This chapter is exceptionally long and has some cursing and adult content. Again, it's more weird than sexy, but be warned if that sort of thing bothers you.

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The rest of the evening passes in a haze of light and color, bubbling with alcohol and fake laughter. More dainties that turn to ash in my mouth. Sholu says our goodbyes and takes my hand, leading me down the corridor to our new suite. The rooms themselves are old; they always belong to the deme and dizsa.

He closes the bedroom door softly. I hear the click of the lock engaging and take a deep breath, looking around me. The room is lit by the moon streaming in through great glass windows, and it's clear even in the soft light that no expense has been spared to make the space comfortable. Plush rugs cover the white stone floor, which is flecked with mica that scatters the light like thousands of tiny mirrors. Billowing gray curtains dance in the night wind, the door overlooking the balcony left slightly ajar so the scent of night-blooming turtleroses floats up from the gardens below. The bed is ornate. Delicate carvings of flowers and leaves trail up its posts, which are covered in a translucent canopy. The mattress is high and thick, and no less than ten down pillows are piled on top of its crisp silk sheets.

While I survey the room, Sholu watches me. He leans against the wall so casually, like he's not nervous at all. Like his heart isn't beating out of his chest. Like he's had a thousand wives and a thousand wedding nights already, while I feel like a child lost in a dark wood. The room is flooded with moonlight, and it casts strange shadows across his face as he watches me sit down in a plush maroon chair. He gives up his surveying and sits across from me, reaching a ring-laden hand out to pour me a drink from a heavy silver carafe. I drink it in one go and hold the cup out to him, silently demanding more.

He raises his eyebrows. "I didn't know you had such a taste for wine."

"There's a lot you don't know about me, Sholu," I reply as he refills my glass, hoping I sound mysterious instead of frightened. "And I don't have a taste for wine, really. It steels the nerves, and the goddess knows I need iron bridges to traverse this evening with some dignity. I told myself I wouldn't cry, or scream, or claw your eyes from your head, so instead, I drink."

I down the second glass with a flourish and reach for the whole carafe, refilling my glass, then overfilling his. Maybe he'll drink enough and just fall asleep, I think. But that would only delay the inevitable. He's won. We both know it. My fate is the fate of the spoils of war: to be destroyed or acquired, as per the conqueror's whims. I wonder when he touches me, does he feel a woman beneath his hands, or just another city to be sacked?

I hate him. I hate this stupid room, decked in gold and lacy finery. The only thing I don't hate is the wine in my hand. I take another long drink and feel a heat blooming in my chest and spreading to my extremities.

"I need to be clear," I say, quieter than I intend. "I will not play-act behind closed doors. I will find a way to tolerate your presence, I will not cut your throat in your sleep, but I won't pretend we're starry-eyed lovers. We're not," I say, a little harsher. "And we never will be. We're just two damned souls sharing the same gray purgatory. Okay?"

He chuckles. "Such sweet words, wife of mine. Tell me, did you pull them from the pages of the book of love, or from the well of your own desire?"

"Well," I take another swig. "More like a pit. We've just ended up in the same goddamned pit."

"Pit?" He shakes his head. "You think you know hell because you've dipped your big toe into the darkness. Or maybe I should say the darkness has dipped its big toe into you. But all this talk of damnation and penance is absurd. We're deme and dizsa, O'otani, king and queen, or whatever title we choose to use. We're carving something new for once, like the gods do. We have the chance to make things better."

"You threw this nation off a cliff," I pronounce simply.

"But I caught you," he says. "The world was falling down, and I caught you. I'm your only friend here, really. The only reason they don't hate you is that they think you're with me. If I turned on you, darling," he continues, acid leaking into his voice, "you'd be torn apart. So, maybe think about that before you dictate your terms and conditions to me."

"Fuck you," I hiss, leaning forward in my chair and scowling at him.

"You will, shortly," he says, emptying his glass and loosening the ties of his kata. The tails look like the crumpled wings of a dragonfly unfurled behind him. The skin of his neck and upper chest comes into view as the wrapped tunic loosens. Even in the low light, I can tell at a glance that he's crisscrossed with scars. I forget sometimes amidst his sophistry that he's norayasti. He got his start fighting and fucking amidst the roughest gangs in Shikkah.

He's risen so much in so short a time, and I can't quite make out how he's done it. Blood, yes, and a certain sort of eloquence, and good timing. Charisma. Maybe even faith, though I've called him faithless. Who else but a god, or a demon, could lift a man so far above his station before the hair around his temples even begins to gray? Who else could imbue him with such gravity that he seems to draw the light itself towards him?

