Page 56 of Ravished By the Revenant

“Boot leather,” I reply immediately. “The second month of a siege.”

She makes a thoughtful noise. “Worse than McDonald’s?”

“The boot had fewer ingredients I couldn’t identify,” I drawl.

She snorts against my collarbone, and I feel her gathering the next question like an archer reaching for another arrow. Whatever she is circling, she intends to approach it from every direction except directly.

“Question.”

“Clara. Is this an interrogation? Should I be strapped to a chair?”

“Later, if you’re good.” Her hand wanders up to my ear, the mangled one, and her fingertip touches the rings threaded through the ruined cartilage, gentle as a breath. “These. Are they decoration or are they, like… load-bearing?”

“Both.” I turn my head to give her better access, because her touch on any part of my body is something I would trade provinces for. “Those hold the ear together. A mace took most of it, and my wounds ceased healing two years later, so the piercings serve as permanent stitching. Functional.”

She clicks her tongue in sympathy. “And the lip ones?”

“Decorative. The nipple as well. And the tongue.” I pause. “And the ladder.”

Her cheeks flush pink. Another victory for Lord Blackthorn.

“So you just… what, woke up one century and thought, you know what this corpse needs? More metal?”

“I was bored, Clara. Do you comprehend the boredom of several hundred years in this castle? I had read every book a hundred times. I had counted the stones in the great hall. Twice, because I lost count at four thousand the first time. A needle and a steady hand were entertainment.” I shrug, jostling her head. “The pain was a novelty. Feeling anything was a novelty.”

She’s quiet a moment, her thumb resting on the lip rings.

“And the tattoos?”

“Lukas did most of them, though some I brought from before my curse, and he refreshed them. The man was an artist, not a groundskeeper’s son. He taught me before he died, and I continued the work myself. Some of the newer ones are mine entirely.” I catch her hand and press it flat over the inked script below my collarbone. “Left-handed work is sloppier. You can tell which decade I did while drinking.”

“Lukas.” She lifts her head, chin propped on my sternum, eyes narrowing. “Wait. The Lukas who signed the portrait? The 1817 guy?”

“The very same. He painted it in secret, from the doorway of the solar, because I refused to sit for one. I only learned of it after his death.” I let my smirk build slowly. “The portrait you stood beneath your first night here. The one you whistled at. The one that made you fall in love with me at first sight, before you had exchanged a single word with⁠—”

She slaps my chest.

It’s not a hard slap. It’s barely a slap at all, more an indignant pat delivered by a woman with no leverage. But the motion travels down her body, and her legs shift, and Schmetterling is launched from his throne like a man overboard.

He lands, of course, on his feet. He turns. He looks at us both with three hundred years of accumulated disappointment, tail lashing once, and stalks to the door, where he pauses to cast a final glare over his shoulder before flouncing into the hallway.

“Great,” Clara says. “Now the cat hates us.”

“He hates you.” I grin unrepentantly. “I was stationary.”

“I did not fall in love with you because of a painting.” She jabs a finger into my chest, just south of the exposed ribs. “I fell in love with you because of fish and warm socks and your unhinged devotion to breakfast. The painting made me think, ‘huh, hot dead guy,’ and that is a completely different emotion.”

“Hot dead guy,” I repeat slowly. “I have held seventeen titles. That one is my favorite.”

She laughs, though it dies too quickly, and I feel the change in her body before she speaks. Her muscles draw tight. Her fingers curl against my ribs. The questions have run out, and whatever she has been marching around all morning now stands directly in her path.

“Aldric.”

“I’m here.”

“Yesterday. In town.” She doesn’t lift her head. She speaks into my chest, to the crystal, as though it’s easier to confess to the heart than the face. “I saw Marco. At the farmers market. With two of his men.”

My body locks up. I’m a general once more, receiving news from the battlefront.