Currency in Flesh

Chapter 18

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I looked at Sean’s ruined hands for only a fraction of a second before my guts flipped and I whirled, the contents of my stomach splattering against the floor. It wasn’t regret or remorse, but seeing a human body maimed so thoroughly was, frankly, unsettling. His garbled cries had quieted to a more manageable weeping so I grabbed the already bloodied hand towel and tossed it over the pile of meat and bone that had once been his fingers.

Lady Cora’s face flashed through my thoughts, and as though summoned, I heard her speak from behind me. “My, my, my, you wicked little thing,” she remarked. Her heels clicked against the floor as she walked around Sean’s restrained body. “I suppose he won’t be touching you without consent ever again, now will he?”

I swallowed down the sour taste of vomit and discomfort before replying. “He deserved it.”

“That, he did,” she agreed. “Are you through with him?” And before I could reply, “For today, I mean. I doubt that a few destroyed fingers is enough restitution for all he has done. ”

Summoning confidence I wasn’t sure I had, I glanced at Sean’s face. His eyes were swollen and red-rimmed, shot through with broken blood vessels and unshed tears. His mouth nauseated me, white foam and flecks of spittle had gathered at the corners like old, chewed food. He looked so weak, so easily broken, and it filled me with an unnamable emotion. Had it been this simple for him to strip me down to bones and fear? Was I ever as strong and determined as I had imagined, or was I always a pitiful thing like the one he had become?

Gentle fingers slid over the denim at my hips, embracing me from behind, right at the swell of my stomach. “You were never truly weak, pet. You were a songbird afraid to attract the teeth of the cat. You were always able to sing.”

My nose prickled, and I knew if I kept speaking, I would cry. But it didn’t feel like a failure to cry in front of Lady Cora. Vulnerable, yes. Shameful? Not anymore. “This doesn’t feel like something a songbird would do. Honestly, is this him paying his due, or me letting out all the anger I’ve allowed to fester for so long?”

“I would ask—does it matter? Is one of those things better than the other?”

“I feel like one of them makes me a good person and the other doesn’t. I don’t want to be like him.” My voice broke on the last word. An unwanted tear slipped down my cheek, hot and fast, and I tried to blink away the rest.

Lady Cora’s face leaned into the curve of my neck, pressing a kiss to the soft spot below my ear. Every inch of my body responded, shifting to angle myself closer to her, giving her as much access to me as possible. I went from sodden to molten in an instant. “I do not care much whether a soul is good or not. Goodness can often equate to a lack of ambition, a fear of judgment. I will tell you a little secret—” She kissed my neck again, her lips parting so she could taste my skin. “The vast majority of souls who make their way to the isles have done things you would consider terrible. The only true innocents counted in their number are the children. The difference between the pit and the isles is how their actions affected the world around them. People like your husband use others, decent people, as stepping stones on the way to their goals. They think nothing of snapping a person’s spine if it means they are an inch closer to what they want. Those in the isles do not rise alone. They make the world a bit more tolerable for the same people your husband would crush beneath his feet. When they are gone, the world is left better by their actions.”

“But we are not a part of the world anymore, we exist here, in the Underworld. What I do to him has no bearing on the world above. It’s just one bitter woman getting revenge.” My hands had begun to shake. I don’t know why she thought that would make me feel better. If anything, I felt worse.

Her grip moved back to my hips and she spun me to face her. This close, I had to tip my chin up to meet her eyes, and she looked down at me with something vicious in the set of her jaw. Lady Cora’s thumb found my chin and she silently commanded my mouth to relax, her feather-light caress across my lower lip. She bent to claim me, the midnight sweetness of her coating my tongue like a deep, rich port. I moaned into her, my breath quickening, the sounds of Sean behind us fading into an intelligible buzzing.

She pulled away and I leaned forward, chasing her touch, and she spoke in a low, smoky murmur. “Some people like sweets, others enjoy heat. My favorite taste is bitterness, blossom. Let me drink of you and delight in the way you reclaim what he stole.”

I hummed in agreement, nodding quickly. “Please.”

“I told you that you’d beg prettily for me one day, pet.”

I realized in that moment, she was right. I would beg for her. I’d grovel and plead and crawl across the floor on hands and knees. I’d do anything she asked of me and then some. “ Do you want me to beg?” I asked. I needed… something. I wasn’t sure what, but I was certain she could provide it.

“Always.” Her eyes roamed over my face, my blood-splattered forearms, down the curve of my body.

I sank to my knees. “Please, Lady Cora, I need you.”

“What do you need, Grace?”

My cheeks flamed. I didn’t know how to ask, how to explain that I needed her to show me how to see things the way she did. How much I craved that sense of peace again. I wanted to feel free, like Sean had no power over me, even from within my own head. Lady Cora let out an audible sigh and I realized she was still able to look inside my thoughts. I need you to make me forget , I thought.

“Oh no,” she said. “You need me to make you remember. You need me to show you just how fierce you truly are. To know that such a man”—her gaze snapped to Sean—“is little more than a tick, a parasite who grew engorged on making you feel small. You need to see yourself on a throne.” As she spoke, the glow of her eyes grew brighter and brighter until the space around her was illuminated. She was a vengeful star.

Lifting an arm, she swiped to the right with utter indifference. Her eyes stayed locked on mine, their intensity so consuming that I was unable to look away. In my periphery, I saw Sean, the equipment, the table, and the cabinet seem to tumble out of the room. With another flippant motion, the room itself upended—reassembling around us with a sparkling marble floor and cathedral ceilings. Lady Cora sat without looking behind her, and when I at last tore my eyes from hers, I gasped.

