A Restless Truth (Last Binding #2)

by Freya Marske

“Maud?” “I’m thinking.” Maud’s voice was cool as shadowed grass. Violet remembered Maud saying, I’m not naturally good. Saying, I know how to unravel someone. Violet wanted, with a sudden thrill of desire, to know what happened when Maud Blyth allowed herself to be a little mean.

Violet let her hands ease apart. The ropes parted Maud’s legs farther and wrapped around her wrists. “Tell me to hold you down like this,” said Violet. “Maud. Tell me to keep you pinned and make you scream.”

If she’d told herself a year ago that she’d find herself here, she might have smiled to hear about some of it. But she wouldn’t have known what to do with this part. This stirring of a drowsy thing in her chest made of soft wax and the smell of honey. The utter strangeness of yearning for something that she’d had—and had thoroughly, at that. Of being in a bed with a beautiful girl and still feeling her heart ache like a muscle long unstretched. She wanted to tell Maud stories and have her laugh at them, to flirt with her over coffee and watch her wander around rooms, thinking with the roaming of her fingertips.

When Morris turned on her, his face ugly with annoyance, she stepped close and drove her knee up as hard as she could into his groin. That was the plan, at least. Her bloody narrow skirt hampered the force of it, and Morris had good reflexes. Violet managed only a glancing blow between his legs—not what she’d intended, which was to drive his fucking bollocks so far up his arse his ancestors would be singing soprano.

It was possibly the worst thing—or the best—that he could have said in the circumstances. Violet had talked about the knife-spell coming from a part of her that was only anger. Maud felt a dark flicker, deep in her belly, thinking of Robin. She couldn’t transform the anger into magic. But oh, she wanted to, in order to hurt this person in return. She wanted to take his skin off inch by inch. She wanted to watch him writhe.

“Why,” muttered Hawthorn, “did I ever set foot on this accursed ship?” He stalked across the room—narrowly avoiding Chapman and the furniture—and turned Maud’s face in his hands, somewhere between clinical and avuncular, frowning down at the split lip. “Maud Blyth. You are a terror and you should not be allowed to run loose in the world.” Maud’s smile looked shaky. “Robin always says that.” “He has more sense than I thought.”

The person I could be with you is a person I still barely recognise. There are no layers to her, and that scares me. Even though I trust you—even though it feels like coming home, like setting down a weight—it scares me.

Edwin picked up one of Robin’s hands as Robin talked, and examined the knuckles with a critical air. Then carried it to his lips for a brief, absent moment that made Robin’s voice trail off entirely. Robin took his hand back. He looked at Edwin as though this slim, unremarkable man was everything he could imagine wanting.

“Maudie, what happened?” said Robin. “Tell us everything.” Everything. Maud bit her lip. What was she supposed to say? She was now the supposed mistress of the Baron Hawthorn, a shameless trollop, and still half-suspected of being a jewel thief. She’d recruited three people to the cause. She’d had a chance at an inheritance, and lost it, and might have been offered part of another. She’d learned to say fuck, and to perform the verb; and to have it performed upon her, thoroughly, by a music-hall magician with a hundred smiles and one high-walled heart.