Retribution (15 page)

I rolled onto my back, trapped. “Yes,” I
said. I refused to elaborate.

“Did you like it?”

“No,” I said. On Terra, before I met Dominic,
with no way of finding a gifted partner or forming a sympathetic
communion, I had been isolated by my gift. The cruel one-way flow
of thoughts had prevented the possibility of mutual pleasure in the
physical connection alone.

“Why?” Jana asked. “Why did you do it?”

Oh gods, I never wanted to hear that
three-letter word again. I turned my head, gazing into my
daughter’s eyes, so like Dominic’s, as they reflected the soft
moonlight. Poor child, she was coping with her own trauma from our
abduction as best she could, things she should not have had to
learn for years yet. “Because,” I said, “how could I know if I
liked it or not until I tried it?”

Finally Jana was satisfied. She nodded her
understanding. “I wish Niall hadn’t gone away,” she said.

“Me too,” I said. I was asleep before I could
say it a second time.

I
t was the crying that woke
me. In the dead hour of the night, the time when it is still dark,
not yet morning, but no longer part of the old day that has ended,
I opened my eyes at the heart-wrenching, wrist-slitting, hopeless
sound.

I lay still, listening with my mind. Jana and
Val both breathed lightly, evenly, on either side. The crying was
not coming from either of them. It was not audible but something my
crypta
had picked up, strong enough to wake me from deep,
restorative slumber. As before, I assumed it was Reynaldo and tried
fruitlessly to ignore it. I turned on my side, tugging the covers
up over my exposed shoulder.

The moaning sobs bored into my mind; the
unbearable sadness brought tears to my eyes. How could I feel so
moved by a bandit’s sorrow, by my enemy’s misery? Could it be
Dominic? I couldn’t believe it, didn’t want to have to think it. If
he was grieving for Niall, that was a good sign. But if it was
Dominic, how could I not know it? I shouldn’t have to guess.
Dominic’s emotions are as clear to me, as readable, as instantly
knowable as my own.

If I didn’t dare make communion with Dominic,
there was only one other way to find out. Earlier I had been too
weak to stand. Yet my hours of sleep had already changed me. The
healing process, begun by Naomi, had taken hold in me, spurring my
body on to extra efforts. Each hour of sleep, each large meal,
increased my strength. I could stand and walk now, could go to
Dominic where he slept, and check on him.

Slowly I eased myself out from under the
covers, slid down between the children until I could step off the
bed at the end. Jana never stirred; Val turned in his sleep,
babbling something in a mix of Eclipsian and Terran words that
became gibberish. His eyes remained shut.

The summer night was balmy and still. I
walked barefoot to the bathroom, glided through to the Margrave’s
bedroom. My eyes adjusted well to the dark. The large pale shape on
the bed was Dominic, naked, sprawled in sleep. He had not bothered
to turn down the covers, but lay on top of the fur spread. His eyes
were shut, his mouth open, his chest rising and falling in deep,
sighing breaths.

Even here I could not tell for certain where
the crying was coming from, although I heard it clearly. I sat on
the side of the wide bed, rested a tentative hand on Dominic’s
smooth chest. He was awake instantly, his hand closing over mine in
a vise-like grip that made me grit my teeth. “Amalie,” he said,
smiling the cold angry rictus as when he learned of Niall’s
departure, “what a pleasant surprise.”

“Dominic,” I said, “are you all right?” I
looked, at close range, into the face of the demon I had
encountered yesterday and tried frantically to pull my hand
free.

His hold tightened so that I winced with the
pain. “Am I hurting you?” he asked. “Forgive me. I forget,
sometimes, how soft you are, how easily you bruise.” The demon’s
words were sibilant, suggestive. His cock stiffened, growing
rapidly erect and dark red, as his fingers increased the pressure.
Demon or not, his touch brought us into communion; I could feel his
pleasure in the pain he caused, the desire to repeat it and
intensify it. The crying, wherever it had come from, had
stopped.

