Her Master's Hand Page 14

  She took a deep breath, trying to collect herself. Her sanity was holding by a thread; a very, very thin one. “You… you brought me back here, dropped me off, made your alliance with papa, you made all these promises, and now you’re just going to leave?”

  “No, I’m not just going to do anything,” he told her, then whipped a piece of paper out of his pocket. “You know that fire-coin that nearly burned a hole in us? Well, they only get that hot that quickly if the sender is urgent. This is from the wife of my steward.” He passed the paper to her, holding up a finger and stepping away, rushing around the corner, probably to continue his preparations. The scratch was nearly illegible.

  Ashcroft,

  Although Moriarty would have never dreamed to disturb you in your travels, we desperately need your immediate help. Our elder sons, Coleby (17), and Samuel (5), didn’t come back before sundown.

  Moriarty has been tracking them through the woods for nearly five days now, but the trail is just now lost to him. He is east of New Gate in the Smokey Lines, awaiting your answer for a meeting place. I know you would not let us down in our time of need. Please reply soon.

  In Your Debt,

  Alice

  Maili suddenly felt like she was falling down a very deep hole, with her stomach flying up into her throat.

  Ashcroft was right—he couldn’t ignore the letter. He had to go… a friend’s children were at stake. She wasn’t opposed to putting herself in the shoes of this Alice; if it were her children who were lost, Maili would easily consider someone like herself as collateral damage. Maili’s fate held no weight next to someone’s babies.

  Maili certainly wasn’t heartless enough not to want to give up her protection and life for the sake of two children. The five-year-old alone, out in the woods, would certainly dwarf any and all concern for Maili.

  Ashcroft still didn’t even believe her about Damen. Every time she’d mentioned him, Ashcroft would grow either pedantic or uncomfortable the way men would when they felt one of their own was being sorely accused.

  Ashcroft came back around the corner, and she folded the piece of paper carefully even as he said, “Do you understand?”

  “I do,” she replied. “You’re right. You have to go… But I’m going with you.”

  His jaw locked. “What?”

  She lifted her chin. “It’s the only way. You have to go, and I need you to identify Damen as a wizard. If I go with you, then that will protect me from him,” she illustrated, although Ashcroft was certainly disappointing her with his stubborn lack of insight. Of course she had to go with him, there was no other way, and she wasn’t happy about it, either. This didn’t sound like it’d be a good time—even less of a good time than when she’d been wondering into the woods alone.

  “I’m not going to protect you from him. I’ve hardly done anything but study the man since I was here, and nothing about him cries ‘wizard,’” he assured briskly. “Stop putting off the inevitable.”

  She wasn’t stunned by his words, but her body froze nonetheless by his coldness. “That would kill me,” she told him, her brain trying to scramble for any solutions at all, but at the end of the day she knew, instinctually, that Damen would be worse than death. “I need to go with you, just as badly as your friends need your help.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t even have any idea who or what took the boys. I have no idea where we’re going. You might end up in a far, far worse situation!”

  She highly doubted that! She crooked her neck to look at him sideways, wondering what tended to go through his mind when she was around. She knew he was smart—Hoel told her that week that Ashcroft was one of the more educated men in the Otherworld—but he must have let his brain go on break whenever she was in proximity. “If it’s between the devil I know and the devil I don’t, then believe me… I’d choose the devil I don’t. It can only get better when you’re faced with getting raped by an evil wizard whose nice side is a warlord.” She crossed her hands over her chest. “I need to go with you.”

  “Three things, there.” He plucked the note from her fingers. “First, he’s your husband. The intercourse you’ve had so far was on the marriage night, and it was his right.”

  “I never had intercourse,” she assured peevishly, straightening taller, “and I never gave my consent to this. Ever. I call that rape.”

  “Yes, you did; Damen told Hoel that he took you,” he grunted, even rolling his eyes.

  He too thought she was a liar!