"Karshaivi," I mutter, remembering Mishira Kyorin. Unnatural.

"What could be more natural on a wedding night than a husband taking his wife in his arms? I know the dimaraste is cold, but your blood runs hot enough to set the river Imer boiling. You're of the body, Tani. Like me. Surely you see the rightness in what comes next."

"I feel like I've been in a dark room for years, Verlaina. I can't see a thing."

"Well, then, let there be light," he answers with a Cheshire grin, striking a match and lighting a series of tapered candles around us. "Now, that's better. I can see your face," he reaches forward and brushes the hair falling over my eyes behind my ear. I stiffen and start to pull away, but stay myself, breathing deeply through the frantic pounding of my heart.

"There's a river boiling inside of me, always, and I don't know which one of us will drown in it. Sometimes," I add plainly, "I feel I already have."

"I won't let you drown," he says softly, trailing his fingertips down the side of my face achingly slowly. His other hand cups the nape of my neck, pushing forward gently until we're mingling breath. He smells like cloves and wine, that and something earthy and bitter. Graveyard dirt, maybe. Perhaps it's just the soil of hell clinging to his steel-tipped boots.

I keep my eyes open as he kisses me. His tongue traces the vermillion border of my lips slowly, coaxingly, before he pulls away. A thin strand of saliva connects our mouths like spider's silk. He breathes heavily and wipes a stray tear from my eye. Damn it. I swore I wouldn't cry, wouldn't flinch. I feel very young all of the sudden, like a girl dressed up in her mother's skirts. The bridal costume is just that, a costume, and the woman underneath is shattered fragments.

He leans forward and kisses me again and without thinking, I bite him. The rich iron of his blood blooms across my tongue. It's the first thing I've eaten all evening that I've actually tasted.

"Fuck," he hisses. I expect him to draw back, to tend to his cut lip, but he only kisses me deeper. The taste of blood intensifies until I grow nauseous. I break away and take a gasping breath, dizzy and lightheaded from the lack of oxygen. From breathing him in.

His hands wrap around my waist, almost entirely encircling it. I imagine I'm someplace very far away while he unties the lacing at the back of my dress and makes quick work of the stays holding my bodice together. The outer garments slide from me like snakeskin, slippery as silk, leaving me in my thin underclothes. He studies me with an inscrutable expression and leans forward, running his hand along the nape of my neck and loosening the myriad clips and pins Idriit used to keep my hair at bay. It all comes tumbling down and he fans it out over my shoulders.

"Are you scared?"

"Of you, whoreson?" I half spit. "No, not in a million years. I'm only scared you won't be able to get the little worm up."

He chuckles softly. "So pretty yet so caustic," he lifts my chin with his index finger and studies me, traces the contours of my neck with his eyes like a predator preparing to rip out my jugular. "Well, maybe they're one and the same with you." I shudder sharply as the room grows dimmer, as he seems to steal the light, his shadow draping itself so covetously over mine.

"Sholu..."

"Hush," he whispers, loosening the last tie of his kata so it falls open at the front. His gold locket glints brilliantly in the candle light. He shrugs his arms out of the scarlet fabric and lets it drop to his feet. Ridges and valleys of scars snake around his torso like hieroglyphs. He stays still for a moment as my eyes roam over his flesh, then pulls me sharply against him. The heat of his chest engulfs me, and I imagine I can hear the clockwork beating of his heart. His hands grab at the crumpled fabric of my underclothes, lifting the skirt high enough to trail his burning fingertips across my outer thighs. He inches closer to my center and I pull away abruptly, overwhelmed. I'm shaking, I realize. I can't seem to stop. He drops his hand, and my skirts, and just rubs my back.

"You told me a story once," he murmurs. "About an Oxgrove cat who gored her keeper to death."

"What about it?"

"You told it as if you were the cat and I the keeper," he continues. "But what if they're both just you, O'otani? What if you're the predator about to tear out your own throat, and the prey lying defenseless beneath your weight? You've always seemed to have two souls to me. One of duty, one of fire," he sighs, tracing abstract patterns onto the skin of my back. "Always an inch away from tearing each other, and you, apart. I wonder, what would you be like, if you let that damned cat out of its cage for a night?"

I've wondered so many times what would happen if I just let go. Stopped trying to excise all of the parts of myself that my family couldn't stomach: my impulsivity, my crude tongue, my violence. Just existed honestly, without apologizing for it.

