Chapter 377: Your Father Was Here.

I got up and crossed the room to the tray on the floor.

Her food hadn’t been touched. Not one thing on it had moved since Monica set it down in here. The light sat across all of it the way it sat across everything else in this basement.

I picked the metal fork off it. The tines were dull. Better than nothing.

Behind me her breathing had gone uneven again. Not the ragged fighting from earlier. Something faster, and climbing, and no longer being resisted.

I came back and knelt on the bed between her legs. The metal frame took my weight and ticked against the stone, a thin complaint that ran the length of the rails into the headboard. Up close the heat of her was sharper.

"Do you like what you see?"

I looked once.

Bare. Open. The outer lips flushed darker than the rest of her, already slick enough that the light found a thin shine along the inner edge. Her stomach hollowed with the next breath.

Then I looked at the rope on her ankle and put the tines of the fork into it.

Her waist moved under me — an involuntary lift that had nothing to do with anything I’d done. A full-body flinch toward contact that the bindings cut short. A sound left her throat and she bit it off.

"Relax. I’m cutting you loose."

"You didn’t answer my question."

"I’m working."

"And I want you to know something." She wasn’t letting any of it go. The voice was steady; the body under it was not. "You’re not the first Nadez to be between my legs."

I got the fork deeper into the weave and said nothing at all. The rope was thick, old, worked into itself. The metal scraped. A single fibre gave and went nowhere.

"Do you know he was the first? Ever. He was about your age when it happened. We were both young then, both of us, and there was nothing else in the world we were paying attention to."

The rope was considerably tougher than it looked. I hooked the fork under one strand and hauled back on it and the whole thing held without giving me anything. My forearm burned. Her ankle flexed against the binding and the raw skin under it whitened.

"I remember all of it like it happened this week."

"Please."

"Is that offending you?" She laughed at me. Genuinely laughed, with her wrists still tied over her head and her legs open around my knees. "It is. Look at your face. You’ve gone completely somewhere else."

"I don’t want this conversation."

One strand gave and frayed out white under the metal. A small victory that cost more than it should have.

"It isn’t inappropriate. I’m telling you something about your father that nobody left alive can tell you. There is one person in this world who knows it and she’s tied to a bed in front of you."

"Be quiet while I do this." I got the fork back in and pulled. The frame shifted. "I’m not going to talk about you and my father."

Her leg pulled hard against the rope and a sound came out of her that she hadn’t meant to let out — high, cut short, the edge of something that had nothing to do with the fork. Her knees pressed together against my sides for a second and then fell open again, the fight losing to whatever was moving under her skin.

The fire came all the way up in her for a second. I watched it arrive — the dark flooding back into her eyes, the tendons in her throat standing, a flash of fang that never fully dropped — and I watched her put it back down, jaw locked, breath held, the cost of it written across her whole face.

"I didn’t ask you to cut me loose," she said.

"I know."

"So stop."

The second strand went. The rope loosened a fraction. Not enough.

"Leave the ropes." Her head tipped back so she could find my eyes properly — dark hair dragged across the sheet, throat exposed, the raw marks at her wrists dark under the bulb. "Leave them. Do it like this. I’m not asking you for anything else."

I stood up off the bed.

Her eyes came with me, all the way up, taking their time about it. From my knees to my stomach to the length of me, and she didn’t pretend to be looking anywhere else. The assessment was open, clinical, and hungry under the centuries.

"I’m not doing anything while you’re tied."

"Why?"

"Because I’m not."

"You actually have a bigger cock than him."

She said it level, almost conversational, and let her knees fall open wider. The movement pulled against the remaining rope and revealed the soft purple-pink inside her — flushed, wet, the entrance of her already open from the heat she couldn’t put down.

"He was younger. So were we both."

My eyes were already going round that room. Stone. A frame. A mattress. A bulb. The tray on the floor with the cold food. Nothing on the walls. Whoever designed this place had thought hard about giving a person nothing — no glass, no edge, no tool that could become one.

"There’s a knife under the tray," she said.

I stopped.

A knife.

Under the tray sitting on the floor of this room.

And you’ve watched me saw at that rope with a fork and said nothing.

I got off the bed. The frame groaned in relief. I crossed to the tray and lifted it. The bowl shifted. The cup rocked and held.

A small knife lay flat underneath, exactly where she’d said — blade short, handle worn, the kind of thing that belonged in a kitchen and not in a cell and had found its way here anyway. Cool against my fingers when I picked it up.

I walked back. Knelt. Put the blade through the rope at her left ankle and it went in one pass — a clean part, the fibres opening, the binding falling away from the raw skin underneath.

Her leg came free and she pulled it wide before I’d got to the other one. Open. Offering. The tremor still running through the muscle.

The second rope went the same way. One pass.

Both legs loose.

I dropped the knife and it rang on the stone — a bright short sound that died against the walls.

Then I knelt between her legs. The mattress dipped. Her free thighs settled against my sides, hot, bare, the soft inner skin still marked faintly from the rope. There was nothing left in that woman with any interest in waiting.

"Don’t be gentle with me," she said.

Okay.