Bloodsong Ch. 02

Then again, Ralen had said he wanted privacy.

As he guided her down, Valeriana thought of love. It was, for the most part, not a factor she'd found worth taking into account, as the mating bond would sort it out. Still, she couldn't help but wonder. If she'd had the chance, the time, if it had mattered, would she have fallen for Ralen Maltos?

It felt like it would make everything easier if she could say that the answer was yes.

She stepped onto porous, salt stained concrete and let her skirts drop. With the waves lapping at the sand and the crystals casting their shimmer over the oil slick sea, the setting would as easily qualify as romantic as it could strike one as sinister. Valeriana had yet to decide in which camp she fell.

"Nice, huh?" Ralen remarked, pointing at the wooden bridge connecting the beach to the port. Bigger crystal bulbs flanked it. He eyed them with an intent that Valeriana couldn't make out. "'ts a shame that there's all this brightness, but I suppose at this distance . . . well, come over, then."

His hand went to the small of her back and shoved. Valeriana stumbled with a surprised noise, not having expected to find herself off balance, tried to right herself, failed, tumbled forward. She'd made it some distance across the bridge and fell far and wide; her knees hit the planks, but her hands landed on the comparatively soft anthracite sand.

"Oof." Valeriana's most immediate concern was her dress. She shook off the skirts as she drew herself back up, running fingers down the seams and sighing with relief upon realizing that there'd been no tearing. Only after did she acknowledge the pinpricks of foreboding fired off at the base of her skull. Had that — he hadn't meant to throw her, surely? Yet the push had felt too purposeful to be accidental. Unnerved, she tried to disguise her misgivings with an attempt at a laugh. "I'm sorry. I can be so clumsy sometim—"

Her words died on her lips, felled by a large hand. Ralen had moved to stand in front of her so, so quickly. His eyes were unreadable. The only hint of anything that Valeriana found in them turned out to be flashes of light reverberating from the lamps.

"Look, V — can I call you V? Since we're about to be that close?" Whatever that meant. Valeriana felt incongruously cold. She nodded behind his hand, which he dropped, mouth shaping into a smile. "Splendid. Now, I don't recall telling you to get back on your feet, did I?"

"No? But I don't understand, I—"

"I know you can't be as stupid as you sound, but just so that there's no room for ambiguity . . ." He paused, eyeing her up and down as she stood transfixed. "Get down on your knees."

"I don't—" Valeriana caught her eyes striving upwards, to the tower, before they snapped back to Ralen's face. She shouldn't be afraid. She shouldn't feel panic nipping at the edges of her mind until they frayed.

Surely whatever was happening here must be normal.

"Get down. Now." His voice admitted no refusal. Valeriana scrambled to obey, thinking — thinking that she was becoming perplexed by his behavior, that at least the sand was soft, that everything would be fine, that he stood blocking the bridge and that she couldn't very well turn back and run for the treeline, because she didn't know the area and would get lost in the dark, that there was bound to be an explanation for why he was . . . "That's better. You're obedient, at least."

Valeriana gave no response and wasn't sure whether she ought to feel blessed by Ralen not seeming to care. He circled her, his appraisal not just cursory this time, no longer bearing the faintest hint of decorum as his eyes dwelled on the shape of her hips, the swell of her breasts, the pulse beating strong on the side of her neck, the redness of her face.

He undid the cords holding his pants up. Valeriana stopped feeling confused. She felt ill.

She stole a glance at the thicket of mangroves behind her. More concerning than getting herself lost, this part of Alkarosh was a delta region, likely riddled with tidal marshes and bogs; deep pits that would appear invisible until she dropped down one of them and vanished.

Valeriana remembered being five and kicking out in terror as muddy waters swallowed her and she swallowed them in turn. Fleeing blind was out of the question. She couldn't very well swim away. Either she made it past Ralen, or . . .

Everything snapped into sudden and startling focus. She shook her head, trying to clear it. She was plotting an escape. Why was she plotting an escape? Her father would kill her. Maybe this was just how it went. Perhaps there was an equivalent to kneeling on a black sand beach under the cover of night for every girl, only you weren't told in advance.

