Chapter 9 Xavier/Elena POV
I smiled, the expression that had opened throats and closed borders.
"Then she'll understand the true nature of the game. And she'll have to choose: the mask that torments her, or the man who offered her death." I turned to face him fully. "Except the honesty was also mask. The only truth is that I will have her, Leo. Completely. Willingly. She will come to me understanding exactly what I am, and she will choose it anyway."
"Because you'll make her want you."
"Because I'll make her want herself." I moved to the window, looking out at the same balcony where she'd trembled hours before. "The version of herself that exists in my presence. The version that doesn't need to pretend, or hide, or kill. The version that simply... is."
Leo was silent for a long moment. Then: "And if that version doesn't exist?"
I laughed, and this time the warmth was genuine. "Then I'll create it. I'm the Tyrant, Leo. Creation and destruction are the same skill, viewed from different angles."
I heard him leave, his footsteps fading down the corridor. I remained at the window, watching the moonlight on stone, imagining her fingers touching herself in the dark, her confusion and shame and reluctant pleasure.
She was searching for a king to destroy. She would find a man who wanted to be destroyed, and who would rise from that destruction more powerful than before.
I touched the glass, cold against my palm, and whispered her name into the night.
"Elena."
Somewhere in the palace, I knew she felt it.
Elena POV
That night, the moonlight through the window cast pale rectangles across the floorboards, and I watched dust motes drift through those columns of silver like tiny imprisoned stars.
My chamber at the inn was nice, luxurious, and modest, with two narrow yellow lace beds, a washstand, a single chair where Grace had left her shawl, but the walls felt too close, the air too thick, the silence too loud.
I sat on the edge of the mattress in my sleeping gown, the linen thin enough to feel cool against my overheated skin.
Grace was still at the merchant guild, wouldn't return until midnight perhaps. I'd told her to take her time, to gather what intelligence she could about palace supply routes and which merchants held the king's favor.
She'd given me that look, the one that said she knew I was avoiding her questions about what happened in the balcony about why I'd returned with my hair disheveled and my hands shaking.
I hadn't answered. I couldn't.
My fingers moved without thought, tracing the curve of my collarbone where the gown's neckline gaped. The fabric there was still slightly damp from when I'd washed upon returning, as if I could scrub away the evidence of what had happened. What I'd allowed to happen.
Dark.
His name sat heavy on my tongue, unspoken but tasted, like smoke or the residue of wine. I pressed my fingertips harder against my collarbone, finding the exact spot where his thumb had rested when he'd pinned me against that pillar.
I'd memorized the pressure, the heat, the way his fingers had spread to claim more of my throat, not squeezing, not yet, but holding me with the promise that he could.
Never touched. Never held. Never wanted.
That had been my armor, my certainty. The assassin didn't feel. The assassin didn't need. I'd built walls so high I'd forgotten what lay behind them, convinced myself that the hollow spaces were strength rather than absence.
And then a stranger in a mask had put his hands on me, and those walls had crumbled like they'd been made of sand all along.
My hand moved lower, following the path his fingers had taken. The linen of my gown bunched as I traced the curve of my breast through the fabric, finding the nipple already tight and sensitive. I gasped at my own touch, at the memory of his breath against my ear, his voice low and knowing.
"So responsive," he'd said. "The king will enjoy breaking you."
But it hadn't been the king's name I'd whispered in the darkness of my own chamber. It had been his. Dark. The monster's monster, the shadow that served the tyrant, the man whose touch had shown me exactly how much I'd been missing.
I pushed the gown down, letting my breasts fall free to the cool air. My nipples ached, desperate for contact, and I took them between my fingers, rolling and pinching with increasing pressure. The sensation shot straight to my core, making me shift on the mattress, thighs pressing together against the throbbing emptiness there.
"Dark," I whispered, testing the sound of it in the silence. It came out broken, needy, nothing like the controlled assassin I was supposed to be. "Dark, please..."
Please what? I didn't know. I didn't care. I only knew that his hands had been sure and demanding, that he'd touched me like he already owned me, and that I'd yielded to it with a shamelessness that still made my face burn.
I pushed the gown higher, gathering it around my waist, and let my legs fall open. The air against my exposed core was shocking, intimate, the vulnerability of it making my heart race faster. I was wet, soaked, embarrassingly so, the evidence of my arousal slick against my inner thighs.
My fingers found my center, sliding easily through the folds, and I bit my lip to stifle the moan that threatened to escape. I was loud, Grace had teased me last night when I touched myself in the darkness, thinking I was silent. "You sound like you're dying," she'd said, laughing. "Or being murdered. Either way, not subtle."
I'd learned to be quieter since then. But alone in this chamber, with the memory of Dark's hands burning through me, I didn't want to be quiet. I wanted to be loud. I wanted to be heard. I wanted him to somehow know, across whatever distance separated us, that I was thinking of him, that his touch had ruined me for solitude.
I pressed two fingers inside myself, the stretch familiar but insufficient, nothing like the fullness I craved. My hips lifted off the mattress, seeking more pressure, more friction, more anything. I worked my fingers in and out, setting a rhythm that matched the pounding of my pulse, and used my other hand to circle my clit with desperate, erratic strokes.
"Dark," I gasped, the name torn from me like a confession. "Dark, please, I need you, I need—"
What did I need? His hands, rough and certain. His mouth, which I'd never tasted but imagined constantly, would it be cruel or tender?
His cock, filling the emptiness I'd never acknowledged until he'd shown me what wanting felt like. All of it. Everything. I needed to be taken, claimed, undone and remade by the only man who'd ever made me feel.
The pleasure built with crushing intensity, each stroke of my fingers driving me closer to the edge.