“Well enough.” Gregori put his hand around her wrist, pulling her hands away from her belly. His hand was feverishly warm, thumb and forefinger more than encircling her wrist. Belinda stumbled a half step forward. Gregori bore down on her wrist, and she dropped to the stone floor, hard enough to bruise her knees even through skirts and carpets. Her gaze darted up to meet his, her eyes wide. He kept his grip on her wrist as he lifted his other hand to touch the bruise on her cheek. Belinda hissed, jerking her head away a fraction of an inch, then held as still as she could, eyes intent on his expression.
He wet his lips, pressing his thumb against the masked bruise. Pain stung at the back of Belinda’s throat and in her eyes, dry and without tears. “What happened?”
“N-nothing, my lord. Only my own clumsiness. I opened a door too quickly-” Belinda had heard a dozen women use the same excuse. Gregori believed it no more than she had.
“A door with knuckles, and a round stone ring. Have you a lover, Rosa?”
“No, my lord!” Horror shot Belinda’s voice up, and she clapped her free hand over her mouth. Gregori’s fingers tightened around her other wrist.
“Have you ever?”
Belinda dropped her gaze again, shivering. “Yes, my lord.” Let him think she was too frightened to lie to him. The truth now was better than the outrage of a man later denied virgin blood. To her surprise, Gregori chuckled.
“You’re either very foolish or very wise to admit that, Rosa. Which is it?” He took his hand from her cheek and settled it at her bodice, plucking at the ties with the casual confidence of a man who knew time was in his favour. “Do these stays and ties hide other bruises, I wonder?”
Belinda shook her head mutely, amending the answer privately: not yet.
“You’ve lied to me once and told the truth once, Rosa. Which is it now?” He smiled at her for the first time, and as she took a breath to answer her bodice loosened. He slid his fingers, hotter and softer than Dmitri’s, under her shift, catching the weight of her breast in his smooth hand. Too smooth: there wasn’t enough water in his body, the heat speaking more of fever than desire. Belinda thought of the desire she’d had to force sickness on him, and wet her own lips, semiconsciously copying his behavior of moments earlier.
“The truth, my lord.”
His smile broadened. “But you don’t deny that you lied?”
She shook her head silently a second time.
“I cannot keep on a serving girl who lies, Rosa.” The chastisement was light and mocking. “Do you think it can be trained out of you?”
Belinda swallowed again, letting her eyes drift shut. Gregori’s skin was too hot, his eyes too bright, his colour bad. He had been well yesterday, and his symptoms were not those of the arsenic. Perhaps Dmitri need not have worried: this once it seemed nature and the queen’s bastard had the same agenda.
But fevers could be healed from, if a man had strength, and the hold Gregori still had on her wrist told Belinda that he still had strength to spare. She remembered the strong dose of poison in his cooling tea, and certainty warmed her: the drug wouldn’t hurt as she worked to achieve her ends, but there were other ways available, too. Cutting a man’s hair wasn’t the only way to drain his strength.
“Rosa?” His voice was more pointed, angrier now. Belinda lifted her chin to meet his eyes, letting a tremble come back into her voice.
“Perhaps w-with a strong hand, my lord.” Let him take her hesitation for fear. Let him revel in his stronghold, while she eked the soil from beneath fortress walls.
Gregori’s smile sharpened, and Belinda steeled herself against pain. Viktor’s mouth thinned with anger when she undressed that night. “No,” she said, before he had time to fling the accusation. “It wasn’t you.” She kept her eyes lowered, though she watched him through her eyelashes. “I drew the count’s attention this morning.”
Jealousy struggled with loyalty, thinning Viktor’s mouth to white beneath his dark beard. “I wouldn’t betray you,” she continued, voice low and beguiling. “You must know that.” She didn’t call him by name; she never called them by name. It made it easier for most things, although in moments like this it would be useful to play that card. Men-and women, too-liked little more than the sound of their own names being spoken. If only she were sure it was Viktor, and not Vlad, she might calculate the risk and take it. Instead she let her shift fall a little further around her breasts, clutching it loosely. “I had no choice.”