"Sometimes, I think I already have," the words spill from me unbidden, like there's a pressure that needs to be released. "That when I was still a babe, they saw... something in me, something foreign, and that's why they chose Shira to rule even though I'm two months older."

"We could try tonight," he offers casually. "You could stop fighting your nature and instead follow where it leads. I could walk with you, goddess knows there's something kindred between your darkness and mine. The parts of us others might find unspeakable."

"One of us would end up dead," I answer with certainty. "And the part of you I find unspeakable, Sholu? That's your soul. Or the space where it used to be."

"So, be my new one," he whispers into my ear. "Bring my soul back to me, little tiger girl." He presses himself against me, guiding me to the bed.

"N-no," I stammer as I fall back on a pile of pillows. "Not- not yet." I pull myself up, smoothing my wrinkled skirts over my legs. "I didn't- earlier, I didn't finish dictating my terms and conditions." I scoot down, putting more space between us.

"I want to pick my own attendants," I start without waiting for his permission. "One half of your choosing is painfully dull, the other too ambitious to be trustworthy. I want Undercaptain Kaza Utim O'utena to lead my personal guard. Each week, I want time away from you and this spectacle of a court you're building. I get a say in matters of state. And I want lanuli each night. I rarely sleep well and I'm sick to death of nightmares."

He raises his eyebrows and studies me in silence for a long moment before asking "what makes you think you're in a position to make demands?"

"You offered me Shira's life in exchange for my hand in marriage," I say. "But you want more from me than that. You want me to play your games, sit with you in relative peace, act like I love you dearly. You want me to help draw remaining loyalists to your cause, and you want the legitimacy of my name, even though I now have yours. Besides," I shrug, "what benefits me benefits you. We're riverbound, remember?"

"I remember," he murmurs, closing the space between us in two short strides. I feel a shiver of fear as his eyes trace the contours of my form with undisguised hunger. My skin is barely shielded by my flimsy white silk underclothes. One of his hands cups my cheek while the other trails down the curve of my back, dipping lower than before.

"I remember, my lady," he whispers huskily into my ear. "I remember so much of you. That first day we met at the east harbor. How your eyes flared so brilliantly when you cursed me for daring to insult your darling prince. How you stepped towards me instead of away, like you were urging me to meet your challenge. I remember how out of place you seemed by your mother's side, like you were merely imitating a lady while she was one," he chuckles low in his throat and leans in closer, so his lips are almost grazing mine. "I remember you covered in blood, screaming obscenities with such fire it almost burned me. I remember that wild look in your eye-"

"S-stop it," I mutter, pushing hard at his chest. "Stop it, you're too close!"
"For your comfort, yes," he sighs. "But not for mine." I hate the way he says that word, almost proprietarily. "I'll grant your conditions, little devil. You'll choose your attendants, Kaza will be captain of your guard, you'll have ample time away from me each week, and you'll sleep soundly as a babe." He lifts my chin, his gaze piercing me like a javelin through my center. "Now," he asks. "What will you grant me in return?"

"A noose, gratis," I hiss, pushing him back boldly and staring at him with fire in my eyes. "That's what you deserve, you stupid son of a bitch. Rope biting into your neck, your feet finding no purchase as you suffocate under your own weight."

I step forward, as he remembers, and I look down my nose at him like the nothing he is and always will be. "Now, enough of this. Enough of the games, the petting, the pleasantries. Enough of acting like this is a seduction instead of a rape. Come on, Sholu, grab me," I urge, taking another step forward. "Catch me when I try to run. Hold me down. I'm sure you can; you're stronger than me, aren't you?" I feel tears of rage pricking my eyes as I continue. I can't seem to stop. All that I feel spills from my tongue like snake's venom. I hope it stings like hell. "Tear the silk and kiss me to silence my screaming. Let your weight press me into the bed, the floor, wherever you choose to take the one thing I have left from me just because you can!"

I start crying in earnest, overcome by the moment, by the life I'm living. I feel like I'm in shock. All of my earlier aloofness and control is gone, replaced by a raw edge. "Because that's what you do, isn't it?" I continue, shoving him. "You just take. You're the king now, you're karu deme, and you're clothed in the silks of those whose throats you slit. My people, you bastard!" I'm sobbing and pushing him back, beating on his chest with my hands. "You wanted it, so you took it, and you wanted me, so you found the one person I love enough to die for and you put a knife to his neck! You took my future, my dignity, my peace of mind. It's your fault that I never sleep because I'm terrified of the dreams I might have!"