  She shoved his chest hard enough that he was propelled back a few feet. “How can you trust a man you’ve never even met over me? What was that earlier in the garden? I thought we had an understanding that we were on the same side!” she hissed.

  His face twisted with anger. “You were mistaken. I thought you were insane since the moment I met you. Besides, you’re missing the other two points: Hoel would never allow you to go, and second, you don’t get a choice between your devils. That should make it easy for you.” He began to turn around, and she grabbed his arm.

  “I’m not going to give you the choice!” she decreed.

  Giving her full attention again, he only became more upset. “I’m in a hurry. Let me be perfectly clear—you’re not coming. One word about it, and I will chastise your ridiculous, delusional little hide myself!”

  He softened suddenly, and she didn’t quite know why until she felt a teardrop leak right down her face. He reached up to touch her cheek but she flinched away from him, disapproving his touch, but he grabbed her cheek anyway and slid his thumb over her upper cheek, rubbing off another tear. “Maili—I am sorry for what I did in the garden. What happened was my fault, and what I did was unacceptable. Of course you’re confused now. Still—things are what they are… Now, I must go. I’ll try to be back as soon as I can; Damen’s not due back for a week or more.”

  He patted her cheek slightly with his fingers, and then walked away.

  She wrung her hands in front of her before eventually walking around the wall and then, glancing at the stables, she walked back into the house. She stayed by the nearby windows, watching as Ashcroft said goodbye to Hoel, and then watched him leave on his large, white horse.

  Maili found that swallowing was painful.

  She had been so close to having everything she wanted. She had interest in a man for once, she knew her past better than she ever had before, and she was finally about to find herself free from Damen. But it wasn’t meant to be.

  Again, she was once again a pawn to be moved about on a board. She had no power to do anything about it.

  “It’ll be alright, sweetheart,” Anwen said softy from behind her. Maili didn’t turn around to acknowledge her; it was not going to be alright. “Why don’t you go to bed?”

  One part of Maili wanted to do just that—go to bed and sleep. She could spend most of her future sleeping, she reckoned, especially if she could get herself a sleeping draft. She would be forced to do Damen’s bidding, but then to live with that, she would merely sleep the rest of the time, blocking out her reality…

  She shook her head; no. She was going to force Damen to do away with her. Not play his game; eventually he might just kill her once he realized she wasn’t going to let him use her.

  No wonder Ashcroft said you were delusional, she thought to herself bitterly. Damen could make you do it, dummy. That’s why he was so confident. He thinks he has you over a barrel. He knows your choices better than you do.

  “Hoel, darling,” Anwen said, announcing Hoel’s entrance into the room, “put Maili to bed?”

  “What’s she doing standing around in her night things?” Hoel demanded; he sounded scandalized. Maili continued to look out the window—she could see Ashcroft race his horse down the muddy road and toward the gate. A flash of lightning lit the sky.

  “She wanted to talk to the wizard before he left,” she answered, as if that should have been obvious.

  “Why?” Hoel huffed. Another second later, he huffed with understand
ing. “Oh.” It hadn’t crossed his mind, Maili knew, because the idea of Maili being right about Damen was such a small concern. “Well, still—Anwen, she’s indecent.”

  “You’re lucky that she didn’t just run out there in nothing at all!” Anwen sighed.

  “Maili? Maili?” Large, clawed fingers suddenly snapped in front of Maili’s face. Their voices had seemed a mile away, since Maili was so deep in thought and dread.

  Before she even looked in Hoel’s direction, Hoel had scooped her up into his large arms like she was a doll. “Maili, darling—you’re like ice,” he said, drawing her closer to his chest before turning to take her up to her room. “Let’s get you in your nice, warm bed, eh? Sleep is like magic to the body, anyway.”

  And just like that, everything clicked together. She knew what she had to do.

  Magic.

