The Spare Princess
Chapter Four: The Shade in the Corner
Evangeline was nothing like any woman Walden had ever touched, nothing like the hard-eyed witches who worked and frequented the pub in Knockturn that he liked. Soft flesh that his fingers dented into instead of the bone and sturdy muscle construct of the dancers, straight, satin-black hair—not like the glossy blue-black of his own, but a matte coal black that he almost expected to rub off on his hands when he touched it—in place of tawdry, lacquered blonde curls, clean pale skin instead of the heavily done glamours and waxy red lipstick that stained his mouth worse than blood.
Strangest and most unusual of all—she yielded when he pushed, didn't struggle or fight him with a smug grin twisting painted lips like they did, knowing how well he liked it. He pushed and she fell without protest, quietly and unquestioningly acquiescing to every slight, unspoken demand. He found himself pushing harder than he had intended, just to see if she would protest. But though her breathing grew strained, though she bit the inside of her lip in discomfort and even pain, though she flinched minutely against his hands, Evangeline never ever told him 'no.' He wondered if she knew the word.
The morning sun through the big window lit the forming bruises on her body as she lay asleep, exhausted and battered in the brand new silk sheets that had been a small part of her dowry. He didn't like the purple and blue on her skin—it wasn't so much fun, really, hurting her. She didn't cry or protest, didn't squeal theatrically like his girls; she was still the vixen in the trap, already too wounded to cry at the new onslaught. It was almost a relief—if she would have played with him, struggled and cried like he liked, it would have been harder to restrain himself, harder to treat her like the wife she was and not the whores he liked.
It was a strange irony that brought him somewhere between fury and laughter—the Princes had given him this fragile doll with a smug sureness that he would shatter her into pieces, but he rather suspected he couldn't. They'd handed him a toy they'd already broken themselves and he was entirely sure that there was no better way to break Evangeline than the way she'd already been broken.
Evangeline smiled hesitantly when she woke, blinking self-consciously as she rearranged the sheet and smoothed her hair, a charcoal scribble across her face and shoulders. "Good morning," she ventured bravely, after a long moment of his silent scrutiny.
"Let me see you," he ordered. With next-to-no hesitation, Evangeline dropped the sheet, swept her hair back, perfectly and immediately obedient. He ran a hand down her neck, over her shoulder. A wince flashed across her face, just a moment of surprising pain, and then it was gone, her face a replica of what it had been even as he prodded her bruises.
"You tell me when I'm hurting you, Evangeline. Don't let me do this to you."
A frown compressed her forehead, her thin black brows pressing down. "But—" she began, the first whisper of anything less than unquestioning obedience.
"I don't enjoy it," he explained, more honestly than anyone—including himself—would have expected. "You stop me, say no, say something—you'll be doing us both a favor."
Disconcerted, Evangeline nodded. "Of course."
Walden growled at her. "Don't say 'of course,' say no." He pulled her up against him, fingers pressing hard into her arms, her back. "Tell me no, say no, whenever you want, whenever you mean it."
Her eyes were wild now, confused. Eager to appease him, the word was quick out of her mouth. "No!"
Even that felt like a loss; the word was empty, it was just more obedience. He let her go and she shrank back a few inches, her arms curling over her chest protectively. He was scaring her, her wide eyes roved over him like he was about to pounce on her.
"I don't want to…" He stopped. That was probably a lie. "I don't mean to hurt you, so you tell me when I'm doing it. You've probably been told I'm a monster, but you will never have a reason to fear me."
It was beginning to rain outside, and it pattered on the windows, the only sound in the silence. "I don't think you're a monster," Evangeline said, her voice drawing his eyes up to her face, which was looking guilty for whatever reason. Her hand was on his arm, trailing up, white and fine boned against the tanned, scarred, corded length of his arm. She was on her knees beside him, and her face pressed in close to his.
"Then you are very wrong," he said roughly. He was a monster, he was a great handsome monstrous beast and he was proud of it, there was no point in leading her to believe anything else.
