Sir Guy of Gisborne yanked the Night Watchman upward, bracing her arms in a near splintering grip. Marian struggled backward as he thrust her down the steps leading from the alcove. The blade rang out, clean and clear as it scraped against her jerkin.
Firelight flitted over the cut of his cheekbone, the shadow of stubble beneath.
No glint of that loathing, longing blue.
He emerged into the dull, bronze light. His expression—those eyes—glowed viciously.
Marian's heartbeat stuttered. His glare complemented the twist of his scowl too well.
"I expected better from you, Watchman. Even without Hood."
His biting taunt, and the realization of her folly, washed over her like acid. However inept they were, the guards had been too distracted. It was a poorly-laid trap Robin never would have fallen for.
One Marian should never have fallen for, either.
Her eyes darted about frantically. The window seemed miles away at the far corner of the room. Even if she could break for the hall, the first floor would be swarming with guards. The logistics rendered the Night Watchman powerless and without surprise.
But Marian—the Lady—still had a few.
Leaving no time to doubt the sheer insanity of her plan, she kicked the sword from Guy's hand. In her haste she'd neither bound as tightly as usual, nor donned her looser trousers.
He would feel enough to feel a woman.
A breath hissed from her lips as she planted his hands on her backside. He was gloved, but still she felt the cup of his palms.
Warm.
He would only be stunned for a few moments.
Fingers splayed broad, trailing. Too close...
She'd only a few seconds to grab his scabbard and—
When Guy's hand whacked down, hard over the curve of her rear, she almost bit clean through her lip.
Her eyes and body stung with humiliation as he drew a dagger concealed at his hip. Slowly, languorously, the metal point of it dragged upward from her navel. Marian inhaled sharply when its course rounded, tracing a crescent beneath her breast. As though the blade were his finger and he and a tender man, touching his lover's skin.
"You overestimate your charms, Watchwoman." Guy's jaw jutted forth, teeth fused together as he grabbed the scruff of her cloak. "Did you think me blind? That I'd not notice when you were that close?"
One second, Marian was scrabbling for purchase. The next, her skull was smashing into the wall behind her.
Her vision swam as his thigh pinned hers to the wall. The black cloth still concealed her face. For as many times as she'd worn it, it was suffocating her now.
"I should slit your throat." His eyes flicked down again. Gone was the tender man. The lover.
"But first thing's first."
She realized only when his fingers were already plying the edges of her mask. Yet another mistake.
He had never said her name.
Marian's wrists flailed as he ripped the eight-shaped scrap of brown leather from her face, tossing it to the floor like a limpid rag. The cloth, which had fluttered down with it, pooled at her feet like a shroud.
With a squeaking tear, leather ripped from leather—his from hers. Colors streaked and dotted as she squinted at the staggering column of his form. He tried to sheath the sword without looking, failing as an expert swordsman never did.
When she looked at his face, as she'd promised herself she would not, he was staring at her mouth. Robin had always teased her for it being so distinctively tiny and bowed.
The seconds burned away as Guy's hurt, his comprehension of it, flooded his features. When the tides pulled back, the rage would come.
Her dampening fingers curled inward until her nails rented her palm. It was over, but his surprise was still her weapon. She was still The Lady.
The Liar.
"It seems it is you who overestimated yourself, Sir Guy."
Turning away from her, he hunched over the table at the center of the room. The dagger hilt still stuck to his glove clattered numbly to the wood. He mouthed something, clearing his throat when nothing came out.
"I told myself it could have been any of the village girls. Even the Saracen."
The old table rocked on its legs as he yanked a pitcher of wine toward him. A goblet clanged rudely with pewter.
"Her eyes are brown, but my God, Marian, but yours..." He winced as the liquid burbled down.
"I did not want it to be you."
When the cup was sloshing full, he drained it ruthlessly. He stood tall again, and Marian waited. She weathered the terrifying, interminable silence that followed until it constricted around her throat.
"Say something, Guy."
Her whisper was so low and hoarse she wondered if he heard it. Her doubt was buried when those discerning coals stoked to life again, only to dull again.