I wrenched my hand free, took a step back
from this demon-thing that had taken Dominic’s place on our bed.
Its words betrayed its identity. Dominic never forgot how easily I
bruise, not since our first disastrous night together. Ever since,
Dominic has always remembered how delicate I am, how much care he
must take with me. It had become a habitual part of our lovemaking,
a game of pleasure, for Dominic to handle me so gently that it was
I who would have to request, repeatedly, that he do what a man must
to satisfy us both.

“Dominic.” I spoke sharply, putting more
distance between us. This demon could become my husband again, if I
knew how to find him.
Dominic-Leandro
, I thought to him,
my love, my lord husband
. I used all the names, all the
words we shared in communion. My thoughts, instead of entering
Dominic’s mind, hit something hard, bounced off and re-entered my
mind with a crack like ice snapping in a sudden thaw.

He was completely shielded, closed to me.
Entering my husband’s mind had always been deceptively easy, like a
bird flying through mist; now my thoughts had ricocheted like
pebbles tossed at a force field. I must use my voice, and quickly,
before the demon gained control. “Dominic, I heard crying– and I
was afraid– that is, I wondered—” The look the creature gave me,
the coolly appraising stare, made it difficult for me to say that I
had thought it might be coming from him. This was what Niall must
have seen, when he needed a sword to defend himself.

The demon laughed—the same raucous,
screeching laugh Dominic used when he was upset or angry. “You
thought
I
was crying?” he asked, understanding me without
communion. He stood up, took a step towards me. “No, Amalie. I am
not a child or a woman. Why should I cry?”

There was a simple answer to the question:
Because you are unhappy and frightened.
But I didn’t say it.
Dominic rarely cried, but when he did he wasn’t ashamed. It didn’t
make him feel unmanned or immature. Even Dominic recognized that
human beings of all ages and sexes wept on occasion, for sorrow or
joy. He had cried when he found me in the
crypta-death
, had
mourned me with a beautiful song. For Dominic to deny his humanity
in this way was unlike him. It was–
insane
came to mind, but
I rejected that explanation.

I retreated as the demon came at me, until my
back was to the door. This tall, slim creature looked like Dominic;
its voice was Dominic’s. But its thoughts—oh, gods, its thoughts
scared me half to death. “Come here, Amalie,” he said. “If you’re
well enough to walk, you’re well enough to lie down again. You must
do your wifely duty.” He sniggered like Reynaldo, waving his
erection in my face.

It was not Dominic, despite the body and the
deceptive voice. There was no time for any more useless words. I
had made sure to bring my prism-handled dagger with me. Now I had
only to unsheathe it.

The demon read my intention and grabbed my
arm, holding it away from the sheathed dagger in my other hand. “No
you don’t,” he said. He hesitated, considering his options. I knew,
with a sickening fatality, that he was aware of the way in which
Reynaldo had forced my submission by taking my dagger and was
tempted to try it for himself. I stood immobilized, unable to think
of a counteraction. My mind was blank, a white sheet of empty
dread.

While I stood immobilized, the demon changed
course. Still restraining my arm, he leaned over to lift the hem of
my nightgown with his other hand, brushing my inner thigh as he
raised the skirt above my waist. He studied the cleft between my
legs. “How small you are,” he said. “It’s funny, I never noticed,
all this time, what a tight little cunt I was fucking.” He seemed
delighted with his observation. “You’ll cry. When I do it to you
now, you’ll be the one to cry.” He squeezed my arm hard, as if to
prove his words were not merely an empty threat.

I screamed with terror. I had heard those
words before, or something very similar. In my cell in the bandits’
castle, mind to mind, Reynaldo had thought that same delightful
sentiment to me, when I had seen him rape the young girl wearing my
dress. Now the words came out of my husband’s mouth, the same
words, fueled by the same motivation: to take pleasure in my pain
and humiliation.

Three nights ago, sick and disoriented, I had
mistaken my husband, confused him with Reynaldo. But tonight I was
not feverish or delirious. What I was seeing and hearing was real.
Reynaldo had infiltrated the righteous mind of my proud Dominic,
was thinking his filth and his venom through an antithetical
medium. Disarmed by the contrast, I found it difficult to fight
him, reflexively unable to use weapons of
crypta
against
Dominic as I had done the last time, when I had not known who was
who.