“If he gets you with child, I’ll marry you.” The man’s words were blunt and hard in the quiet room. Belinda forgot coquettishness in astonishment and let the shift drop, only catching it at the last moment. She drew it up too late; the bruises against her throat Viktor had already seen, but the others, on her arms and breasts, she’d thought to hide until twilight dimmed to darkness. Viktor curled his lip and came forward, using both rough hands to pull the shift down. Belinda folded her arms over her breasts as he scowled and knelt, putting his palm over marks left by Gregori’s hands, without touching them. Her ribs, her hip, her thigh. The last he put his hand on, making her pull away, making her open her legs. The marks there, against the backs of her thighs and curving inward, were welts, not bruises. Viktor’s hands, usually warm, felt cool against the raised marks. “Do you like this?” There was so much anger in his voice that the words scraped from his throat. Belinda answered truthfully, surprising herself.
“Not particularly.” It was true, although not the whole truth. Lust rode a dangerous border between pleasure and pain, and she was well-versed in giving herself over to desire. When the line blurred, she rarely minded in the moment, riding it as a kind of power of her own. Even now she could reach back to the morning and feel Gregori’s strength waning; feel it as though she drew it away like a succubus, increasing her own vigor. That was heady enough to savor, though days of soreness and bruises after made her sullen, and she never eagerly anticipated the lick of a cane or a hard hand.
“Do you like him?”
This time she smiled, more a sound, breath snorted out, than a curve of her lips. “Not particularly.” She unfolded one arm from over her breasts and touched Viktor’s hair. It was cleaner; he’d washed today. The realization clicked in her mind and she lifted her chin, staring sightlessly at the far wall. “You knew.”
“Everyone always knows.” Viktor’s voice remained gruff. “So? Will you have me?”
Gregori would never get her with child. It took a simpleton of a servant girl to not know the sharp-flavoured flowers that grew, the seeds of which could be brewed into a strong tea and prevent a child from quickening in the womb. But men didn’t like to think of such things, taking the very idea of an unrooted child as an affront to their masculinity. Belinda, touched with a rare compassion, closed her fingers in Viktor’s hair as gently as she could. “You deserve better than I can give you.” She meant the words, if not in the way the guardsman heard them. He hawked a rough sound, denial.
“You think I don’t believe you when you say you have no choice? He’s the count. You’re nothing.”
Anger flared up in Belinda’s chest, taking her breath with it. She was far from nothing; she was a secret weapon, a secret child, a secret truth, and for a shocking moment the impulse to lay that bare hammered within her. She subsumed it, astonished at the emotion’s violence; not in all the years since she had realised her hidden heritage had the desire to share it struck out. To do so was disaster for all; to discover that the notion to confess, or declare, lay in her thoughts astounded and frightened her.
“We serve, all of us,” Viktor went on, oblivious. “No one, not serving maid or guardsman, says no to the master’s whim.”
Belinda’s eyebrows arched slowly. “A guardsman?” Now that was a secret she hadn’t so much as heard a whisper of, which meant either Gregori was incredibly discreet, or she was misinterpreting. Viktor’s face curdled red under her hand, and she masked a laugh by forcing a lie of wonder into her voice. “I didn’t know men could… could-but not the count, surely.”
“I only know rumours.” Viktor moved his hand up sharply, bisecting her sex with thumb and forefinger, ending her speculation. She closed her eyes briefly; the flesh was tender, and his touch hadn’t been gentle. “I’ve never understood the need to hurt a woman,” he said in a low growl. He pulled her closer, sliding his other hand over her bottom, bumping his fingers over welts laid there by Gregori’s cane.
“Do you wish to explore it, my lord?” Belinda whispered. The hard hands of three men in a day was more than she remembered counting before, and Viktor usually laughed when she gave him the appellation normally reserved for the master of the house.
Not so this time. He pushed his thumb into the cleft between her thighs, pressing his finger against the already-abused centre of pleasure there, and ignored her question to say “You haven’t answered me.”