It took Marian a moment to realize he was somewhere else. He was dissecting every glance and touch and promise. Every moment that added up to years of his confounding stupidity.
She jumped, more than she should have, when the empty goblet slammed to the table. When he turned back, everything in his expression was aflame.
"Show it to me."
"Show you what?"
In a swift motion, he clutched and slammed down the blade, lodging it neatly between a crevice on the table. He moved faster—a man possessed—as he tore one glove off with his teeth, the other with his hand. They landed with a brutal slap. The wet traces of his mouth and wine on them gleamed when the firelight danced in the draft.
"Can't be the witless maiden anymore, my lady. Show me, or I will find out for myself."
For all the furious posturing in that rumbling growl, Marian's heart surged with confidence. Beneath that rich and dreadful voice lie that fleeting slur of frustration: the desire to see what he could not touch.
His rage still was not enough.
With The Lady's grace and The Liar's charm, she obliged him. As her mottled skin met the cold, she almost heard the swell of his lungs. Her mouth clamped shut as his lips parted. It was an irrational thought that, for as thin as they looked, they'd not felt that way when she'd kissed him.
A few ominous thumps of his boots and his shadow loomed; a great black moth to a tiny flame. The thin line of his mouth hovered inches above hers. All she had to do was reach down, to grab and plunge her concealed dagger into his ribs.
He would kiss her first, this time.
Instead, the Black Knight's lips curved with wickedness. His left hand anchored to her hip, while his right tangled in the hair at the nape of her neck. Marian yelped as skin ground over bone when he clawed for her dagger, yanking it brutally from its scabbard.
"You will give this weapon and every last one—everything—to me," he growled. "Willingly, and now."
"As if I would give you anything willingly."
His left hand tightened. It should have hurt.Fingers. Bare, now.
"If you want them so much, just take them by force, Sir Guy." Her torso twisted, shrinking from his touch and the tingling of her skin. "I was mistaken to think you incapable of it."
The tall, steepled shadow at Marian's feet narrowed. She spun round as her hip went cold. He was walking backward toward the table, his palms raised in armistice.
"I do not take women against their will." He raised a wry but faintly menacing eyebrow. "You should know better than any of them."
"I know nothing of what you do with kitchen maids."
She did know better. And she would never admit it.
His eyes dimmed, muddied by something that she could not read. A familiar twinge stabbed the center of her chest when his features hardened into that implacable veneer. She pushed away an image of gold-spun curls and hitching skirts; that rakish line of pink hushing girlish laughter. The man who took what was his.
"The weapons, Marian. I'll not ask again."
Marian's mouth puckered with feigned defeat and anger. In her mind, however, the pieces and pawns were aligning.
She would play.
Giving him a very Gisborne-like smirk for good measure, she tore off her gloves for expediency. Out came the daggers and throwing stars from belts and boots and everywhere in between. Almost everywhere.
When she'd discarded all of the obvious, Guy crouched and swept them into his arms. His predatory glare fixed on her all the while as he tossed them into the dark alcove behind him.
Marian arched an intrigued eyebrow as he swayed back into the table, his sanctuary, rewarding himself with more wine. It had been flowing at the castle for hours before he'd arrived back at Locksley. He could be all the more feral, soused as he was becoming.
Or careless, if she was lucky.
For now, as he stood and swaggered, he was just infuriatingly puzzling. Her frustration mounted as he nonchalantly traced the etching in the dagger's hilt. His lips teased the rim of the cup as he sipped slowly.
Maddeningly slow.
"So, I suppose you are just going to sit there, drinking yourself to death."
Guy took another long swill, baring his teeth at the sour wine. "What would you care if I did?"
"I care to know my fate."
"Your fate was in the Sheriff's hands the moment you donned that ridiculous mask. If you think I will defend you, you are mistaken."
"We both know that you will defend me. To say otherwise is to lie to yourself."
"An art you know too well." His low growl rose to a bitter chuckle. He slouched lazily, his weight easing into a chair. "Tell me, then. How does the woman who lies more than the devil's whore herself get to question my honesty?"
