him. ‘You aren’t a good man,’ I said, my voice unsteady.

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But I can be good to you. I want to be.’ He cupped my face, grey eyes scanning mine like he was searching for something he’d spent his whole life looking for. ‘I don’t want to be the reason for any more of your pain,’ he said. ‘If you don’t think I could ever earn your trust, and you want to walk away… then I’ll let you. I love you enough to let you.’

Abruptly, I stood. Went to the table. Rummaged around in the basket Margrave had left us until I found a glass and the bottle I’d spied before. Gritted my teeth as I yanked out the cork. Slopped a generous helping into the glass. Drained it. Poured another. Draven had risen to his feet, eyeing me with some concern.

I shook the bottle at him. ‘That is bullshit.’

He frowned. ‘I meant all of it. I have nothing—’

‘The last part,’ I interjected. ‘About letting me walk away. What, I give up everything for you and then you just let me walk away ? After everything you went through to force yourself into my life? After you chased me across two kingdoms? No fucking way do you get to feed me that line.’ I took another drink, steadied by the warmth of the wine in my stomach.

‘I know that’s what I did,’ he said slowly, ‘but if—’

‘No!’ I smacked the glass down onto the table. Fortunately I’d emptied it, because the roll of the ship sent it promptly tumbling to the floor. ‘If we do this, there is no walking away. Not for either of us, do you understand? We have nothing but each other to rely on, now, so you’d better be fucking reliable. You’d better make it worth committing treason and being exiled.’

Slowly, he began to smile. Widely. Like sunlight breaking across his face. Dimple and all. ‘Alright.’

I swallowed, completely unnerved by the pulsing, expanding, consuming warmth in my chest, the way it seemed to want to leech out and take over my entire body at the sight of that fucking smile. Still didn’t trust the feeling. ‘Alright,’ I said, brusquely, turning my back on him to pick through the basket again, busying my hands. ‘Do you want a drink before I finish it all?’

He didn’t answer. I heard his footsteps behind me, hands stilling as I felt him draw close, heat beginning to flush my skin. But he didn’t reach for me. When I turned, it was to find him standing so close, so readily within my grasp, looking down at me with an expression that mirrored that warm glow in my veins. But it was like we didn’t know how to touch each other anymore. I felt so raw, so exposed, my skin so sensitive that it seemed to react to just the flicker of his gaze when he dropped it down, brushed it across the sweep of my neck, raising goosebumps even without touching me, found my lips. He seemed to be almost holding his breath, and it was so strange, that waver of uncertainty I saw in his eyes, so unlike anything I’d ever known in him before. In all the problems between us, all the dysfunction, there had never been uncertainty in this part of who we were. He had seduced me as easily as breathing, as though he knew my mind and what I wanted just as well as he knew my body and how it needed to be touched. The hesitation now was enough to draw my hands to him.

‘Your clothes are crusted with salt,’ I admonished softly.

‘So are yours.’

‘We’ll have to wash them,’ I said, caressing a button on his shirt with my fingers. Undoing it. Slipping down to the next one, and the next one, until they were all gaping open. Exposing skin as I slid the fabric off his arms and it dropped to the floor. My breath caught for a moment at the sight of him, at the bruising. His stomach and ribs were blotted with patches of purple and blue and black.

‘I’m alright,’ he said, reading my expression. ‘You’ll just have to be gentle with me for a few days. No stabbing or lightning bolts to the chest.’

I laughed, but the sound came out high and strangled. ‘I’ll do my best.’

His jaw tightened as I trailed hands over his shoulders, my chest aching. He held so still as I traced his collar bone, his stomach, found the ragged white scar I had put there, his eyes fixed intently on my face, so intently I had to drop my gaze. Gently, I laid my palm against his chest, felt the thrum of his heart, the quickened pace of it.

He took a hold of my wrist. ‘It’s yours. Do what you want with it. Bruise it, break it. Carve it from my chest. It’s yours all the same.’

I anchored myself against that steady beat. ‘You love me,’ I said, and it still sounded like a question, even though I knew. I knew .

His chest rose and fell as he took a deep breath and released it. ‘I love you,’ he said. His other hand found my chin, lifted it until I was looking up at him again. ‘And you love me.’

I licked my lips. Swallowed. My heartbeat was frantic. But I held his grey eyes. Because I had felled a kingdom and stared down an army and called storms from the sky. I was not going to be cowed or defeated by this. ‘I… love you.’

I had only a moment to admire the relief, the triumph, the joy in his eyes before he was kissing me. My hands laced around his neck, holding him there, drinking him in, my whole body softening against him in the liberation that has washed through me in saying those words. Like I was finally allowed to feel the things I had long been beating down and trying to smother. His hands were slower, more hesitant than they’d ever been as he moved them down my body, breaking the kiss to lift my tunic. I raised my arms, let him draw it over my head, and then he was moving behind me, hands already at the laces of the vest I wore beneath. He peeled it off me and it dropped to the floor, leaving me in just my pants, my focus entirely absorbed in tracking the way his hands brushed along my shoulders. His breath was warm against the back of my neck as he paused there, as though he was waiting for something. I wanted to turn, to read his expression, see the look in his eyes, but then he caressed my neck, traced the line of my collar bone, brushed a kiss against my ear. As he trailed the backs of his fingers over my shoulder, down my spine, pausing to caress every dimple, every mark, every freckle he found on my skin, the aching warmth became too much to hold and it spilled onto my cheeks as tears. No one had ever touched me so gently. I’d never have expected it of him.

