I kissed his cut fingers, as if in apology. Sevas wiped away the mess of blood on my thighs, staining his palms the color of sour-cherry kvass. Already I felt so horribly empty without him inside me. I wished I could catch him there, keep him there, swallow him whole.
Chapter Eleven
There were no windows in the mirrored room and so I only woke when I felt the wooden floor pressing hard against my hipbone, and something prickling at my scalp. I sat up and shook glass shards from my hair. Sevas rolled over onto his back, flinging one hand over his eyes even though it was as dark as it had always been. His lips were wonderfully swollen and it made me flush just to look at him, still unclothed, our bare legs tangled like an extraordinary nexus of tree roots.
I could have stared at him this way forever, and perhaps stayed curled there with him, if not for the pain in my side and the throb of something torn open between my thighs. I gave him a soft nudge in the shoulder and Sevas groaned, lashes fluttering.
The moment he’d sunk himself inside of me a vision had burst across the insides of my eyelids, painting everything in lurid color. I saw Derkach’s hands, huge and hairy, and the flash of a silver belt buckle. It was so awful that I’d bitten down on Sevas’s lip and hoped that as he bled the memory drained out of us both.
And then I’d wanted only to pour myself into the space that the memory had left in him, like sugar in black tea, thinning it and making it sweet. I kissed him back as hard as he kissed me, and with every moment that he thrusted into me, Derkach’s face faded from both of our minds. Now I saw the stain of my blood on his palms, darkened with the hours to a color that was nearly black. I almost thought to lick it off, to see what my broken maidenhead tasted like—it had to be as heady and good as honey wine to make Papa want to guard it like a panting dog—but I figured that would perturb him. Instead I jostled Sevas again, with greater force this time, and heaving a weary sigh he opened his eyes at last.
“Marlinchen,” he said. His gaze traveled slowly over me, over the hair that lay in coils covering my breasts. Last night I had not felt ashamed of them, their softness and heaviness, but now I did, and I was glad that they were hidden. “I’m sorry for making you bleed.”
I wasn’t sorry at all, but I didn’t tell him so. Instead I reached for my gown, torn nearly beyond repair, all the snapped corset laces strewn about the broken glass. As I tried to smooth the pleats of the skirt I felt like a ghost returning to its body, only I was both the body and the ghost. The ghost’s words bubbled up in me. “I have to go home.”
Sevas propped himself up on his elbows, swollen mouth twisting. “What?”
When I’d run last night, tucking the compact into the cleft of my breasts, when I’d turned away from Papa’s outstretched hands, the magic of my long-kept secret breaking this spell, I hadn’t thought of returning. I’d only thought of fleeing from the dragons at the door.
But now I knew I would have to return. I knew it in my marrow and blood. I belonged to that house like one of Undine’s china dolls or the grandfather clock or Papa’s last cat-vase. It had birthed me in all of my ugly, feral strangeness, and so it would have to take me back. Only—
My breath caught in my chest, like a pin in the hem of a dress. A film came over my eyes, fear turning my vision milky as marbled glass.
Sevas sat up with a jolt of alarm, pushing himself onto his knees beside me, all the while I was panting and gasping and trying not to cry. Whatever impossible magic had existed in this mirrored room last night was gone, dried up, burned down. Sevas’s hand hovered above my shoulder, like he was afraid to touch me, and the absurdity of it almost made me laugh; his palm was still matted with my blood. It was only then that I managed to say, “My father will have my liver, for what I’ve done.”
“Your liver?” Sevas’s brow furrowed with hard, deep lines. “Marlinchen, please, you’ll have to explain the workings of his wizard’s mind.”
So I told him about Papa’s potion, that vile-tasting black draught that he tipped down our throats every week or whenever he thought that he could smell a lie on us. I told him about how he guarded our maidenheads like a jealous lord guarded his most fertile lands, so that only he could plant there.
By the time I was done, my teeth were chattering as if I’d been gripped by a sudden bout of cold, and Sevas gripped my arms, smearing my own blood into the crook of my elbow.
“Why wouldn’t you tell me?” he asked, voice tipping up on the last syllable, high and thin with despair. “I wouldn’t have done it if I had known.”