It seemed — it seemed so counterproductive to keep it a secret. Had she known, had she been able to come to terms with it beforehand and prepare, she wouldn't have had to subdue the reflexive urge to scream for help.

"I . . . don't. You're not supposed to. We—"

"Why not? Did you buy that dress without trying it on first?" Ralen was looking at her as though she were a fool and a disappointment. Valeriana was intimately familiar with both expressions. "I'm just looking to see how well you fit. If you're concerned about your father, don't fret. He gave me leave to do as I liked with you."

Valeriana stared up, feeling cold and queasy and like so very many things were just plain wrong. She didn't speak. Her tongue was tied, her throat tight. She didn't mouth 'he wouldn't, he couldn't allow it', because after everything was said and done, she knew what sort of father she had.

Ralen's fingers dug in her hair. She held herself motionless despite the nails scratching her, because parental approval was her cue to be quiet and concede. To do otherwise would land her in a worse position.

Her blurry vision and the warm tracks on her cheeks hinted that she'd started crying, but that was just because he was hurting her with the pulling, so everything should be alright once he stopped doing that. She tried craning her neck, twisting the angle at which he held her to ease the tension, but—

The slap rang loud, felt like a burn. Her sight threw up stuttering, throbbing bursts of light.

"Stop fucking wiggling and open your mouth."

That was it for pretending that all would be well were it not for the pain, because Valeriana found herself shaking her head without caring if her hair snagged on his fingers and ripped from her scalp.

Ralen dropped his pants, and his manhood hung between his legs like a fat, strained sausage. His free hand wrapped around the base and pumped a few times; she watched it rise with dumb, numb shock. If she opened her mouth he'd shove it in. She didn't want to look at it, tried not to, but he was all but waving it in her face.

She did part her lips, then.

"HEL—" Blackness. Blackness and stars exploding. A trickle of wetness down her lip, chin, the knowledge that her cheek would be on fire once her nerve endings caught up with reality. A few of her teeth wobbled against her tongue. Her spit tasted like blood.

"Try that again, see where it gets you!" he growled, shaking her, turning the world to a jittery mess of orange light mingling with skeins of darkness. Valeriana wanted to vomit, not even because he'd made her dizzy, but because it was all going so wrong and she couldn't figure out how or why it had.

This, she told herself, was where she was meant to apologize and attempt to placate him.

Instead she screamed again, louder.

Ralen kicked her. She flew back a handful of paces, the sand not doing much to abate the violence of her landing.

"I suppose it was too much to ask that you have a working brain. Although, considering every other way you are stunted, maybe it's on me for not seeing this coming." He paced around her, sneering. His pants were gone, his shirt unbuttoned — when had that happened? — the skin of his chest rippled. "You know what you'll get if you keep yelling? Someone will show up. They'll see what's happening. I might even tell them the rest of what I'll be doing to you. Once they realize that no one is getting killed down here and it's just some witless girl throwing a fit, they'll either shake their heads and fuck off, or ask to join in. Either way, they will tell everyone about it, and that won't be too good for your reputation, now will it?"

She wanted to believe him a liar. Her sisters would be incensed about how inappropriate the whole thing was, even if they wound up backing off once they knew that their father had consented to it in her stead. Jack had been angry about just the concept of Ralen, and he'd never taken well to people harming her, but she couldn't see him taking a break from his own problems to promenade down the garden path.

She still wanted to believe him a liar.

"Stop crying, unless you want me to give you a reason to bawl your eyes out." Once again Ralen's fist was raised, leaving scant doubt that he'd make good on the threat.

Valeriana cringed away. She could do that. He wasn't holding her anymore. She could get up and run, and the odds might be against her and her chances of making it slim, but she found she didn't care. She shot to her feet, swaying. Tripped, when a tentacle shot out like a whip and slammed into her knees.

"No! No, stop, stop, please!" Yet she felt sure, as the blows rained, that begging was useless. Bringing her hands up to cover her face dulled the sting of his fists, but angered him more.

"Stay still, you little — bitch." There was further coarseness after that, but Valeriana heard it like a distant, unpleasant echo. Her hands fell aside, arms limp as the will to fight hit a wall and deserted her. "See, if I'd had any intention of mating you in the first place, this behavior? Would be a deal-breaker."

