Page 22 of The Queen’s Shadow

I had been resisting it, resisting her, because I knew what I was like.

I had smoked my first cigarette when I was thirteen and was instantly hooked. The first time the effects of whiskey had taken over my brain, I had nearly polished off the bottle. Immediately after I had first successfully managed to bury my dick in a woman, I fucked my way through every female assassin at the Ironclad company within a matter of weeks. After my first murder, I had gone on a four month long killing spree and worked my way up to the highest paying ranks of the company at a record breaking pace.

I was known for a lot of shit, but restraint was not one of them.

Someone like me should not be fucking around with someone who smelled like Kasha. I knew if she ever let me close enough to get a taste, it would be over for me. For her. For us. I would devour her. Consume her. Make her so irrevocably mine, that her legs would shake and she would be screaming my name until her voice fucking broke. If she even so much as looked at another male… my fists clenched and a growl blossomed in my throat.

Like a man possessed, I abandoned my original plan to head to the slave’s room. I walked into Kasha’s empty chambers, her scent getting stronger and stronger with each step.

Before I knew it, I was drowning in her. She was everywhere, all around me, and that feeling of guilt crushed around my heart again.

Godsdammit, I must be some sort of fucking masochist.

Her little vanity, by the opening in the wall that all bed chambers in this palace seemed to have, had a hairbrush with a few strands of blue hair still caught in the bristles. There was a little black notebook next to it with a peacock feather quill and a small jar of ink.

On her bed, a book lay open, as if she had been interrupted mid chapter and would return to it at any moment.

There was a heap of discarded clothes piled up on one of the chairs by the table in the middle of the room. The table itself was covered in a collection of what looked like…tiny jars of dirt? Sand?

I crept forward and picked up one of the jars. She had labeled each of them. I held the small jar up into the light. It was filled with red sand and had been labeled ‘The Viridian Desert.’ She had drawn what looked like a little pile of steaming shit next to it, and despite myself, I barked out a laugh.

There were probably close to a hundred jars with earth and sand from all the places she had travelled in her life, and I found myself meticulously examining each one. There next jar I grabbed was the black sand of Aurora’s Cove. On this label she had sketched a tiny sea drake. There was white sand from The Court of Envy, where she had drawn a little sunshine. My hand paused over a bottle filled with brown dirt and little bits of decaying leaves. My heart thudded in my chest.

This one was labeled ‘Olkuyrbe,’ and next to it, she had sketched a single, tiny, black heart.

Rycon

My fist clenched around the miniature corked jar briefly, before slipping it into my pocket. I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t noticed her little collection the last time I had been in her room. Probably too pissed off.

Turning away from the table abruptly, I was about to storm out when my gaze, again, fell on the small black notebook on her vanity.

Just leave it. I hissed to myself, but I knew before the thought even had a chance to fully form that I couldn’t. I snarled and snatched up the little book with the moleskine cover and nearly dropped it the second my eyes took in the first page.

Names.

I flipped to the next page, and the next. More names. This whole fucking book was just filled with dozens and dozens of names. My vision quivered in and out and my skin rippled with the force of an oncoming shift. I snarled again and slammed my fist into her vanity mirror, reveling in the slice of pain as the glass lacerated my flesh. My knuckles were going to just be mounds of scar tissue at this point.

This little notebook was another item that hadn’t been here the first time I had come to Kasha’s room. She must have filled it up the night before she had been kidnapped. After we questioned the widowmaker about the sheet music that had come in the box with The Flute. Right before we had gone to The Origin’s palace and everything had gone to shit.

The widowmaker’s words rang through my ears;

“If you let me have her, I could feed off of her nightmares for weeks… so many atrocities to choose from. So many delicious violations.” It had cooed.

I had played these words over and over again in my mind as I had flayed it. I hadn’t known about Kasha’s past. No one had told me.

I guess in retrospect, there would have really been no reason for anyone to tell me. And Kasha was understandably touchy about it.

But I had followed her out of the common room that night, to find her here, in her chambers.

“Go away.” She had snapped as I entered without bothering to knock

“No.”

I needed to know what that fucking thing had meant. Its words had scared her, I could smell it on her, and it both excited me, and pissed me off at the same time.

I was a predator. The scent of fear was enough to give me a hard-on on a normal day. Mix it with Kasha’s addicting catnip scent and there was no way I was going anywhere.

What pissed me off was that the fear wasn’t for me. She was afraid of something else. And it wasn’t the type of fear I wanted to be smelling on her.