Marian bristled, but not at the accusation of lying. "I have every right to question the man who has slaughtered the innocent people of Nottingham. It is you who have sold your soul to the Sheriff."
She hated him and her tone equally. Her life was hanging by a thread, and here he was baiting her.
(And here she was—taking it.)
"I could as easily call you the Sheriff's whore," she goaded. Flinty anger sparked in his eyes again, lightening her weighted shoulders. Him enraged; her defiant. The pieces where they should be.
The iron grip Marian had on the situation faltered, as did her resolve for calm, as he glowered spitefully into his cup. Dismissively.
"Better the Sheriff's whore than Hood's."
So tarred with jealousy were his words that Marian instantly absorbed them.
That red curtain glowing in the dark, Guy and the Sheriff rejoicing like demons over hellfire.
Guy's sword, not a nameless soldier's, felling Robin with the killing blow.
With avenging agony she sprang forward, clawing from behind at Guy's collarbone. Her grip formed as she crushed her chest to his back. She yanked out a bladed hairpin from her twist, a bramble of curls tumbling down with it. Iron sang as it pressed against his pulse.
"What if I told you I was Robin's whore?"
His tendon tautened like a bowstring. She pressed and squeezed: words, body, and blade.
"I could tell you just how I pleased the true Lord of Locksley..."
He struggled. She grinned.
"...how I would get down on my knees and—"
Pain shot through her shin as he erupted from the chair between them. He grabbed her by her rib cage until her shoulders poked into him, their positions reversed. The prick of metal was at her neck, now.
He should have been staggering and lumbering with what he'd drank. Another mistake.
"I dare you," she rasped.
A longer lock of his hair brushed the nape of her neck. Green faded to black.
She curved into him, involuntarily. His smile curled at the shell of her ear. It was then that his sonorous reply came, a trickle of ice water cascading from her head to her feet.
"No."
The blade sliced shallowly as she stumbled backward, a tiny trickle of warmth running down her neck. She wiped the blood with the back of her palm, knowing it would smear. That metallic tang turned pungent, making her heart race with sickness and relief.
She had been right.
He could not do it.
Guy resumed his leering perch on the edge of the table. "I will not give you the satisfaction of seeing Hood so soon."
"You will never give me any satisfaction. It would also be imprudent to kill a lady of the Court," Marian muttered as an afterthought.
'And never mind that you love me', she did not say.
Cruelty tugged at his smile as he looked down his nose at her. It was sharper, more aquiline from this angle.
"The Sheriff wants you dead. Who do you have to stand for you now? Some cowardly peasants?"
"You dare speak of cowardice!"
"At least I do not slink around in the dark with a mask."
"I wear it to protect the people." As though powerless over her own two feet, Marian charged him again. "Your mask you hide behind in plain sight. All the people, all the villagers..."
She paled, momentarily forgetting to keep her eyes trained on him and his every move.
The necklace.
Her throat was so parched when she spoke again, the words could barely form. "I saw you at the hanging. I saw you tear that necklace off the woman's neck." She paused. "I saw you look away."
As though she were once again holding the blade to his throat, he craned his neck high. He rummaged in his pocket for what seemed like hours before he tossed something shimmering, metal and beads, to the table.
"Here, have your bloody bait. The girl can wear it to her wedding, for all I care."
They stood at silent impasse, his eyes glinting with punishment; her scarlet with hate and self-loathing, still trying to look anywhere but at him.
There was a bowl of fruit on the smaller table. There were peaches. Plums.
Oranges.
Maddening.
"You said nothing to me after Robin died," Marian blurted. "Why?"
"You do not get to ask the questions." His sigh was drunken and weary, as though fighting with an old friend at a tavern rather than the woman who'd just betrayed him.
"And you know very well why."
"I do not."
Guy looked longingly at his goblet. "You expected me to watch you think of him," he slurred. "Pine for him."
The breath left her before he could resume his swilling and ruminating.
"Guy—"
"I am done with it, Marian." He raised a forestalling hand, his eyes strangely fearful. "All the pretty pleading."
