Recent content by Keres

Her brow knitted, a tight, pained crease forming as his words sank under her skin like hooks. Her stomach twisted at his shame and regret. He thought she blamed him. He thought she needed to forgive him. As though either of them had been given choices. Keres swallowed hard, forcing clarity...

Keres hadn’t expected how deeply the music would cut. How quietly it would move through her, slipping between the bruises and the raw places inside her chest like water seeping through cracks in stone. When was the last time she’d heard a song? A tavern somewhere, with Roul beside her, tankard...

Keres jerked her hand back the instant he flinched, fingers curling into a fist before she drew her knees in tight, arms winding around them as if to make herself small. The air between them felt suddenly too fragile. “Threnody…” she echoed softly, eyes lowering. “Alright. If that’s what you...

Keres sucked in a sharp breath as his voice broke the quiet. Her spine stiffened, her blood running cold as the world seemed to tilt beneath her. She turned her head slowly, meeting those soft green eyes now bright with pain and confusion. “I…” The word fell out of her, thin and useless.. No...

Keres did not fight. Her body drifted on a tide she could neither command nor comprehend. Anything that was not pain, not cold, not the whip or the ghosts gnawing at her nerves, she let the numbness take her. What was offered, she accepted in a fogged, spiralling haze until thought itself...

The moment his blood touched her tongue, she knew she had erred. The pain she’d drawn from him was satisfying, yes, but the blood itself was not mortal. It burned. Sweet, metallic, and wrong, and the moment she swallowed, it flooded through her like liquid heat. Her pupils dilated, swallowing...

Keres held his gaze, refusing to look away even as the whip slid like a serpent over her skin. The handle’s path down her throat left fire in its wake, and when he looped the cord about her neck, the rasp of leather made her pulse stutter. It wasn’t fear, it was rage, raw and shaking, fighting...

Satisfaction burned through her like fire in her veins. The shock that had flickered just briefly across his face filled her with a dark, dangerous delight. She had caught him off guard. The Shrike. The untouchable, unshakable tyrant. Her lips curved faintly despite the leather in her mouth, her...

Pain muddled her senses, casting a haze over her mind as she struggled to focus on him. Her chest heaved with each ragged breath, black eyes blazing at him despite the drowsy weight in her limbs. When he shoved the handle of the whip into her mouth, gagging her, she let out a choked sound...

The bite of the whip was too much to ignore. Each strike tore a ragged cry from her throat, her body twisting as though trying to flee the pain though she had nowhere to go. The chains rattled above her, holding her upright when her legs could no longer bear her weight. Blood ran down her form...

Keres flinched at the whip’s crack, her chest tightening in dread as the air seemed to split with its song. “I took him to bed… because you told me to,” she bit out, teeth clenched, eyes glistening as she stared up at him, defiance and fear tangled in her gaze. Her words died on her lips as the...

Keres frowned at his words, shaking her head sharply. “I have no attachment to him,” she bit out, the defiance in her voice wobbling only slightly under the weight of his gaze. Her eyes flicked to the whip in his hand, and then to the wooden rod he chose instead. Her stomach turned. Her jaw...

Her heart jolted as the second manacle snapped tight around her wrist with a metallic click, the sound sharp as a blade in the silence that followed. The chains went taut, biting into her skin as she glared at him from beneath the shadow of her lashes, her chest rising and falling in short...

All he had to do was repeat that one word, and her blood turned to ice. The way he said it, soft, curious, mocking, it crawled down her spine like a cold hand. She tried to keep her chin high, her jaw locked in defiance. Tried to match that glacial stare and hold it. But then the air shifted...

What he had just put her through - ripping the souls from three living beings- was a mark upon her own. She could feel it, heavy and festering, seared into the marrow of her bones. Her body trembled from the effort of it, from the strain of holding so much alien power that it still clawed at her...