Chapter Sixty: I Love You Both

Aya sat alone in a rusty, reeking cell with her wrists and ankles clapped in iron chained cuffs bolted right into the ceiling. It was a far more secure detention than the tarp she had been bound up in the last time she had been dragged down into these cells, yet Aya felt certain she could slip these chains and break open that door, because this time she was still wearing her full assassin’s gear. It had been Razier’s men to lead her down here and chain her up, and those prudish men had performed only the most cursory search to strip her of the obvious weapons belted at her waist. They did not know about the arsenal of poisoned needles she carried hidden in the lining of her shirt, and they did not know how easy it was for Aya to pick a lock with those slender pointed implements.

She already had one such needle in the keyhole of the cuff holding her right-hand, fishing with careful patience to find the catch, even as the steps of the guards who had led her down here retreated away down the corridor. It would be safer to use a sedative needle for this work, in case the needle slipped and pricked her finger, sending its deadly poison into her veins. Aya had used the only two sedatives in her possession to knock out Clara and then Carnen though, so deadly poisons were all she had left.

She worked with careful diligence, but even taking her time with it, the cuff clicked open in under a minute, and she set to work on the left side, and then her feet.

The rusted lock on the door of her cell took her longer to open. She needed two of her needles working in tandem to keep pressed in the three layered catch until the lock was tricked into thinking it had a proper key. Still, it was less than ten minutes from the time she had been brought down here to the moment she was striding out the open door of the cell, heading off toward the upper halls of the palace to speak with Charlotte.

A torch rounded the corner ahead of her and she ran straight up the wall, holding herself up against the ceiling to keep hidden until this guard passed beneath her. She would drop down and incapacitate him then, because she was still within sight of her empty cell and she could not afford a sounding of the alarm yet proclaiming her escape. The cloaked Arakeshi stopped in his tracks, just as she’d feared, the second the light of his torch fell over the empty cell ahead. He was already turning, no doubt intent on alerting the other guards.

Aya dropped down and charged him, but the man deflected her first most savage swing set to catch him beneath the jaw and knock him out cold. “Do not charge me in all out attack like a rabid dog. It is I, Kareem.”

Aya ripped back her hand, demanding angrily, “What are you doing roving the dungeons, young marquis? Shouldn’t you be preparing for your wedding?”

“Of course,” he assured her, stripping off his deep-hooded cloak. “but I could not leave you lonely in prison, cali. Or should I say Aya?” He smiled, and she blushed, avoiding that smoldering gaze, still shining with such infatuated craving. “Such a beautiful name, Aya. It hangs on the tongue like a sigh.” He leaned in toward her lips, and she quickly pulled back her head.

“Are you not set to marry Charlotte in a matter of hours?” she demanded.

“Yes, but that is many hours away still,” he insisted, completely missing the point.

“Charlotte, is the girl you love ‘with all your soul’, remember? I’m just the demonic peasant distracting you away from her most clearly.”

“Envy is a most insidious emotion, and you must never succumb to it,” Kareem insisted, brushing his hand over her cheek. “Have I not shown my care for you by coming to your rescue this day?”

“I needed no rescuing. I broke free myself. Charlotte is the one in need of rescuing from a marriage to you…”

Other voices echoed from the corridor just ahead, and Kareem quickly swung his cloak around her shoulders, pulling up the hood to completely conceal her features. “This way, my love, unless you wish to be imprisoned anew.”

Aya sighed in annoyance, but kept on the provided disguise as Kareem steered her down the corridor toward a decrepit looking stairwell winding up toward the kitchens. No one dared question the demi-marquis or his cloaked ‘attendant’, as they slipped through the levels and toward the exit. Aya had no idea which room Charlotte had been provided to get cleaned up from the violent scuffle in the church a few hours prior, so she ordered Kareem most sternly, “You will take me to where Charlotte is.”

In response to which he turned a corner and opened the door of one of the castle’s spacious guest rooms, waving her inside.

“Charlotte’s not in here, is she?” Aya filled in flatly, as they stepped into those deserted rooms with their lavish furnishings and already filled copper tub of steaming water.

“No, she is with her ladies in waiting in the west wing of this castle, changing into a wedding dress not spattered with blood, I presume,” Kareem offered calmly, already stripping off his shirt.

Aya instantly whipped out one of her poisoned needles, holding it up in threatening preparation for a throw. “So to clarify, you brought me here just to bed me before your wedding, you absolute cad.”

“Such harsh words, my love.”

“Stop calling me that!”

“But I mean it,” he insisted, crossing the floor and holding her eyes with compelling intensity. “I love you, my Aya. I need you for my own, but we most certainly need to first get you bathed, just as I myself must be cleansed after all the filthy work of storming that church.”

