Страница 49 из 70
Just feel.
Leto’s strokes became tighter, shorter, less controlled. His hands were vises digging into the meat of her hips. She looked back in time to see him point his chin toward the ceiling. That gorgeous expanse of masculine beauty strained. His release was a groan and a string of deep, truncated curses. He ground his pelvis against hers, wringing the last sparks of sensation from them both.
Still panting, he withdrew and sank heavily onto the mattress. With one agile movement—how was he still capable?—he swirled her body down and along his. They were glorious, shimmering with an afterglow that was nearly palpable.
Ny
He rumbled something inarticulate and pulled her flush, chest to chest. “We both knew you would.”
“Did we? I doubt that. Stubborn man.”
“In that regard,” he said, kissing her crown, “I’ve met my match.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Leto awoke with a shiver. Some dream. Remnants stuck to his thoughts like having walked into a spiderweb. Two children. One slightly grown, in pain. Another just born. Small, red-faced, yelling at the world.
His skin was cold. Ny
He wanted to hold her tighter, or pull a tangled blanket off the floor and wrap it around them as surely as they held one another. He did neither, unwilling to wake her.
Bright and beautiful, her gift was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen. Yet every day, she gave him more of herself.
Break her. What a lie. She’d taken everything thrown her way and absorbed it like he could absorb the force of a punch. He was staring at the shadows on the ceiling, wondering when he’d lost his way.
She was becoming even more of a slave to the Asters, just as she was prying his mind apart.
He touched his collar, suffering through another bone-deep shiver of dread.
Leto of Garnis, what would you be without this?
The skin along the edges of the collar was scarred by callouses. He wondered what he would look like without it wrapped around his neck. He couldn’t think back far enough to remember, and even then, the face in the mirror would’ve been that of a young man. He’d been eager to follow the path forged by his father, even though that path had meant suffering, sacrifice, and ultimately death.
Leto would live and die in the Cages.
He shook his head, closed his eyes, but nothing eased the truth: He didn’t believe that anymore. What’s more, he didn’t want to believe it.
For the first time in two decades, he remembered wails of agony—his mother’s voice, shredded into hoarse strips of sound. The crowd had cheered as it always did when strong men fell. His father had been made to look defenseless, slaughtered like a sacrificial lamb. He’d been made to look weak when Leto had never known a stronger warrior. A stronger man. Not himself. Not anyone. For years, he’d endured match after match, guiding his wife through multiple pregnancies until they had what few Dragon Kings could claim: a new family.
Who else could’ve bid that family good-bye, kissing wife and children perhaps for the last time, every time he entered a Cage? Who else could’ve delivered the whip marks that still scored Leto’s back, all in the knowledge it would make his son a more resilient fighter? When faced with the same prospect now—of whipping Ny
His father had been the epitome of honor.
What Leto felt, lying there with Ny
He wanted out of the dark.
The single person who might be able to lead him free of such a place was in his arms—and she wasn’t even a real person. She was a warped version of the woman who’d once been more determined than the passage of time.
Somewhere out there, held in a box or a cell by Dr. Aster, was a little boy named Jack MacLaren. Leto had helped erase the one person who would walk through hell to save that child.
Ny
He’d known it was wrong from the begi
No.
She’d been right. Brainwashed, she’d called him. He wished he could scrub it clean, start over, sink back into that numb, rote place where his misgivings didn’t bite his insides. He should’ve been sated, having won a tough match and fucked a lush woman.
Instead, he was begi
But what kind of man would he be if he kept Ny
“You’re really out of it,” came a sleep-soft voice.
“Hm?”
“I’ve said your name twice.”
Leto opened his eyes and found Ny
“What’s going on in that head of yours?”
Leto forced a small smile. “Have you changed so much that you think I have anything in this head of mine?”
“Changed?” A frown tipped her brows together. “For the better, I hope.”
He gave in to that need to cover their cooled bodies by grabbing the tousled blanket off the ground. “Changed,” he said softly.
“No, no.” She shrugged out of the blanket and stood up from the bed. “I want to see my tattoo. I remember at least that much.” Another pause. Another frown. “I keep . . .”
Leto sat up. “What?”
“I keep losing time.”
“What do you remember?”
“Glimpses of you.” She ducked her head, then pulled on her wrinkled cotton shorts.
Unable to resist that seductive call, he joined her standing in the middle of his small room, holding her from behind. Her dragon seemed to glow in the scant light. “Which glimpses?”
She turned her face and gri
“Wicked,” he whispered against her hair. “Tell me another.”
“You held my face as Lamot seared my back. I want to see what he put there. I think I’ve earned it, don’t you?”
There was no putting off the inevitable. He nodded.
Although the room had only one mirror, there above the sink, he retrieved a breast plate from the wall. It was polished to a shine that was nearly as revealing as a mirror. Ny
“That’s not a serpent.”
“No.”
She peered closer. “A . . . Leto, what does this mean? Did Lamot do this?”
“No,” he said again, as grim as delivering news of a death. “I told him to.”
Whirling on him, she thrust the breast plate into his hands. Stark, strong anger shone from her face. In the last twelve hours, he’d seen her determined, depleted, triumphant, panicked, and ravished. Now she looked ready to steal his skin and sew it into the leather of her armor.