Valeriana couldn't make out much else of what he shouted, but those words drifted back to her in a somewhat comprehensible form.

"Wh—" She was cut off by an awful tearing; Ralen hadn't had the patience to bunch up her skirts and just ripped the seams up to her waist. She could barely see for how much she was crying. "If you had—"

He stopped messing around with her clothing, stared at her and barked a laugh.

"Eventually I'd have let your father know that I'd changed my mind. Can't risk infecting my offspring with whatever's wrong with you, can I? However, seeing as you're making this so damn difficult, maybe I'll tell him, after we're done, that I won't go through with it because you were too intractable to make the whole business worth my while."

Her blood turned to ice at his words.

Her father would . . . believe it, were Ralen to tell him she'd misbehaved. Wouldn't even feel surprised.

She would be ruined in every way that mattered, with no recourse or right to appeal, and then — she couldn't contemplate what would come after. Hadn't allowed her thoughts to carry her that far, always shielding herself behind the conviction that she'd make herself do well, that she'd perform to the best of her ability and it would have to be enough.

She'd studied so much, tried so, so hard. All for nothing. She'd never stood a chance.

She could beg Ralen to at least — at least not tell anyone, afterwards. Bargain, promise that she wouldn't complain, but then again it didn't seem to matter whether she did. He might have gotten a good enough overview of her family dynamics to reason that no one would care that he'd forced her beyond how much it dropped her market value.

He was on top of her, naked from the waist down, his erection rubbing against her leg, hands digging in her thighs as she tried to roll the torn fabric around her so that there'd be something, some barrier to buy her time. She kicked and screamed and doubled down on the screaming and clawed and pushed.

The latter made him falter, likely only because she'd caught him by surprise, and one had to wonder whether the consequences were worth it. Valeriana had expected him to reply with a shower of punches. Although those did come, she had not expected the stab of teeth sinking into her throat just above her collarbones, closing around a mouthful of flesh with a snap.

It occurred to her that if he made enough of a mess, if she returned to the ballroom wounded and blood soaked, if it were obvious that she'd gone above and beyond to make things difficult, if it were clear to everyone that none of it had been her fault, that she hadn't wanted . . . it might help. She'd be seen as a sad, pitiful thing, but wasn't that already the story of her life?

Valeriana choked back a sob. Ralen had stopped biting, since she didn't insist on fighting. He looked irritated, but she hadn't goaded him enough to be so angry that he'd go beyond subduing her. He might even have expected resistance, since his voice was thick with relish as he leaned in and seized her hands together to stop them from hindering his roaming about.

"You know, since you objected to my cock in your mouth, maybe I'll go the long way around and shove some meat up your throat instead of down. What do you think?" He was in a good mood. Smiling, as blood dripped from his lips and teeth, his mouth already shrinking back to normal width, looking smug as anything as he waited for her terror, waited for her to swear to behave, to do anything, anything at all if he spared her that fate.

Valeriana shuddered and spat the blood pooling in her mouth over her chin and neck and bodice, thinking that if this weren't enough to make people see that he had forced her, she was beyond hope. Then she screamed again. Screamed until her throat felt more raw from the sounds she made than the wound. Felt no surprise when his teeth were there again, making so much blood bubble out that the possibility that she'd die suddenly didn't seem so farfetched.

It was fine. If she died, at least they'd know. If he killed her before he had his way with her, she'd be spared the shame altogether. Her father would have to concede that it hadn't been her fault. Ralen would be arrested. It was dirt easy to get away with violation, if one believed the horror stories her sisters told her, but murder was a different matter. He'd go to prison for hundreds of years, then spend another century doing civic labor. He'd pay, but wasn't . . . wasn't it twisted, that death was the only way she had to see herself vindicated?

Her neck hurt. She didn't want to die.

Ralen might not consider it a reason to stop if she were to cease breathing.

"I asked, what do you think?" There he went, shaking her again. Must have mistaken her for a beanbag.

Valeriana thought that she wanted him to die, miserably and in many pieces.