"No?" she said, more of a question than any sort of statement, as though testing her voice. "No," she practiced firmly. She smiled softly at him. "No," she said sweetly, and shyly pressed her mouth to his.
He pushed her away, more firmly than he'd intended. "What?" she asked, a thin, uncertain smile threatening on her face. "I thought I was the one saying 'no'?"
"Don't be clever," he groaned, falling back against the pillows and letting her lighten the mood.
"But I am clever," she protested, leaning over him with a slight but widening smile on her face and her eyes bright with mock innocence.
"Are you?" he said tiredly, shielding his eyes with his hands.
"Mmm," she murmured what sounded like an affirmative, settling back into the pillows herself, and the two fell into a sort of dozy silence in the grey, rainy light of the morning.
Teapot, the house elf that was another part of Evangeline's dowry, bustled in with breakfast a few minutes later. "Good morning, new Mistress and Master! Master Ev'rard is sending me down to take care of you!" Teapot set the tray up beside their bed and wandered around the room, picking through the discarded clothing that littered the floor. "Would the Mistress like to see her jewelry? Master Ev'rard sent down the chest with Teapot," the house elf squeaked, picking up the tattered remains of Evangeline's white satin negligee with no hint of embarrassment, though Evangeline flushed pink and pulled the silk sheets tighter around herself. (Walden had found his hands ill-suited for the tiny fastenings and grown impatient with the flimsy bit of underwear, the first of his many instances of misconduct.)
The house elf didn't wait for an answer, instead levitating what looked like an antique chest on legs through the door to settle by the bedside. Evangeline frowned as the elf finished her quick sweep around the room and disappeared. Walden took a heavy drink of the tea the elf had left and grimaced—too heavily sweetened.
"This chest is very big," she began hesitantly, edging to the side of the bed, her hand on the lock. It fell away under her touch; some sort of blood enchantment, no doubt. Walden slid up behind her as she lifted the lid up and she gasped; he thought it was from his touch for a moment, but at the first glance of the chest's contents changed his mind.
Diamond and opals and emeralds and rubies and sapphires and a dozen other precious stones Walden couldn't name glittered up from the black velvet that lined the chest like multicolored constellations in the night sky. Wonder and worry threaded her back in taut lines, her shoulders held stiff. After a few long seconds, she reached out to touch one necklace, some silver metal laid in with emeralds and diamonds.
"This was my cousin Eirene's favorite necklace, she'd be so furious if she knew…" she whispered, tracing the woven silver carefully. "My grandfather is very particular about the jewelry we take with us when we marry," she explained, still fingering the jewelry. "He wouldn't let Emmeline or Eris or Eirene keep anything they liked, just the old, gaudy pieces we all hated, and just a few pieces for each. There must be two dozen pieces in here." She sounded nervous; she pulled her hand away from the necklace like it was going to bite. "And it's everyone's favorite things…Emmeline loved these earrings, Eris wore this locket all the time. Maybe a mistake, my grandfather couldn't have meant to give us all of this, this has to be a quarter of my family's jewelry."
This was no mistake; Everard Prince did not know the word. This was just another carefully constructed humiliation, this was the overdone wedding all over, another prodding joke, but the punch line in this particular cruelty was harder to find. There was a note in Evangeline's hand, pulled from where it had been tucked along the side of the chest.
For the new and most deserving House of Macnair, was written in Everard's hand. May the many future daughters of your line wear them with dignity and pride in their noble ancestry.
Frustrated fury arced through Walden's head. Another backhanded gesture with clouded motivations. What did old man Prince find so amusing as to toss away a fourth of his family's jewels on the joke?
More commonplace anger replaced it; if they were nothing else, they were unsubtle reminders of everything Walden could not give Evangeline. Her wardrobe of exquisitely tailored robes hung beside his frayed Ministry issue, and now this grand fortune would sit in its chest in his sad little cottage, rarely worn, its beauty wasted. There was no manor for Evangeline and her finery, just this cold, empty exile in cold, empty Scotland with no one but her monster of a husband for company.
