Not long before this, she had stared at her reflection.
She had seen the ring of light that glowed above her head, and the satin-soft feathers that adorned her wings – pristinely white, with gold scattered throughout. She had stared at an angelically beautiful creature that did not match the wretched thing that was inside. Because even though she has always been all things light and lovely, even though she has always been delicate and soft-spoken, she is none of the things that light is made of. She is selfish and insatiable in her want – she is faithless and she is damaged beyond repair. She is everything that is ugly, dressed up in the prettiest of wrappings, and she deserves every ounce of hurt that she gets.
She has twisted it in a way that she can have some semblance of control. It started long before Beqanna, in those jungles in a land far from here, where she first began to train herself to want it. It was easier to withstand the hurt if she craved it; it was easier to weather the heartbreak if she fooled herself into not caring.
And now she was this, a false angel begging to be broken by dark gods and heartless kings, all but offering her own halo to choke her with.
She doesn’t notice the way her breathing had quickened along with the exploration of his touch, or the way her eyes drifted close in the heady haze of her want. The lightness of his mouth as he skims and grazes across the outline of her ribs and the curve of her hips makes her shudder, and her heartbeat surges again when he lingers behind her – the tension building and twisting in her chest, her muscles quivering.
But then he is alongside of her again, and her eyes open with a tilt of her head and a slow exhale of the breath she had been holding. The roughness of his voice, the way he laughs when he lays out the rules, it makes her pulse jump again. She wants to push against him, she wants to see how much is too much from her – what his limit is until he is annoyed, or enraged, or what would make her feel that instant ice-cold fear of regret in realizing she has just said or done the wrong thing.
She doesn’t, though. Not today, at least.
Instead she steps into him, mild and sweet, her lips reaching to first caress against his neck. Her touch travels slow and deliberate, a startling contrast compared to the sharp bites he had left marked across her. Her lips reach the groove of his throat, brushing along the side of his cheek, before she ducks her haloed head beneath his. With a curve of her neck her lips find his jaw, and only then does she ask in that soft, obedient way that she has learned from years of trying to appease those that wanted nothing more than to break her, “Can I play your game, Atrox?”