He let his pants drop to the floor, and Aya’s needle went instantly to his neck, just a hairs breadth away from piercing skin. “This is not love, it is obvious lust.” A lust she unfortunately shared, with that bared bronze skin on full display right in front of her. She kept her eyes carefully off the uncomfortable, hanging bits, but staring into those eyes was just as debilitating. “You just said, an hour ago, that you were in love with Charlotte!” she reminded herself harshly. Poor Charlotte, who had been fool enough to believe him.

“I am in love with Charlotte,” came his infuriating response, running his hands up her back. “I love you both. I will take you both into my bed, and we will spend out days most happily together in my harem, where you will be most pampered and protected…”

Damn it, Aya should have packed more sedative needles rather than this most deadly poison held poised right against his throat. As much as he infuriated her, she was not about to ignite a war again by killing him, especially not when she did feel this unfortunate attachment to him...

“You love me,” he insisted, with eyes so warm and hungry.

“I don’t.”

“Then you will, just as I love you. You were meant to be mine, Aya.” He pushed aside her upraised hand that had been hovering the needle right up against his flesh, and she let him. She let it drop to the floor, and she let him kiss her. He pulled her right into his chest, and she remembered the feel of his fingers moving up inside her body.

She remembered Charlotte’s heartbroken expression, watching Aya and Carnen, watching her promised husband choose Aya over her. Then she thought of Charlotte swooning just as hard over Kareem, only to walk in on them now, and see his bare body pressing up against her trusted friend...

Kareem had already lifted up her shirt, cupping his hand to her bare breast, so Aya did as she should have the second he started stripping and jabbed her knee right up between his legs. He gave a startled moan, and she kicked him to the floor.

“I am not going to sleep with you,” she panted. “Not now, and not ever. You cannot love me and you cannot love Charlotte, because your version of love is as fickle as the rising of that worm between your legs! If you want to be happy with your new bride, commit to her! Get to know anything about her other than she has a pretty face and she can speak fluent Arakesh. We were not either of us ‘made to be yours’. Charlotte is marrying you for the sake of politics and nothing else, but I will not let her be pressured into a miserable marriage! I am going to rescue her.”

“She does not need rescuing,” Kareem spat, and Aya faltered. “She is making her own decision to be my bride, because she feels just as deeply for me as I do for her. I could tell the second we locked eyes. She falls happily into my arms, as a woman should, unlike you, you brutish cali!”

“I really aught to just kill you,” Aya muttered, picking up her needle.

“And break Charlotte’s heart?” he snapped. “Enrage my father and truly earn your fate being strung up from the gallows!”

“I am Charlotte’s friend, her only friend,” Aya whispered, tucking the needle back into the sheath in her sleeve. “So I will talk with her, and leave it as her decision.”

She opened the door and found her way blocked by two armed Arakeshi. They had her hands seized in seconds, with pistol leveled at her head. “Your father would be greatly displeased to see you in here, Lord Kareem, so improperly alone with a woman who is not your wife.”

“She will be my wife,” Kareem asserted, easing his way wincing to his feet with hand cupped protectively over his aching crotch. “as I have already explained to my father. The murders she committed were on order of her master, and she is not to be punished for them. I will see her name cleared and I will take her home with me to Arakesh, but in the meantime it seems she must stay back in the dungeons, as she is a most brutal creature not currently fit to present herself civilly.”

He eased his way into the bathtub and motioned for his guards to escort her away. “And have one of the female attendants more thoroughly search her and change out her clothing!” he urged. “She has an arsenal of deadly needles hidden in that outfit.”

The guards closed the door on Kareem and led her back toward the dungeons. Aya knocked the gun from their hands and incapacitated them both the second she had an opening.

She would not be a prisoner, and she would not be chained to Kareem as his whore. Her purpose, as it had been all her life, was to protect Charlotte, to protect her freedom, protect her smile…

And what would Aya even do if Charlotte was not in need of rescuing, as Kareem claimed? Where would Aya even go, once she broke free of this castle? She had no employer now, no resources, no family, and no home. “But Charlotte is my family.” Even if she absentmindedly might always treat her like a maid, expecting Aya to see to the laundry and the delivery of her tea…

She could be Charlotte’s equal if she did as Kareem urged, became his second wife and be taken into a new home, never separated from her closest friend again. “She’d grow to hate me though, sharing someone like that…” Because the heart was not meant to split for two loves. It caused nothing but envy, insecurity and pain.

Aya had spoken the truth anyhow in that she did not love Kareem and could never love him really. Her heart had been given to a brute who had broken it, and every jagged little piece of her was aching for him still.