  She needed it. She could escape with it. She could defend herself—she was powerful, damn it! That’s why her powers had been taken away from her to begin with, wasn’t it? She was frail, she certainly didn’t have a lot going for her—but she had magic. She had lots of it. She just had to be able to use it.

  Getting rid of the cuff would have a two-fold benefit—she could escape and nobody could claim she was Hoel’s. At the moment, the jewelry betrayed her just like a collar on a dog. If removed, Hoel’s little personal charm would no longer lay any sort of claim to her. Although she enjoyed the warmth of his embrace, the care he had always given her, she simply had to remind herself that he wasn’t just her papa now. He was her jailor.

  And the cuff was her manacle, her irons. She could run, but she couldn’t get far.

  “Are you feeling alright, Maili?” Hoel shifted her weight in his arms as he went up the stairs to freely pressing his wrist to her forehead. “You look pale…”

  “I’m fine, papa,” she replied tonelessly. “Just… tired, I guess.”

  He looked at her doubtfully. “I don’t like your color. I’m giving you a suppository.”

  Her body tensed and the color washed out of her face. “No. No, papa. Don’t you dare.”

  “You must be ill if you’re taking that sort of tone with me, young miss,” he replied warningly, as if what he claimed he was going to do to her wasn’t warning enough.

  “Papa, I don’t need one of those… su…” She didn’t want to say the word for the thing he planned to wedge up inside her most secret of places. “Just no.”

  “I don’t want you to get ill. I can repair bones, Maili, and I can help mend hearts, but I’m at a loss if you get ill. You look extremely pale, and not well at all,” he reminded, and she knew that much. She knew that illnesses frightened him, because he had no power to heal people for sickness, only for injury. Helplessness was a horrible feeling.

  The reason she knew that was because lately Hoel had made her life miserably helpless.

  Besides, she could be at death’s door and she still wouldn’t freely invite Hoel to give her a suppository. She struggled to get out of his hold, but he had her tight in his arms. “Maili, don’t be ridiculous. You’re acting like a child.”

  “You’re acting like I’m a child!” she huffed, beginning to pant with the exertion. She didn’t know why she even bothered. Hoel was so much more powerful and strong than she was.

  He opened the door to her room and closed it behind them. He brought her into the bathroom and riffled in the drawers with one hand while he held her flailing body to him with the other. “I’m warning you, girl, stop it. I’m in no mood for your nonsense.”

  She knew she should stop, she was already telling herself that it was useless to fight Hoel. It would probably have been more productive to fight a wall.

  How could she lose Ashcroft, her hope of happiness, be awaiting Damen to come and make her life a living hell, and still have new problems to deal with, like suppositories she didn’t need.

  “Fine,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the giant bathtub and hauling her over his lap before putting two bottles behind them.

  He reached out for the edge of her nightgown, and she had no hopes whatsoever that whatever would transpire next would be enjoyable. In fact, he was grunting as if frustrated, which normally preceded… something slightly worse than a suppository. “Don’t, papa,” she demanded, reaching around behind her. “Don’t spank me. I won’t let you.”

  “How dare you presume to tell me what I can and cannot do!” he huffed indignantly. “I have a mind to tell you to fetch your damned paddle on top of everything. I’m a very busy man, and I have very little time to fight with you about how to give you care.” He snorted ruefully and finished pulling her nightgown up to her mid-back, despite her squirms to not make the baring easy for him. “You won’t let me, indeed!”

  He was right, she supposed; men traveled far and wide for Hoel’s aid or his advice, and there she was, fighting against him like a kitten who didn’t want to get a flea bath.

  She pulled her hands away from her bottom, knowing that if she proceeded to futilely protect her bottom, she’d only get her wrists pinned to her lower back, which was less than comfortable.

  His large palm slapped down across her bare cheeks, and although she knew he wasn’t using anything even in the realm of his true strength, it was heart-stoppingly loud and drew a cry from her loud enough that all the servants would be able to hear it. The walls and doors were thick, but any sounds that escaped would be unmistakable. She wrapped her arms around Hoel’s leg, desperate to keep her hands forward. She was kicking and bucking to try to get away from him, although the arm wrapped around her middle was holding her perfectly still.

