Chapter 4 Caught Again

Lirael's POV

He caught me in three minutes and forty seconds.

I know because I counted. I had been counting from the moment he crouched down in front of me against that tree and told me to run, his voice smooth and unhurried like he was offering me a gift, and I had taken it and run with everything I had.

Every hunting instinct, every year of moving through difficult terrain in the dark, every ounce of speed my legs had ever produced. Three minutes and forty seconds before his arm wrapped around my waist from behind and lifted me clean off the ground like I weighed nothing.

"You said five minutes," I managed, breathless and furious and still kicking.

"I lied," he said.

He set me down but he didn't let go, his arm staying locked around my waist, and I grabbed at it with both hands and pulled…hard!

Guess what? I accomplished absolutely nothing.

He was solid in a way that felt less like a body and more like something the world had decided to make permanent, and the cold coming off him should have been unpleasant but it wasn't, which was its own specific problem that I refused to examine.

"Let go of me," I said. "Let go right now."

He pulled me closer instead. My back met his chest and I felt the shift of muscle under armor and my hands stopped pulling for one traitorous second before I remembered what I was doing and started again.

"Fighting me will not help you," he said above my head, his voice completely unbothered, like I was a minor inconvenience and not a person actively trying to escape his grip. "It will only entertain me."

"I don't care what entertains you."

"No," he agreed. "You don't. That's one of the more interesting things about you."

I didn't know what to do with that so I went back to struggling, which he allowed with the patience of someone who had nowhere else to be. His grip didn't loosen. Not even slightly. After another minute of getting nowhere I stopped, not because I was giving up but because I needed to conserve energy and think, and he seemed to understand the difference because something in the arm around me shifted, not releasing, but settling, like we had arrived somewhere.

The horse appeared from the dark the way everything around him appeared, without warning and without sound, smoke and bone and eyes like cold embers.

He mounted it with me still in his grip, pulling me up in front of him in one motion that left me seated sideways across the saddle with his arm still around my waist and nowhere to go. I considered throwing myself off. I looked at the ground. I looked at the speed we were already moving. I stayed where I was.

The ride back was the longest journey of my life and it lasted maybe twenty minutes.

I was aware of every single point where his body met mine. His arm at my waist, firm and immovable. His chest behind my shoulder. The cold that came off him in waves that should have made me want to pull away and instead made some deeply stupid part of me want to lean back into it. He smelled like dying roses and something darker underneath, old smoke and something that had no name I knew, and it sat in my lungs in a way I couldn't clear.

I stared straight ahead and catalogued all of this in my head with the grim efficiency of someone building evidence for a trial I planned to win eventually.

"You're not going to keep struggling," he said at some point. Not a question.

"I'm thinking," I said.

"About what."

"About how to make you regret this."

He said nothing for a moment. Then, "I look forward to it."

I could hear something in his voice that I didn't want to identify so I didn't.

When the manor came into view I expected empty streets. What I found instead made my stomach drop. A crowd had gathered at the gates, dozens of people pressed against each other in the fog-lit dark, and when they saw us coming the noise they made wasn't the angry sound of people who wanted me freed. It was celebration. They were cheering. Holding up lights. Calling his name and a few of them calling out things about me that I won't write down because they were deeply unflattering and also terrifying.

"Your people are celebrating," I said, my voice coming out smaller than I wanted it to.

"They worship me," he said simply. "Your capture is an occasion."

"I'm not a prize."

"No," he said, and something shifted in his voice. "You're not."

He said it like it meant something different from what I'd said, but before I could work out what, we were through the gates and the crowd surged closer and a guard, drunk on the occasion or just stupid, shoved me as Xalric dismounted. The man's hand hit my shoulder hard enough to send me stumbling, and I caught myself and turned to say something, and then I stopped.

Because the guard's head was no longer attached to his body.

I hadn't seen him move. I hadn't heard anything. One moment the guard was there and the next he wasn't, and Xalric was standing where he had been with his scythe in his hand and an expression on his face that had not changed at all. Not anger. Not satisfaction. Just the calm of someone who had made a minor correction to something that displeased them.

The crowd went silent for one second.

Then they cheered louder.

I was shaking. I could feel it in my hands and my knees and somewhere deep in my chest where the reality of what I had done, walked into his manor, run from a god, been caught in under four minutes, was finally fully landing. I had known he was dangerous. I had known it in the abstract the way everyone in Ebonveil knew it, the way you know fire is hot without having stood in it. But watching him take a man's head without breaking his expression while a crowd cheered like it was a festival was something different entirely. Something that sat in my stomach like cold stone.

I had messed with the wrong god.

He looked at me across the space between us, took in the shaking I couldn't stop, and said nothing about it. He simply walked to me, threw me over his shoulder like I was luggage, and carried me into the manor while I hung upside down over his back and tried to decide whether to scream.

I decided against it. The crowd was still watching.

Inside, he took me up two flights of stairs and through a corridor and into a room and set me down on my feet in the middle of it. I took one look at the room and hated it immediately because it was beautiful. High ceilings and deep colored walls and a bed that was genuinely offensive in how comfortable it looked and windows that faced the city, and everything in it was too fine and too deliberate and the door had four locks that I could see and probably more that I couldn't.

"This is a cell," I said.

"This is your room," he said.

"It has four locks."

"For your safety."

"From the outside."

He looked at me with those silver eyes and said nothing, which was somehow more infuriating than anything he could have said. He stood in the doorway with his arms folded and his wings folded behind him and all of him taking up space in a way that left no room for the possibility that any of this was negotiable.

"From this night," he said, "you belong to me. Your days, your will, every move you make inside these walls. You serve no one else, you answer to no one else, you go nowhere without my knowledge. You are mine, Lirael Vaelryn, and the sooner you accept that the easier this will be for you."

I looked at him for a long moment. My hands had stopped shaking. Something had gone very clear and very cold in my chest, the way it always went when I had nothing left to lose and needed to think straight.

"I will hate you for this," I said. "Every single day. I want you to know that."

He held my gaze and the corner of his mouth moved, just slightly, into something that was almost a smile and was worse than one.

"Good," he said. "Hate me. I find I prefer your fire to your fear."

He pulled the door closed. I heard the locks turn, one by one, all four of them.

I stood in the middle of the too-beautiful room that was a cell and looked at the door and breathed, and when I was sure he was gone I sat down on the floor because my legs had finally decided they were done, and I put my face in my hands and thought very hard about the next move.

There was always a next move.

I just had to find it.