I pause for a moment, drawing a ragged breath, then another, as tears stream freely down my cheeks. Their salt trails down my neck, burning the new scar on my collarbone. "This madness you've made has consumed every part of me. I'm surprised you even want what's left, it's so very little," my voice is hoarse from shouting. "But you're a vulture, and you'll take any rotted meat left on my bones because that's what you do. That's who you are.

"And because you took who I was," I promise, "I'll take who you are right goddamn back." Rage flows through me like liquor. "I'll strip away the layers of your false gains until you stand naked once more, devoid of palace, of country, of power, of legacy. Begging on your shattered knees for mercy that will not come," I laugh through my tears. "I'll take it because it's my right. We're riverbound, remember?" I spit. "Remember? Do you remember? I do. I remember every single fucking day. And the thing I can't get past is you knew what it was like. You saw her lying there, your future dead inside of her. You know what it's like to be the one who's left, and you still did this to me. I never did anything to you. It was Somitu who took what was yours.

"Was it worth it?" I ask, unsure if he can even hear me through the intensity of the sobs wracking my chest. I fall forward onto him, at once pushing him away and pulling him closer as my strength gives out and I crumple like a folding fan. "Was it? Are you happy now? Are you less lonely because you've dragged me to this pit, too, my lord? Am I good company here in the dark? I can't imagine I am, I can't imagine anything good anymore. I can't remember what it's like not to be so angry. You could have just let me die that night. One mercy, Mesviraste, one pang of sympathy for the girl you say is so much like you."

"And what would following them into the dusk forever have done?" He asks, pulling me upright with his own strength. "You didn't act like one who wanted to die that night. You must recall wresting a knife from one of my men, stabbing him, and then bashing another to a bloody pulp against the marble floor. You know what someone who wants an end looks like?" He asks. "Ristalai Kyorin. That vacancy in her eyes. There was a silent decision about her, a certainty that things would never get better, that she would never heal," he continues. "Or maybe just that she lacked the energy to try. You fought like a wildcat, O'otani, and you promised to end my life, not your own."

"You keep saying I should have let you die that night," he says, eyes burning like stars as he stares deeply into my own. I gaze back from a hollow place, wondering if he sees Ristalai looking back at him. "But you did, O'otani Koritzu Amarin. You died that night. Or maybe I should say, your life ended. Your present was swept away by a great wave you couldn't stop, a tide that swallowed every future you had imagined. All you knew was lost to the deep water." I look away, unable to bear my reality as told through his words. He's narrating my heart like he's walked inside of it for a lifetime when I myself can barely touch its truth.

"You died that night, but if any mortal holds the secret of resurrection, it must be you," he urges, gaze softening as his thumb brushes a few drying tears from my cheek. "Who else but you could rise like an ember from that wet ash and burst into flame? Who else but you burns so hot, so bright, so vividly that she could chase the darkness itself away with her light?" He holds my face gently in his hands as the last of my tears fall like diamonds upon my flickering lashes.

"There is none," he pronounces softly, kissing my forehead. "None but you."

"Is this where you tell me you love me?" I laugh derisively. My eyes are swollen half shut and my nose is running. "Is this where you promise me it gets better, where you paint me pictures of the shining future you envision? Is this where you tell yourself I want this too? Because I don't. I don't want you. I will never want you. Can't you see that, goddamn it?" my voice rises again, finding some previously untapped reserve of strength to deliver one last blow.

I don't know why I say it. I just want to hurt him. "Can't you see that Shira's shadow is so bright it blots out your false sun with ease? Haven't you realized by now how in love with him I am?" I escalate, seeing the sharp sting of pain in his gray eyes. "Haven't you realized I have no innocence left for you to take? That I was always his, body and soul?" I laugh softly. "So go on, then. Go on and fuck me while I think of him. While I remember his hands on my skin, his lips panting over mine. His cock-"

"O'otani, I know you didn't lie with him," Sholu says in a low voice. "He wasn't- he didn't want women that way. It was clear to see."

"Really?" I ask, staring up into his eyes and hoping to sew a seed of doubt. One that will be like a sharp bur pricking at him continuously, a speck of dirt in his eye he can't blink out. "Why would I agree to this, to you, for any other reason? I'm in love with Amshira, Sholu, and I always will be. What you take from me, he's had already. So go on, then" I hiss. "Go on. Finish it. Finish. Or can you even start?"

"I know you didn't lie with him. You just told me I was taking the one thing you had left."