"That would be a first."
"I am not going to reason with you." With a frustrated roll of his eyes, Guy plunked down the goblet yet again. "There is no debate. I am taking you back to the castle. In chains. Where you will await trial."
"Hanging, you mean."
His cheeks blanched to ash before anger colored them again. "Possibly."
"Death is the only penalty for treason."
"A lesser sentence might be arranged."
"A lesser sentence?" she huffed. "I do not think a hair cropping will appease the Sheriff this time."
"Nor I, fetching as it was..." He gulped down the last swallows as though the cup might sprout legs and run from him. "But time in the dungeons might do you good."
"You are returning me to the Sheriff to die!"
"What choice have you given me?"
Marian pointed at him like a thief absconding with a loaf of bread. "And there he is. Guy of Gisborne. Weak." She grinned vindictively. "Hated by everyone."
The ever-present line between his eyebrows smoothed. Her breathing shallowed as she watched the smugness drain from his eyes. The steadfast line of his mouth wavered.
"Everyone," he echoed. It was not a question.
She had said more hurtful things before. Her ears rung, almost drowning out the weary drag of boots; their friction on leather and wood.
More hurtful things.Must have.
His hand brushed hot against her cheek. She looked up into his bleary eyes, craving their blue coldness like a balm.
"Every honeyed word...when you returned to the castle."
"Guy, stop. You—you are drunk."
His fingers had wandered, entwining into a single strand of her hair that had come loose. With her sudden lightheadedness, the tapestried walls were bowing, like dark trees bending in wind. The space between Guy's body and her own was dangerously small.
"Je...étais-je jamais...Pourriez-vous..."
Tiny hairs rose on the back of her neck beneath the pad of his palm, now absently caressing the skin there. He was far away, again. The meaning of that whisper, quiet and rich, might have been known to her if she'd paid attention to her lessons instead of climbing trees. Still, somehow, she understood.
She'd avoided hearing it for this long, but now it loomed and it burned—his bold plea. His Question.
They had met on her birthday, when the blooms had just fallen from the whippletree. The way he lurked in broad daylight; those gruff replies to any compliment. How he always needed to check some menacing cruelty, some crude misspeech, that threatened to strangle every word.
Even his handsomeness was awkward and stark. He was glacial eyes and raven hair—all pale and pointed in relief against a monolith of black.
It was only his arrogance that rendered him vulgar and ordinary. He lusted after gold and women; another nobleman who wanted a prize and not a wife. To him, she was a pawn, ripe for violation. With all earnestness, she had convinced herself that these were his only truths.
Marian had recited this creed, this conceptualization, faithfully whenever she had to manipulate Sir Guy. It was a reminder to use her sugared tongue, her sex, and her position against him. Knowing how firmly Guy had been lodged under the Sheriff's thumb had made it easier.
She'd told herself that it was only Guy's newfound bursts of courage, his tacit rebellion against the Sheriff, that had made her job harder. His defiance, mirroring her own, had watered down the black. But there had been grey long before that, if she was honest.
If.
She'd gone to Locksley that night, after he'd razed Knighton, with the intent to sway him. It was a speech well-rehearsed—a thin blanket of warmth over icy revenge beneath. When she saw him, the intractable shell of leather gone, she was thawed to water.
Before her was not the knight but the man. He was smooth and firm in candlelight, bronze and gold over marble. She swore she could see his heartbeat pulsing, in and out of shadow. He had thought she was grasping for his hand.
It was what she'd wanted them both to think.
And then, for reasons she still could not explain, she had kissed him. Robin had been mere feet from her in the castle. His proximity should have made it easier to imagine his lips as she seized Guy's muscled arms. Then those dark wings had enveloped her. In the solemn, stretching shade of them Guy had consumed her, as though it was his last kiss on Earth. Her lips were still humming when she pulled away.
It haunted her almost as much as that final blow. The day he came back.
When Nottingham was about to burn, she'd wanted him to leave. When he returned, serene with redemption, she understood. He was ready to die with her. For her, and no one else.
