Shattered (11 page)

“No.  I…,” Robin began, but she let the words die off.  Nathan saw the rise and fall of her shoulders as she drew in a deep breath, letting it out in a soft sigh. 
“Have you ever braided hair?”

“Of course, I h
ave two younger sisters,” he answered, realizing after the words were out that a simple ‘yes’ would have sufficed.  Robin didn’t seem to mind it, not tonight.  She brushed a wayward strand of hair back over her shoulder to join all the rest and handed him a small piece of ribbon.

Nathan
delighted in the chance to touch her.  As he sectioned off her hair to braid he let his fingers roam down the full length of her curls.  Each time he crossed one strand with another he touched at her neck, light enough it might’ve been an accident at first, but when she rolled her shoulders he took that as an opportunity to touch harder.  Soon the braid hung half-finished and he worked the tightness from her naked shoulders instead.

“Tell me about them,” Robin said, her voice subdued by the
sleepy pleasure of his hands.  “About your sisters, do you miss them?”

“Yes, more
than anything.  Clara and Elizabeth.  They’re both from my father’s second wife, so I suppose that makes them half-sisters, but they’re more dear to me than any of my full blood relations.”  Nathan kept his focus on his hands to keep the pain from his voice.  It wasn’t fair that Robin could hurt him here too.  Unlike physical pain he found no pleasure beneath it.

“Clara debuts soon, doesn’t she?”

“Next spring, when she turns thirteen.  I planned…” Nathan swallowed but the lump in his throat wouldn’t clear. “I was going to present her myself.  But perhaps Trent can, now that I’m dead.”

“You’re not dead prince.”

“Then what am I, Mistress?”

Robin fell quiet. 
The unspoken question, freedom,  burned in the silence that filled in.  It had always been there, but it was heavy now.  They both felt it.

“You want to ask me what
I’m going to do with you, what your fate will be, don’t you?”

“Yes.”  Nathan paused
, but now that she had weakened that barrier he couldn’t contain it alone.  For a moment he was himself again, and the rest came pouring out naturally.  “How long can you enjoy doing this?  How many tomorrows can you fill with pain?”

Whatever
Robin had been expecting it wasn’t that.  She recoiled as though struck.  “You think I choose this life?  I was eight when everything I knew and loved was taken from me.  Eight years old.”  She was quivering as she spoke, he could see it in her shoulders, but her words were steel in strength and just as unwavering.  “I don’t enjoy this, but it’s all I have, and I will continue on until the day I die, until the day I can finally forget.  My tomorrows are already filled with pain, but I can see to it yours are too.”

S
he gathered up the open folds of her dress and rose, and it seemed like she might leave it at that, but she made it no more than a few steps from him before she turned back.  Her blue dress flared out as she spun and the cloth cracked the air.  “And what about you, Prince Dorthorial? How long can you pretend you don’t want to be here? You have a choice, you have for a while now.”

“What choice?”
Nathan demanded.  She had broken something between them and he dared to raise his voice at her now.  He didn’t try to understand it, he couldn’t.  “You have hurt every part of me.  You’ve taken everything from me.  What choice could I possibly have?”

Her nostrils flared
and she pointed at the ground between them.  “Eyes on the floor then,
prince
.”  And he complied, but his whole body shook in anger.  Even after all that she didn’t hurt him and by the time she crawled into bed Nathan had already worked his fingers deep into his palm.  It was no use though, the pain wasn’t the same.

***

Nathan felt the cold stone floor bite into his knees as the
night passed too slowly.  Perhaps if time might speed up tonight, if he could find himself with fewer hours to fill with thought, he may not have been so tempted to rise.  But he finally made his choice.  She’d told him how this ended already.

Robin was asleep in her bed.  He could hear her steady breathing
stay unchanged as he lifted himself from his place on the floor and stood over her.  In the dim candlelight of her room he could just make out her sleeping face in the shadows.  Nathan swallowed and took the few steps necessary to reach the bed.

He crawled
atop it and knelt over her, his knees pressed down on both sides of her slender waist.  In his mind he was ready to subdue her, when she awoke, but when she stirred he froze instead, paralyzed by a fear he didn’t understand.  He could overpower her, easily, if it were a competition of strength alone.

W
hen her eyes remained shut he found the courage again to move.  His hands went to her throat and encircled it.  He paused there. He took a breath, to search for resolve he wasn’t sure he possessed, and when he looked at her face again she stared back at him.  Dull grey begged him to end this quickly, before they slid shut again.

“I was wondering how many opportunities I had to give you before you took one,”
she mumbled, her voice still soft with sleep.  “I worried you wouldn’t, not once you realized you could enjoy it.”

“
Was anything you told me true, Robin?”

“Every word of it, my prince.”

Nathan pressed harder on her throat, until he felt her heartbeat fighting back against his fingers.  It was the only struggle she put up.  Her arms were unpinned at her side but she didn’t bring them up to stop him.  If she tried he would stop, he’d spare her, but she was accepting this too readily.

“
You still haven’t told me what we did to you,” Nathan said, to create some reason not to tighten his hands further around her neck.

“Isn’t it obvious
?” Her eyes came up to his again.  “You made me live with the memory of that day.  You made me live for revenge.”  Robin laughed.  “I told you that I’d make you suffer every pain you and your men inflicted.  Revenge is the last one.  Now take yours and live with the same disappointment I do.”

“
How did you escaped? You want me to believe they just let you go?” Nathan asked.  He had to keep her talking.  He was scared.  “Because you’re right, I was there, and those that weren’t killed were taken as slaves.”