"I meant my dignity," I reply coldly.

"No, you didn't," he whispers back. "But if it's true, no matter. I've never followed the Amarin definition of honor, and I don't plan to start now. I'm certainly no blushing virgin. But you're right about one thing. You will always love him." He says, trailing his finger down my cheek. "And I will always love Lizsa and the child she carried. I will always pray that one day, when I go home to the goddess, they'll be waiting for me. But it's a long way home, O'otani, and it's better to walk with company.
"I'll say this only once," he continues. "I'm sorry that I hurt you. I'm sorry for what you lost. But I'm not sorry I killed them. And, if you're honest with yourself, you'll see that it was always going to end. I just happened to be the blessed fool who walked past at the right moment and lit the fuse."

"What are you talking about?" I ask, pulling back and glaring at him.

"Your family killed itself long before I came along," he sighs. "Kyoro sought me out, not the other way around. If I had said no, I'm sure she'd have found someone else. That sort of rage doesn't just go away. And then where would you be?" he asks. "At the helm of a nation falling into civil war, presiding over a family split down its jagged center over every issue that matters, crying over Shira's gravestone? They would have killed you, O'otani," he says. "Kyoro wasn't Somitu. She couldn't keep that family together, let alone this nation. There would have been a war, you would have lost, and you'd have what you claim to so fervently desire." He pronounces. "An ending."

"Stop it," I whisper. "Just stop."

"But it wouldn't just be you," he continues, ignoring my entreaties. "It would be the baker's son, and the weaver's daughter, and Kaza's little sisters, and ten, twenty, a hundred thousand more. We were teetering over the edge for years. It was time someone gave the final push. Now the dust has settled, and there are one hundred and fifteen dead. Two of which you murdered, three of which you sentenced to hang. The city is bent, but it's whole. The people are celebrating for the first time in goddess knows how long. There's a unity of old and new, two hands clasped tight, ready to lead them toward something that actually matters. It's dawn, O'otani, and you're dressed up as night and crying stars. And you know, I don't blame you for it. Not for a moment."

"Really?" I reply acerbically. "I blame you every goddamned day."

"No," he corrects. "You blame yourself."

"How dare you suggest-"

"That every time the sun rises, you feel farther from its light? And that every sunset, you try to melt into the shadows so no one can see the blackness staining your hands?" he narrates in a silken voice sharp as a carving knife. "In quiet moments you excavate your own heart and hide the harvest of your guilt behind performative rage. I am the external focus of the maelstrom roiling inside of you every waking moment."

"Like hell you are," I hiss, stumbling towards him and shoving him blindly. He's solid, barely shifting as I push against him until the tears filling my eyes blot out my vision. The whole world is a wet haze as I insist "you're the architect of this catastrophe. You're the reason this happened. I- I loved my family. I did nothing wrong. And you-"

"Are the thing you point to so you don't have to point to yourself," he finishes softly. I shove him again, heat rising in my blood. How dare he speak to me like he knows me. How dare he get it right.

"When you look in the mirror, you see your part in it so clearly. You wonder how, at the moment it was happening, the truth was so unreachable. Like an island lost to the sea. You repeat the same excuses and mitigations over and over again until they grind you down to near nothing."

He pauses and my hands drop. I feel more naked than I ever have, certainly more exposed than I am by my white slip. My hands curl into fists at my side and then relax limply. My mouth opens and closes without uttering a word, because what can I say? That he's wrong? We'd both hear the lie in my voice easily.

"Do you get it now?" he asks fervently. "I meant it when I said I see you. Understand you. I meant it when I said we don't have to lie to each other or be so lonely." He takes my hands in his like he might coax them to mold wet clay into whatever shape he desires. "You don't have to say or decide anything now. Just get into bed."

He lets my hands drop and turns away from me, unbuckling his belt. I hear it clatter to the floor followed by the rustling of fabric as he strips off his breeches. My breath catches in my throat as I wait for his hand to grab my shoulder and turn me towards him. I stand still for a few moments before I hear him walking away from me. There's a rustle and a creak as he crawls into bed.

I turn towards him, confused. "Aren't you going to-"

"No," he sighs, pulling the blankets up over his naked chest. "As much as I'd like to, I think enough blood has been spilled already."

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SO still no sex. Sorry? Also, this book is fucking depressing. Next chapter is Shira again and I'm so excited for something a little lower key. Writing O'otani is emotionally exhausting. Tell me what you think and whose side you're on, if any.

-SW