It was a selflessness that Robin had never offered. Swathed in honor, the hero of Nottingham had molded the shattered pieces of her in his hands like clay. His laugh, his wit, his burning desire to make England whole again, were why the Holy Land could be forgiven. Justice shone distant, but always bright. Only Robin's death could eclipse their future.
It was why that idyll, that belief he'd rebuilt to be unbreakable, made her time in Sherwood all the more sobering. It was the little things; the way he ordered Much around, jovially annoying as the man was. When she had offered strategic advice, Robin had, in his charming way, ignored her. He ignored all of them, really.
With him, it was always the people of Locksley or Clun or Nottingham. It was always England—always now. Robin and Marian of Locksley were the people of tomorrow. When Richard was home. When everything was over.
It was a future. Not theirs alone.
Marian had known then that Robin would never be able to live a life less than a hero's. Her voice had always made him smile; the snap of the bow—the adulation that followed—made him beam. When they had embraced that last night, she had tried to bury her selfish doubts beneath the leaves. Hope and prayer would guide her.
Neither of those things would have gotten her anywhere with Guy. Selfishness and cruelty, killing and torture, were his instruments. There were no assurances he could, or would, save her. Too many times had he been unhinged by a single word.
But always her word.
Hers alone.
"—What are you plotting?"
Violence shot across his face like lightning.
Marian's blood ran cold. "Nothing."
"Answer me." The unyielding tower of his figure straightened from his defeated slump. "Could I ever have been—"
"Stop it. No, I never could have—" She held up her hand, as though it could undo the truth. She could never tell him.
She had to tell him—
"Please just marry me, Marian."
Incredulity, the sheer audacity of him, froze her, body and soul.
"I wish to marry no one."
"No, I do not believe it. You wanted to marry him." She had tricked him so many times that she could see him ticking them off in his mind. Guy swallowed as if there were glass in his throat. His eyes were glazing again. Gone.
"I know you wanted him, Marian. For him to bed you."
"I did."
The words came too quickly, almost as soon as she'd thought them. His fists balled as he ignited, his arm drawing back. He was finally going to—
With a hideous crunch, his fist collided with the wall next to her head.
"I knew it. You let him lie with you."
The truth of it, what it meant and did not, made her flinch. "We did not."
"Liar!"
"I am not!" Her voice warbled as blood trickled from his knuckle where he had struck it. "I can—"
His glare was cold, still pointed at her feet. "You can what, Marian?"
"There is—"
"You try to deceive me while I stand here the fool, not binding you, not gagging you silent—"
"I said I am not lying."
Her last word, the only one that mattered, trailed into a whisper. Two men, and her lies between them.
Gisborne: Shutting her up in the castle. Locksley: the day Robin told her to stay back. It was an inevitable and unwanted comparison.
One suitor had offered a life of cold luxury and protection; the other a life of adventure on his terms. Both were cages. It was their vision of what and where and who she should be. A colorful bird, clipped and flightless.
"Your denial means nothing." He scowled at her hip. "You would not know the truth if it gutted you."
Marian examined him, saying nothing as the slice of his words mended. Despite herself, a plan formed around a better memory of him, gilded in firelight.
Her hand grazed his chest, the bow of his muscle underneath, as she mapped her remaining weapons. There was one still sheathed inside her hip. She could lodge it between his ribs before he could blink.
One way or another, she would escape.
"I will not marry you."
Her lip trembled. She was going to do this thing.
"But if I prove to you that I was never Robin's, you will let me leave Nottingham without a word to the Sheriff."
For a moment, he seemed struck dumb. Then, he raised a goading eyebrow, trying to be patently amused. "Prove?"
"Yes, Guy. Prove!" She made an embarrassed circling motion around her hips, one far less awkward in her head.
Though he wore a familiar mocking smile, there was color on his cheekbones. His eyes were bluer and brighter. Hopeful.
"You would sell yourself to me? No, no—you do not sell anything." He reached to the ground where her cape had fallen. "The fair maid who cannot be bought."
