My heart pounded so loudly, it was all I could do to seize the door knob with shaking fingers.
The last I’d been here, I had woken up lacking in clothing and detailed memory. Zylphia had sworn that I had not been taken, but it had been so close.
Steeling myself against the wild conflict of emotions within me, I threw open the unlocked door and called, “Hawke!”
Silence greeted me. Stillness. The lamps were unlit, the grate empty of fire. Hawke’s bed loomed at the far wall, draped in black silk and embroidered in red, gold and green design, but there was no sign of the man himself.
I stepped out quickly, my breath shallow and too fast.
That even a foot into that place was enough to tear the confidence from me was telling enough. But as I had not found my quarry here, the return of my anxiety only made my concerns the worse for it.
In that moment, standing in Hawke’s chamber with perspiration itching across my shoulders and panic fluttering in my mind, I finally gave in to my own demand. I plucked the wax ball from my pocket, tore the paper in my haste to unwrap it, and bit a lump off. I did not chew it, I did not lick the pungent resin. I simply swallowed it.
Whether it burned through my flesh quickly or the very act was enough to calm my senses, I do not know. I stopped shaking. The pain in my hands dulled, then eased to a warmth I could better manage. My breath expelled on a relieved, gusty sigh, and it did not shake.
With a serenity I did not question, I wrapped the dwindling bit of tar once more in the torn wax parchment and replaced it into my pocket.
So calmed, I could search for the ringmaster without fear of missing clues along the way.
With his bedchamber pristine, I felt confident that I would find none here. I knew of only one other room, and hoped that it would remain the likeliest to be used. Ignoring the servants who stared at me as I hurried past, I ran down the corridors.
Something was wrong. I was not positive how things operated in the Veil’s residence, but if this had been my home, embers would have been allowed to flourish in the grate to keep the chill away. Lamps would have been lit as the day eased into afternoon, kept low for the sake of the oil.
That Hawke’s room was cold suggested he was not expected to return anytime soon. Yet he was not gone, else surely Osoba would have suggested so.
These thoughts came to me on the back of such simplicity that it seemed tragic I had missed it earlier in my high temper.
I did not pause to examine the root of my concern; had I done so, I might have taken things with greater tact. I might have also realized that there were no silent Chinese warriors waiting outside the Veil’s door, indicating there was nothing to enforce.
Instead, I burst through the two ornately carved doors into a wall of heat so thick that it stole what little breath I had left. The screens I had grown accustomed to had been moved, clearing the center of the hardwood floor and turning two fires into glowing jewels behind patterned silk. The light may have been directed away, but the heat did not lessen. I was sweating in seconds.
Yet it was not the light glittering on silk and gilt that snared my attention so fully, but that what snagged on tawny skin.
Hawke sat in the center of the floor, his back to the door. If my interruption bothered him, there was no sign of it. Not so much of a strand of his ink-black hair twitched out of place. Left loose, it tumbled to his shoulders in a pin-straight fall, hid any glimpse of his jaw or profile from me. Sweat gleamed on his back, turned his swarthy flesh to gold.
The man had removed his shirt.
Firelight danced behind the screens, but no shadows fell on the broad expanse of bared muscle and ridged strength. What I had suspected beneath Hawke’s cleverly tailored attire was true. This was no waifish gentleman flattered by the fit of a coat.
What I had never dreamed were the wicked lines of puckered flesh marring that dusky skin. My heart shuddered in my chest as I counted as far as twenty before losing where one furrow ended and another overlaid. Each scar spoke of ruthless effort, relentless energy. They criss-crossed his shoulders, his spine, as low as his waist.
I could not fathom what grave transgression would coerce Micajah Hawke to tolerate a whip’s lash.
My mouth went dry. My voice, tight with breathless astonishment, balled up in my throat and even if my soul depended on its use, I could not summon a single word.
Rage flickered somewhere beneath my wordless inanity. Rage that some monster would mar such a perfect back, that a lash would be allowed to touch a creature of such strength and pride.
Hot, damp shivers wriggled down my spine—the heat of the room and the cool of the hall’s air behind me warring to claim my attention. That the awareness of all that bare muscle and skin conspired to add to my discomfort was a fact I chose to ignore.
Hawke had still not moved.
For the first time since tasting that bit of resin, fear touched me. That it could do so even while the bliss worked to take me was a testament to the strength of the feeling.
A feeling I chose to turn into abject curiosity, rather than truly explore what it was I suffered.
I left the door behind me ajar, as if the mere promise of an escape route would protect me, and walked silently across the sweltering room.
I halted just behind him, torn between wanting to crane about to see his face—make certain that he still lived—and to flee while I still possessed the opportunity.
“Hawke?” It was a croak, and one that barely earned the definition of whisper.
A muscle twitched in his back. The scars over it whitened briefly, and relaxed again. To me, to my searching study, it was as if the very air rolled over his skin like a caress. The firelight gilded his body, turned swarthy color to an uncanny luminosity tempting the senses. I wondered if he would be as hot as the air surrounding us.
If he would warm me as a fire would, or if I would simply turn to ash were I to try.
My greater sensibilities warned me away, but the dreamy space I occupied—that Chinese bliss so named for the sweet innocence it engendered within a body and mind—did not heed the warning.
To my great disbelief, my own hand reached to touch him. With him sitting the way I’d seen some of the Chinese do, legs folded, and myself standing, it seemed that he was in greater reach.
That he was somehow less intimidating.
A moment of fickle-minded folly.
What I intended, I could not say. All I know is that the tips of my middle—and forefinger settled upon one of those terrible grooves whitening the skin of his back. It was ridged, almost delightfully so in my opium-ridden senses, with a tactile pleat carved in skin at once smooth and rippled.
The muscle beneath my fingers contracted; the breadth of his shoulders went taut. His skin was damp, blazing hot where I dared to touch.
As if in a dream, I watched my own hand—eerily pale in comparison to his flesh—stroke the wicked line. “Who dared?” I whispered, shocked. At the question, at the rippled scars. At my own temerity.
What I had mistaken for unawareness turned to lethal poise. With a grace and speed I could not wholly follow, Hawke unfolded, rose as a tiger might from a disarming laze. I snatched my hand back, but my pride would not allow me to put distance between us. This game was one I was more familiar with—Hawke enjoyed brandishing his physical dominance over my smaller stature.
Yet as he turned, I realized too late that games were not the goal this day.
Ruthless intent shaped the stark lines of his features, hardening planes and angles I had spent too long admiring from afar. Hawke had always been a handsome man, even a blind woman would say so, but his was not the fashionably masculine beauty reserved for the harmless or weak.