She sat upon a chair crafted of intertwining, curling vines. A vibrant burst of color surrounded her—ivory daffodils with buttercup centers, dahlias in deep scarlet and rich plum, bundles of golden marigolds, blushing roses, the dusky indigo of irises. Amidst it all, she sat, almost pearlescent with her pale skin and long, white-gold fall of hair. In this place of dark, hard lines, this world comprised from shades of black, it was radiant.

Lady Cora smirked, looking down at where I knelt before her throne. “Beg.”

I should have felt affronted. There was a time in my life when I would have been full of righteous indignation. Hell, not that long ago, at the beginning of my existence in the Underworld, I would have been angry or disgusted or ashamed. Something in me had changed, and I had not yet sifted through the shards of what had shattered to find which pieces remained. So I begged. I crawled. I pressed my lips against the sheen of her stiletto’s pointed patent toe.

“Your Highness—” I raised my forehead from the floor, looking at her from beneath teardrop-spangled lashes. “Make me worthy of you. Please, allow me to earn the place you’ve given me. I want to be your solace. I need to feel you, to please you, to let you break me. I want to be remade.”

“Oh, pet, I will do all that and more. But right now, I do not wish to hear that lovely voice beg me for salvation; I want to hear the words of the whore who hides beneath your flesh. I know that gorgeous pussy is drenched and aching for my touch. So tell me how much you want me to fuck you, Grace.”

A shiver rolled through me, pebbling every inch of my skin and leaving every nerve flayed raw. The lifelong guilt born of Sunday mass and oppressive purity tangled my tongue. Fuck, I wanted her. I shook with how much my neglected body needed her. Tears filled my eyes, tumbling down in fat drops of shame and disgrace. It fucking burned—a rope of suffocating indignity wrapped around my limbs, binding my desire from becoming words.

So I did the only thing that could be done.

With a keening sob, I unleashed the torrent of shame-heavy secret desires. I let it pour from my lips. I shed my dignity like layers of clothing, tossing aside every ounce of self-respect. “I want you to fuck me until I can’t stand. Ruin me, bruise me, make me bleed. Use me until there’s nothing left. Make me your fucking needy little slut, force what I don’t want, demand what I can’t give. I want every part of you inside me, stretch me open until my body falls apart. Wreck my worthless holes until they’re a fucking gaping mess. Take it all, Cora. Please.”

I collapsed to the cold marble, shuddering with uncontrollable weeping that coated my face in tears and snot and spit from my blubbering lips. I was disgusting, so ashamed that I felt fucking sick. I couldn’t lift my head, and I curled in on myself as though I could somehow escape what I had said, what she had heard.

A tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, echoed beside my head—just loud enough to hear over my own cries. I had nothing left in me. I couldn’t even try to parse out what the sound was, but I felt something move over my skin, catching slightly on the lace of my blood-crusted camisole. The strap slipped from my shoulder, I couldn’t care. The ruined shirt was nothing compared to my destroyed psyche.

“Get up,” I heard Lady Cora say. I wanted to, I did, but it was all too much. “I said, get up,” she ordered, the tone of her demand setting my teeth on edge. It was a threat, and if any knowledge still remained in me, it was that her commands were to be followed. Somehow, I got my hands beneath me and pushed myself up on shaking arms. It took longer to turn my body so I could get to all fours, but from there I was able to shift to kneeling. Minutes or hours passed, time no longer a linear thing, but I steadied my limbs enough to stagger to my feet. She stood inches away, before her blooming throne, eyes trained on me and breath coming heavy. Her gown puddled on the floor around her feet in a cascade of inky silk, and not a single strand of her hair was out of place. She was the most flawlessly perfect thing I had ever seen, and as she grabbed my face in her hands and her mouth crashed against mine, I knew I could never want anything more.

Her tongue snaked between my teeth, plunging deep with furious violence. She wrapped one hand in my hair and gripped my neck with the other and I knew she was feeling herself violate me—the way my throat bulged against her palm with each hard thrust. I gagged, body rebelling against the intrusion and she wrenched my head back. My scalp screamed, and I heard strands of my hair snap beneath her fingers. When I retched again, she slid her tongue roughly from within my throat and long strands of saliva trailed behind it. Her punishing fingers snatched the mess of my drool from between us and shoved it back in, pulling her hand free just long enough for her to spit into my open mouth and force my jaw wide enough to accommodate her fist. My teeth scraped over her knuckles and my eyes watered while I looked up at the terrifying radiance of Lady Cora.

“You want me to fuck every one of your slick, desperate holes?” she growled. “You want me to use you?” I nodded frantically, even as I struggled to deal with her hand stretching my jaw past the point of pain. “You like when I make you feel worthless, pet. You love when I hurt you.” I kept nodding as tears cut hot tracks down my cheeks. She bent closer, the hand in my hair moving to cup the back of my head as she pulled me near enough to whisper against my ear. “Because you know I see your worth, Grace. You know I treasure you beyond compare. You know you are my jewel and my only weakness, and it makes your dripping cunt throb to give yourself to someone who would do anything just to show you your own beauty.” I fractured, breaking apart at the seams from the magnitude of her admission. I may not know who Grace Schafer was anymore, but I knew she belonged to Cora. I knew no one could possess me with such horrifying power as this Goddess who had claimed me as her own. I existed for her alone, and it was more than enough.

She pulled free of my mouth and I tasted the copper tang of blood as her knuckles split against my teeth. I swallowed it down greedily, and pressed my thighs together to relieve some of the suffocating arousal that set my body aflame. “Will you take everything I give you?” she panted, eyes wild and feral.

“Yes.”

“Even if it hurts? I will not be gentle.” Her tongue darted out to lick her lips.

“I want it to hurt. I can’t die again, and I know you can heal me. I give you complete consent, Your Highness. Ruin me.” I meant every word.

“Good girl, blossom. Good girl.”