  “I’m tired of fighting you,” he was saying over her, although she was so busy screeching and panting from the shock of the pain that she could barely hear him. “You need to start doing what you’re told or else you’ll find a very, very hard life waiting for you. Your husband will not put up with this attitude and this much stubbornness, and before you blame Damen for that much, know no respectable man would!”

  “I’m not a little girl!” she bellowed at him. It didn’t matter, in practice. Hoel and Anwen not only saw her as a little girl, but as their little girl. Distantly, she wished they hadn’t liked her so much in the beginning; she wished they weren’t so willing to love someone that they’d taken in. “Stop treating me this way!”

  “What do I have to do to get you to behave, Maili? I’ll take you over my knee as often as it takes for as long as it takes, make no mistake!”

  He started spanking with more enthusiasm, despite that Maili felt that she couldn’t take any more without beginning to hyperventilate from all of her own caterwauling. Finally, she lost the struggle and let her hands reach back to protect her. Just as she’d known that he would, Hoel merely picked up her wrists and pinned them to the small of her back and continued, letting her cry and hiccup out tears and sobs.

  “There now,” he said when she finally stopped struggling and cried, powerless, over his lap. “Maybe in the future, you’ll find that you’d do well just taking orders like a good girl.” He chewed off one of his claws, which would surely regrow itself before he went to bed, which did not bode well for her.

  She heard him open up a bottle over her, and she knew it wasn’t any sort of healing salve. She took a deep breath and squeezed her bottom cheeks together just as he tried to put his large fingers between them. “Maili, relax. This is nothing to throw a fuss over,” he told her firmly, and was able to push a lubricated finger between her cheeks and pushed that overly large digit into her puckered anus.

  She found it impossible to relax, though now that he was pushing that finger in anyway, she found herself trying to. Despite the ample amount of lubrication he was spreading inside of her, she could still feel the soreness of her opening spreading further than it was comfortable.

  The embarrassment was the absolute worst. She remembered Hoel doing this right before she reached immortality, and as he’d been pushing the suppository inside, it was during that episode tha
t he had made a fuss about her having been touched before. With a heated pain, he’d actually repaired her maidenhead while lecturing her about never letting a man touch her again, not that she could remember any men in the first place. That day was long ago but she could still heat, thinking about his absolute shock that she wasn’t as innocent as he would have liked.

  Now, putting his finger in a place no man’s finger should ever go, anyway, he was lecturing her that she needed to be good, not fight, and make sure she took better care of herself.

  He pulled out his finger and she let out a sigh of relief before she felt something harder and colder nudging inside of her. “Eeep!” she squeaked, smooshing her face against Hoel’s pant-leg at the intrusion. The suppository wasn’t as big as his small finger, which was about the size of two of her own thumbs, but she could feel every ridge as he followed it with his finger to push it deep up into her.

  “That’s a good girl. It’ll be over soon,” he said, his tone softening.

  The suppository always felt dry and burning, alien and horrible. Her stomach cramped slightly around it as he withdrew his finger. “See? That was no reason to fuss at all, was it? Took only a moment. I don’t know why you have to deliberately make things worse for yourself,” he scolded, then pulled down the back of her nightgown and helped her off his lap. “While I get cleaned off, I want you in that corner.” He pointed toward an empty corner in the bathroom across from the sink. “Nose in, and start thinking of some ways you’re going to try to act like a big girl who cannot throw a tantrum every time she’s faced with something even a little bit unpleasant.”

  With angry tears, she walked there and thought of all the ways she was going to try to escape as soon as Hoel left her alone, and of what she’d put herself through to get that cuff off. After a spanking and something pushed into her bottom, she felt like all other discomforts were put into perspective.