"Put this on," he ordered gruffly, picking up an amethyst and onyx necklace that caught his eye. There was a moment's hesitation and he wondered, with an edge of amusement, if she was contemplating another use of her 'no' but she obediently pulled up her hair and let him fasten the collar of precious stones and silver around her white, elegant neck. His hands rested on the sides of her throat, the gemstones cool under his palms. Evangeline reached up to touch the necklace.
"This one's always been my favorite," she said quietly. "Eris never let me wear it, never let me even touch it."
"You wear something every day," he ordered her solidly. "These are yours now, I don't ever want to come home and find you without one of these on."
"If you'd like," she replied, a little dazed, looking over her shoulder.
"Yes," he said firmly, pulling away. "Turn around, let me see you." Evangeline obediently clambered around from where she'd been seated on the edge of the bed.
She was beautiful, a shaded charcoal sketch in black and white and grey, a shadow in the corner. The necklace circled her throat in heavy black with tiny sparkles of deep violet, the bruises on her body bloomed like blue and purple roses on white canvas. The amethysts lent a violet cast to her deep blue eyes and she was entirely his.
If she had not been beautiful, the fact that he owned her would have made her so, but even as a thin, self-conscious smile, spread across her face, Walden burned to touch her, this prize no one could ever take from him, to feel that soft flesh bend obediently to his, to drag a few more of the hesitant, surprised shudders of pleasure out of her.
She must have seen everything in his eyes—they were probably transparent with lust—because she took a careful breath in and found her way into his arms, and his hands came up to grasp her hips with almost a mind of their own. Her hands were on his shoulders, her bruised and swollen lips hovering an inch from his ear and her soft warm breath and the smell of her hair seized him up—she smelled faintly sweet, like her floral perfume, but he thought he could smell a little of his own spicy soap and leather smell overlaying it, and another wave of possessive desire spiked through him.
She lay her head on his shoulder, one hand meandering down his back in a path that left fire in its wake, the other threading up into his blue-black hair; he almost asked her to pull on his hair, to dig her short neat fingernails into his back until iron red welled around her fingertips and ran down his back, catching in the scars like a stream around rocks.
Instead, he skimmed her body as gently as he knew how, his hands laying whispers up and down her sides until she shivered. She pushed on his shoulders until he was on his back, propped amongst the pillows. She averted her eyes shyly as she straddled him with none of the practiced ease he was so accustomed to in women.
"Am I doing this right?" she asked, his shadow of charcoal and violet spoiled by the pink flush of her cheeks.
Something warm and affectionate bubbled up from some unknown part of him at the sight of her intense concentration. "You can do nothing wrong," he assured her, smoothing the gravel of his voice as best as he could.
Evangeline shifted her weight to her hands on either side of his head, her soot-black hair falling down like a curtain around his head and there was nothing but her in his world. Her face took on a serious, grave cast. "I can do a lot of things that are wrong," she said strangely.
The way the words fell from her mouth sounded wrong, with the grim look on her face. But then the bruised flesh of her lips pressed to his and it was all he could do to hold himself back, to be gentle with her. Her hands were in her hair—surely, surely they would come away dirty this time, like he'd thrust his hands into a blackened fireplace—and she was soft and warm above and underneath and around him.
It was not everything he wanted—far, far from it—but from the way she sighed he could almost forget that. Every gentle, shy caress of her hands wrote I belong to you over and over, and that seemed like enough.
I've hijacked my sister's old, unused desktop--while she sits on her pretty new MacBook Pro, grumble grumble. At least it works and I've got internet and word processing capabilities. So, yay for that. I wrote this chapter in a FLASH--began at work yesterday, and sat up until god-knows-when keeping on with it.
Please review! It really makes my day--I'm now addicted to the 'Reader Traffic' thing on the profile, and I love to see all the different places my readers come from! I'm read all over the world, I can't believe it! Thanks, y'all!