Robin
laughed again and raised both her hands from her side, until her arms were perpendicular to the bed.  Stark white gloves, two vertical lines against the relative darkness of the room, covered her hands and arms up to her elbow.

“Take them off.”

Nathan sat back on his heels, over her stomach, and took hold of one gloved arm.  He pulled at the ribbon on her elbow and slid his fingers beneath the laced cord that ran along the outside of her forearm, undoing both completely before tugging them off.  And as he peeled them back he had his answer.

Her hands
had been burned and twisted.  Most of her fingers were mangled past the knuckle and her left hand was so badly damaged it seemed she couldn’t fully open it.  Twisted white scars ran up her arms and towards her elbows. No wonder she never bound him herself, nor wrote her own letters or removed her gloves.  The handlers weren’t there for him, they were there for her.  Robin was crippled.

“I tried to take the sword of the man beating my father,
” Robin explained, “but he caught me by the arm as I failed to lift his blade from its scabbard.  How could I have known it would be so heavy?”  She shook her head against the pillow. “He dragged me to the hearth and shoved my left hand into the coals.  And then the right.  And I screamed and screamed, as my brother did, and my mother too, but eventually we all fell silent.  When I awoke again the village was ash.”

“
I wanted revenge,” she said to the air.  “And I’ve hurt a lot of people and manipulated a lot more to get it.  But whoever said revenge is sweet lied.  Never once has it felt sweet.  It takes root and it consumes everything.  Revenge is a beast that tears you apart from the inside.”

Nathan took each of her hands in his and pressed them to his cheeks. 
She tried to pull them away but he held firm, pressing until her palms cupped his face.

“
Have you tried forgiveness?”

Robin
gave up her struggle and laughed. “Would you forgive, in my place, would you honestly?”  Dull-grey searched the face she knew so intimately when he didn’t summon up an answer.  He knew better than to lie to her, so he stayed silent instead.  “No prince, there will be no forgiveness, but I think I can finally lay revenge to rest.  I’ve had enough.  I’m tired.”

Nathan dropped her hands and she curled them beneath the blankets
, as though to hide them.  She stared off at the ceiling like it might offer some haven.

“
I know you never had a choice,” she mumbled.  “But I liked your submission, even though I knew I forced it.  Of everything I did to you, of all the things I took, I wanted that to be real the most.”

Nathan sighed as he crawled off
her and shut his eyes for a full breath.  “I’m not going to be your prisoner anymore Robin.  In the morning I want you to see to it that I go home.”

She nodded and gradually her eyes came off the ceiling and bac
k to his face.  His declaration didn’t even faze her.  Her expression was blank, but Nathan knew better.  He laid down beside her and slid his arm beneath her pillow, leaning over the huddle of blankets that was her body.  He drew her in close, until her face was just beneath his.

Robin stared up at him.  Beneath the
sheet of dull neutral in her eyes was all the hurt she had spent a lifetime accumulating.  Every time she had to reserve a touch, every time she had to ask for help in some simple task, she added to it.  Without vengeance driving her all that sadness lay so close to the surface.

Nathan cradled her face, laying his hand against the line of her jaw and running his thumb over her cheek.
  He breathed in her smell and tried to imagine how it might taste.

“May I kiss you
, Prince Dorthorial?”

The idea that Robin might ask permission for something seemed so wrong
that Nathan couldn’t help but chuckle.

“
It’s not morning yet Mistress,” he whispered back.

It took Robin a second to realize what he was saying.  When she did Nathan saw the change in her eyes, a spark of wickedness caught and ignited
like a beacon in that sea of grey.  One corner of her mouth turned up in a small grin.

Robin sat up and Nathan leaned back to give her room as she scooted against the headboard. 
She knelt beside her pillow, but as soon as she realized her marred hands were visible again she tucked them beneath her thighs and her confidence waivered.

“Give me your hands,” Nathan said
. He laid his out between them, palm side up.  Robin hesitated, but in the end his stillness won out.  She placed one hand in each of his.

Nathan
lifted them to his lips.  He left them hovering there, just a hair’s width above his skin.  “I want you to touch me,” he whispered into her fingers.

“Close your eyes
prince,” Robin commanded.  He did, and unbeknownst to him, Robin did too.  She closed her eyes against all the times she wasn’t able to feel another’s skin.  She explored his lips, felt over their warmth and their softness, felt his breath on her fingers.  His hands went back down to his side as hers gained confidence.

Robin’s fingers traveled up his face, over his cheek and along the ridge of his cheekbone to his nose.  They dove off the end there, skipped over his mouth and landed
lightly on his chin before continuing their journey south.

She touched his neck and a powerful shiver surged down his spine.
Robin lifted her hand in surprise and their eyes came open simultaneously.  She searched his for the usual repulsion, the disgust, but it wasn’t there.

She
pressed both hands just below his collarbone and felt the rapid beat of his heart.  Her eyes stayed open this time.  She traced the fading lines her whip left across his chest.  Her fingers were cool against his skin.

“You’re beautiful,” he
whispered and he cupped her face in his hand.  Again her gaze lifted level, towards his, but the smile she gave him was half-hearted.  She didn’t believe him, but she forgave him for it all the same.

Robin leaned
in to him and sat up onto her knees.  The nightgown she wore hung loose off her body and when she rose the fabric moved against her chest, exposing the outer curves of her breasts and the tips of her nipples.  Nathan kept his eyes up to her face, mostly, for it seemed right that he should look up to her.  It felt familiar.

She crawled over his legs and
pressed her hands against his chest until her weight pushed him backwards.  She slid up his body, only stopping when she straddled his hips.  His erection brush against her thigh through the thin pants he wore.  Nathan readjusted beneath her, to try to hide it, but it was no use.