Who would dare?
Reaching back, I pulled the door shut, lest a passing servant find it and run tales to the Veil.
The metal panel clanged loudly.
Hawke’s head rose. His hair slid from his shoulders, down his white shirt in a pin-straight sweep. He did not attempt to turn, or to look behind him to see who it was intruding on his imprisonment.
He said nothing.
I did not know what to say.
First, I’d witnessed the scars upon his back, painful and wicked. Now, I found him in manacles.
Who would dare to break a tiger already caged? For what reason could they possibly?
Purpled fingers stretched, wrapped around the chains forcing his arms so high. It set his shoulders shifting, rippling with strength I could not imagine. To be held aloft for so long, and still force one’s body to obey one’s will? All but impossible.
I approached on near-soundless feet. “Why are you chained?” I asked, and the chamber took my voice and bandied it about between hollow walls. Even the lavish furniture, as polished and masculine as that in his quarters, could not wholly soften the stony prison.
He did not answer. The fingers wrapped around iron links tightened.
Did I know that I played with fire?
No. Not entirely. The opium I’d taken softened all such fear, and I was untouchable.
But I did know guilt. Where I had hoped to cultivate resolution, there instead came remorse.
It was a thing that grew in one, nurtured on the terrible circumstances that forced my hand, again and again. I knew guilt for all who had come to harm for my sake, and as I studied Hawke’s still figure—stretched taut and silent in the middle of a lavishly appointed nick—guilt once more bit.
The risk was not in feeling it. The risk came with the need to take more tar, smoke more of the pipe, drink even more of the laudanum to ease that guilt.
I wanted to eat all of what I had left. Now.
Sweat dampened my palms beneath the gloves. The breath in my lungs thinned, and I inhaled so deeply that my collecting corset tightened against my expanding chest. “I did this,” I said on the exhale, answering myself with a certainty that did not ring of anger or deserved apology.
It fell empty and hollow between us, me and the prisoner I had put there.
The chains clinked gently. “Leave.” Hawke did not shout. He did not snarl. With only a single word, he laid before me an order that left no doubt I would obey.
I refused. I closed the distance between us, circled around him to look up into his eyes.
They were blue. Violent, wicked blue, same as the heart of the flame within the hearth. They blazed into mine, and I gasped a note that was as much question as bewilderment.
I had seen these eyes before. The first time, when I’d found him roasting in the Veil’s meeting chamber, I thought I’d dreamed them. Now I stared into that wicked blue flame and could not reason why they had changed again.
Was it my doing? Were my senses truly so far gone on the tar that I could paint Hawke with such outlandish fantasies?
He closed his eyes as if to clear them, his midnight lashes a thick fan. “You should not be here.”
I shook my head, as much to shake loose the webs making it difficult to reason through as to deny his influence. “That has never stopped me before,” I assured him.
When those dark lashes parted once more, his eyes were same colors as I’d ever known, tawny in the light and slashed in the blue I’d only just dreamed they’d been.
Readily solved, then. I was dreaming. Blissed out, more like.
There was no other explanation for it.
“Don’t be a fool,” Hawke said tightly, as if the words labored to escape his straining chest. His arms tightened, and the chains rasped and clinked in response. “Leave me.”
If it occurred to him that he was shackled, held from the floor and powerless to force me to obey, he did not indicate it by so much as a flicker. His features were the same implacable stone I had come to expect, hauntingly beautiful in a way that only the truly deranged might appreciate. His beauty conveyed authority and power; cruelty where the sane might require none.
I understood myself to be among those considered deranged. Certainly, as the tar I’d eaten turned firelight to gold and warning to wicked menace, I had no call to reach up, gently place my gloved fingertips over his chest.
The muscle beneath flexed. Hawke’s jaw hardened to near impossible edges.
“This is my fault,” I whispered.
“This is my doing,” Hawke replied flatly, and his gaze conveyed a fury that should have frightened me. Perhaps it would have, were it not for the opium—or the belief that I was as untouchable as he. “You must leave me. Now.”
“No.” A single syllable it was, but it cracked between us like the lash of a whip.
“Damn you, for once—” He closed his mouth, cutting off his angry demand, until the cruel shape of it thinned. He closed his eyes again, hiding whatever thoughts my refusal engendered within him.
I turned, spied a chair I could use and hurried to drag it back to Hawke’s side. I climbed it easily, stripped off my gloves when I found the locks that would require finer manipulation to pick. It placed me on level with his head, forced me to stretch to reach the locks.
The position put me so close to him that I could feel the heat of his body, an inferno too hot for normalcy and too hard to ignore as I balanced my weight against him. His mouth was too close to my temple while I strained to reach. His breath stirred the fine hairs curling about my ears.
If he so much as twisted, I’d fall.
“Cherry.”
My name again, my given name, sweet as my namesake on his lips. But it was not said sweetly; it growled. It shook, a tremble of breath and snarled effort. The shock of it rent through my concentration. With my hands wrapped around the first of his chains, I jerked my head back, eyes wide to find his pinned not on my gaze, but my mouth.
My lips tingled, as if he’d touched me. As if a finger had drawn across my lower lip.
Open, he’d commanded, only hours ago.
My breath rasped out, and I sealed my lips so tightly, I imagine they whitened.
This was not the reason I was here. I’d come to beg Hawke’s help, not his attention. I’d come because I had nowhere else to ask for help.
I did not know what he could have done, but he was the bloody ringmaster, wasn’t he? He could do so much, if I only offered him my pride.
To find him like this, strung up like some kind of criminal? Isolated, alone. No. “Shush,” I counseled briskly, as if I were the greater force present. “You’re distracting me.”
Forcing my attention once more to my task, I leaned against Hawke’s rigid figure for balance and teased the first of his locks open.
I should have foreseen the consequence of loosening the pull upon one arm, yet I could not be expected to think so far ahead when the heat of the man’s body buried itself into my clothing, nestled into my skin. When I was aware of every second he stared at me, scowled at me, and my senses filled with the fragrance of heat and spice and overwhelming Hawke.
When the manacle released, his arm dropped, and the tension holding him in place lessened along his right side. His body swiveled, tore my balance free and I flailed atop my chair, cursing a sharp uncivility. The floor tilted. The chair tipped.
The muscles at Hawke’s left shoulder bunched, his swollen hand whitening around the remaining chain. With incredible control, his body wrenched back into place. His free arm banded across my shoulders, one hand seized the base of my plaited hair, cradled the back of my head, and as the chair righted itself upon all four legs, I found myself pulled hard against Hawke’s chest.