My screams echoed and re-echoed in my head.
The demon, the Dominic-Reynaldo abomination, was crushing my arm in
the same place that Dominic had seized yesterday, when he had
forced communion to find the truth about Niall. As in a dream, I
seemed unable to open my throat to produce real noise. My pain was
expressed only in my head, with
crypta
vibrations, not
actual sounds, yet I heard three voices simultaneously: mine and
the demon’s—and Dominic’s. The voices rang in triple disharmony,
slowly diminished, became two, then one. The demon had disappeared.
Dominic, still screaming noiselessly like me, dropped my arm, then
was still. I was no longer shouting, only standing paralyzed, my
mouth wide open.

Dominic stood a few inches away from me. He
stared dazedly, first at his own hand, then at me, last at my hand
clutching my sheathed dagger. I knew he had felt the pain in my arm
and my terror, through his hand that had held me. His erection was
gone, completely deflated.

“Amalie!” he said in a whisper. “What are you
doing out of bed?”

There was no point in accusing him of what he
hadn’t done. “I thought I heard something.” I took a breath. “It
was coming from this room.”

Dominic shook his head. “I was asleep.” He
looked at me again. “Something frightened you,” he said. He
remembered the pain, reached for my arm before I could stop him,
raised the sleeve of my gown. There was the faintest hint of
daylight showing through the window now, just enough for Dominic to
see the inky purple-black lakes imprinted on the white skin, the
marks of his fingers overlaid on the puckered scar of the marriage
brand.

“Who did this?” Dominic said. He laid his
hand lightly over the marks—a perfect match. There was no need to
answer his question. Of everyone in the household, only Dominic had
the long, tapering fingers to fit the pattern of bruises on my
arm.

His face drained of all color. “When?”

“Yesterday. When I tried to withhold from
you,” I said. “About Niall.”

Dominic put his head in his hands. He
stumbled to the bed, sat down as if all animation had drained out
of him suddenly. He cried loud, racking sobs, his shoulders
heaving. I listened dispassionately for a moment, judging. No, it
was not the same sound that had awakened me. This was
unquestionably Dominic, my own dear husband, crying like a child,
although in a man’s deep, throbbing voice.

I was not capable of leaving him uncomforted,
had no need to force myself to join him on the bed. I was there
instantly, responding to the same sound I had heard as I woke from
the
crypta-death
, when Dominic had mourned me prematurely.
There was nothing I could think to say, but I put an arm around his
bowed shoulders, stroked the back of his slender neck, felt the
ends of dark coarse hair that needed trimming. I had no fears, no
lingering apprehension. The demon-thing was not here.
My
love
, I thought to him.
My lord husband
.

“Oh, gods.” Dominic groaned into his cupped
hands. “What is happening to me?”

I ran a hand along the supple spine. “I don’t
know.” Better to speak, no matter how meaningless the words, than
to let him think I was ignoring his suffering. “I don’t know, my
love.”

The touch of my hand on Dominic’s skin
decided me. It was essential to say it now, not to wait. “It’s
him
,” I said, rejecting the epithet we had adopted that had
not protected us from Reynaldo’s evil, yet unable to name him out
loud. “Lady Ladakh was right. What we’ve been doing, torturing him,
keeping him alive, has been wrong. It’s reversed things somehow,
given him power over us. We’ve got to kill him, or at least let him
die.”

Dominic stopped crying, lifted his head to
stare at me with wide, glistening eyes full of worry. “But,
Amalie—”

I didn’t wait for him to finish. If I had,
perhaps a great deal of unpleasantness could have been avoided,
although, looking back, I think Dominic was too frightened to tell
me the truth just then. “There’s no point in debating,” I said. “We
should do it now. Right now.” I stood up and headed back toward my
room. “Just let me find a spare pair of boots.”

Dominic stood up also, moving quickly to
obstruct my path. “No, Amalie. Don’t go down there.” As when he
learned of Niall’s escape, for a fleeting moment a look of shame
crossed Dominic’s face before it hardened into the expressionless
demeanor of the commanding officer among his troops. As I tried to
go around him he crossed his arms over his chest and snapped an
order at me. “I forbid it, Amalie.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, my recent terror making
me slightly giddy. “Permission to speak, sir.”