Later, she would tell herself that she hadn't been able to think further than that. That none of what followed had been her doing, that something had come over her as the realization struck, possessing her limbs and depriving her of sense. That she'd been dragged through the motions like a marionette, only to later come to her senses feeling like she'd gone to sleep and dreamed in red.

Her teeth ceased to be loose things swimming around her mouth unmoored. They were razor sharp, and they were legion.

If Ralen could seek to make her bleed so that she'd give in to his wants, then why—

Later, many decades down the lane, Valeriana would review the events with a less self-deluding mindset and acknowledge that there'd been no mysterious force driving her. That she hadn't gone to sleep so much as woken up to find the furniture of her mind rearranged, and the solutions she sought lying in plain view as if they'd just been waiting for her to acknowledge them.

Ralen had teeth, but so did she.

The world stopped spinning.

Valeriana noted, with frightening detachment, that while her jaw lowered and her grin stretched her lips to her ears and split her face in two halves, her heart rate barely picked up.

There was screaming, hoarse and incredulous, as her mouth latched not onto the side of Ralen's neck but the front. She didn't leave her teeth sitting where they pierced like makeshift plugs; she pulled her head back, tearing, pausing to spit out flesh, thinking that at least he'd beaten her hard enough that she'd gotten used enough to the flavor of blood that she didn't gag.

His screaming didn't last. Valeriana only had to tear through so many layers before reaching and excising some part in the absence of which he was reduced to garbled gasps.

There was no one moment in which she knew that she would not let up until he was dead. It was an awareness that came to her in bits and pieces, first when Ralen's half erect member slapped against her side as he tried to pry himself off, then when his bones yielded with a crunch, then when there turned out to be more of his throat scattered around them than left in place. After all that, she thought she might still stop, but knew—

She wouldn't, because she didn't want to. Death was a solution, one satisfying enough provided that it didn't happen to her. Not the only one, but at the moment Valeriana could entertain no other.

A part of her reproached her; it was her rational half, the one that had led her to kneel with little protest, to plead and cry when matters turned sour. The one that had allowed her to dream of flight but eschewed all reminders that fight was an option. Valeriana couldn't fathom why she'd ever heeded it.

There was blood on her lips and on her arms as Ralen clawed at her. He might be stronger, but believing her so much weaker had impaired his initial reaction, and she'd torn plenty of pieces off before he could reform his opinion. Tentacles twitched in a last-ditch attempt to throw her off, and then just twitched aimlessly, because there went his spinal cord and with it what little motor control he'd kept.

And then, with limited aplomb, he lay in two pieces, body sprawled on top of her, head rolling off to the side. Valeriana remained on her back for a long moment. Ralen's body sputtered rivulets of blood down her shoulder and onto the sand. She could taste him on her tongue and feel pieces of him sticking between her teeth. She was filthy with his gore, a mess, unsightly. By all rights, she should be losing her gods given mind.

Yet the inside of her head had never felt so still, so calm. It was almost surreal.

Valeriana finally stood up, shaking off the dead weight, looking into Ralen's glassy, empty eyes and facing her reflection.

She was herself in a dress reddened from the blood that drenched it, hair wild and eyes burning.

She kicked the head towards the water's edge and watched the sea sweep it away.

Her current state of hallowed serenity would only last as long as it took for the consequences of her actions to sink in. Valeriana made use of it while she still could.

She skipped to where the waves licked the sand and waded into the water until it reached her waist. It was lukewarm and still, protected from the stronger currents by a rocky outcrop along the edge of the bay.

She cupped water in her hands and splashed it first over her face, then her chest and arms, and repeated until it stopped running over her palms in shimmering shades of red. She unfastened her hair and rinsed it, knowing that getting it to resemble what it had been was a lost cause.

She wondered, as she stepped back onto dry land, when she was due to start regretting.

The night was a warm blanket wrapped around her, the orange light of the crystals comforting and soft. The railing of the bridge looked as good a place to sit down as anything, so she did. She lost track of how long she sat there, just her and the sound of her breathing and the sea lizards dozing on a sandbank further ahead. She'd missed them the first time around; the commotion didn't seem to have disturbed them.