He was standing before me again, hands running over my bare stomach, trailing kisses along my jaw. He paused when he tasted the tears. Drew back, scanning my face. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m scared,’ I whispered. And even just doing that, admitting that I was scared, felt so dangerous. And yet… what a relief it was to say it.

‘Why?’ He brushed a thumb across my cheek, collecting my tears.

‘You’ve hurt me before. What if you do it again?’

He said nothing for a long moment, only sweeping his thumb back and forth across my skin, expression grave. But his eyes. The way he was looking at me. No one had ever looked at me like that before. It was almost reverent. It made me feel seen . ‘We were never going to get love right on the first try,’ he murmured. ‘People like us don’t know how to do it. We’ve never lived it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn.’

I drew my hands up his arms, over ripples of muscle and shoulders, twining them in his hair, pulling him to me and kissing him hard. I couldn’t say the things I felt, didn’t know how to, so I would kiss him and hope he knew them. And it was something so wild and terrifying to kiss him, more than it ever had been, now that I’d told him I loved him. Now that it was burning through me and I was allowing myself to feel it. I wanted to touch him all over, wanted to trace every rise and curve of him with my tongue, so I took his hand. Led him to the bed. Sank onto the dark blue covers. Warm sunlight caught on the ridges and edges of him as he stood before me and I unlatched his belt.

‘How gentle?’ I asked, looking up at him as I ran my hand over the bulge in his pants and caught his sharp inhale, my fingers itching to hold him, stroke him, and watch his expression fracture.

‘Maybe not so gentle,’ he said, voice rough as he leaned down, unbuttoning my pants. There was nothing gentle in the way he was looking at me as I lifted my hips to let him slide them off me.

‘Good,’ I whispered, pressing my mouth to his stomach, blood quickening as I found the ridge of his pelvis, felt the strain of his cock as I rubbed my palm against him again, chased his pants down his hips. He was hard and ready and when I took him in my mouth, ran my tongue along the shape of him, his hand shot out to grip the headboard and the other gripped my hair. I loved the sound he made, the fact that I made him make that sound, and my fingers curled into his thighs, holding onto him as I tried to see what other noises I coax out of him. But too soon, he was drawing back, planting his hands either side of me, breathing ragged and heavy.

‘This’ll be over in another minute if you keep that up,’ he said, crawling over me, kissing his way up my stomach, lingering to trawl a tongue over my breast, to take my nipple gently between his teeth as I threw back my head and gasped at the quickening tide of pleasure racing over my skin, ignited in every place his body touched mine.

A moment later he dropped to his elbow with a sharp hiss, hand going to his side.

‘Are you alright?’ I asked, raising myself up on my elbows.

He offered a crooked smile. ‘Fine. Just a broken rib complaining.’

I pushed him up, sliding out from under him until he was sitting on the bed and I was kneeling before him, anxiously studying him.

His breathing was still strained, forced, like he was controlling the pain. ‘Don’t look at me like that, I’m alright.’

‘Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this. You need to rest.’

‘Fuck no. Come here. Make me feel better.’ He caught my hand, drew me to him, and I crawled into his lap, too needy to disagree with this heat pulsing between my legs. I swallowed hard as I held his face, studied it, until his fingers found me and my eyes fluttered closed, breath rushing out of me as he stroked that burning heat.

‘It would make me feel a lot better if I could watch you come,’ he murmured as I ground against his hand. Then he was guiding himself into me and I wrapped my legs around him, drawing him deep, pressing our bodies tight together as I rocked against him. And I did try to be gentle, rolling with the slow dip and fall of the ship, my hands in his hair, our foreheads pressed together, breathing ragged and fast and threaded with quiet cries. I rocked faster as he touched me and all that rising warmth drew down, building into the point where our bodies met, winding tighter and flaring brighter until it released in a blinding flare of pleasure. I buried my face in his neck, held him tightly as I quaked with it, as I felt him move his hands to grip my hips, groaning out ‘ fuck ,’ as he met me there, pulsing inside me with his release. Then he stilled and I remained draped against him, eyes closed.

‘I love you,’ he whispered, and this time when he said it I just let it wash over me, let it fill me and soften me and sweeten my skin.

‘I love you too,’ I whispered back. Madeia, I didn’t think I’d ever get used to saying it. Didn’t think I’d ever be able to without that twinge of fear and a brief flicker of the desire to run. But I let him draw me down to the bed and lay with my cheek pressed to his chest, limp, spent, feeling like I was full of sunlight, like it ran through my veins, filling my skin all the way from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, and my heart beat to a refrain that I couldn’t seem to stop repeating in my head, like the words had been so momentous that they were still echoing even now. I love you. I love you. I love you. The terror of it rumbled just beneath the bliss of the moment, and I knew that soon it would have its moment to strike me, would cut me down for being so soft and vulnerable, but right now it was barely present. Something far away.

And I was done with letting it rule me.