"It is a bargain. We both get something we want. Nothing more."
Guy ripped off a piece of fabric with which he staunched the now viscous blood of his hand. Marian's mouth opened in silent protest but shut again, stopping herself. He tossed the bloodied cloth into a corner.
His mouth scrunched with a peculiar, childish pensiveness. He was weighing it; playing into her hands.
"You do not get to bargain," he replied, evenly and carefully, as if only to himself.
"What have I left to lose but my life?" Her fingers trailed down his sleeve, feeling the tightening muscle beneath. Evenly and carefully.
"What do you have to gain, you mean? You're wasting your breath with your trickery." He looked down at her touch with attempted disgust. "And I'll not take his scraps."
She sniffed haughtily. "Am I not the one who is taking scraps?"
Malicious intrigue sparkled in his eyes. "You are jealous."
"Not a chance. As if you could ever have had—"
The words died in her throat as his hands imprinted her backside, that now-awaited touch, drawing her hips to his. The hardness against her abdomen made her want to press her legs together; to hold her breath until she fainted.
His breath kissed her forehead. She shuddered, trying to remember what she was doing. Anything.
"I gave you a chance to be a good man."
"And I would have given you so much more if you had given me anything in return."
She gritted her teeth. Still, he would be impossible.
"You always wanted more than you could ever get, couldn't you?"
His hands dug into her hips, feeling around until they tapped on something hard. Marian closed her watering eyes as he tapped the handle of her secret dagger. He reached just below the waist of her breeches, pulling it out gingerly from the pocket. Arousal besieged the anger in his gaze.
"You were going to let me touch you. Drive your little daggers in after you toyed with me." She could almost taste the wine, heavy with his whisper. He swayed, attempting too late to right himself without her noticing.
"But it does not matter. You are trapped."
Her eyes darted to the window and back, not caring that he watched her like a hawk. He was right.
If she stayed, it was the gallows. She knew what would happen if she ran. Him on her heels, tormenting and pleading. Still, it would not take much to fan her angry red wings and fly out of England. She closed her eyes, hoping to see the whir of green and grey and moor as it would be, dotted and quiet far below.
Instead she saw the chain, dangling over Guy's eyes. A smile, like sun on silver. Clouded eyes and clouded emeralds.
It was over; The Thief and The Lady were dead. It was up to Marian alone to play.
She would be the one to give. And then she would take it away.
The dog only she could feed.
Her hands started trembling even before she reached for her fastenings. A few of them pricked at her nail beds, scraping too fervently over the metal. She glared at the spidery crack, veining at her feet like parched earth. The drumbeat of her heart was low, under leather and cloth thudding to a heap on the floor. Her toes fanned the floor, ice cold. Her boots had been the last to go.
There was no telling how long she stared at that crack, shuddering as her nipples tightened in the frigid air. When she tilted her head upward, she did not blink. The voice that came was no longer hers.
"Have your proof."
She crossed her arms, fuming with humiliation as she waited for him to speak; to touch. She could laugh for how empty his threats were, now that he stood like a powerless oaf. He was supposed to leer, to grope what he always so arrogantly wanted to possess. To do something.
Just when she was about to give up and sacrifice herself to the guards, he moved. She shielded her breasts as he drew close, their dance beginning again. Her nostrils burned as his hands stroked upward with unnecessary softness—as though she were a petal of a lady. It was only from the shock of it, she presumed, that he pressed harder on her scar.
His eyes were glinting. He was sorry, angry, reverent. Gentle in that horribly confounding way that was not him. A man who wanted to have rather than to take.
Her hands fell. She did not raise them again.
She moaned with surprise as he palmed her breasts, the warmth of his hands radiating down and around. His leather was cold on her already chilled skin. Her neck craned as his moan vibrated through her hair.
"Marian..."
The kiss she had waited for was not gentle. It was an invasion of mulled berries, her name still vibrating on his tongue. His hips ground against hers, hands roaming their avaricious paths and making up for lost time.
The pulse thudded between her thighs as his thumbs teased her nipples. She sighed in frustration when his touch traversed toward her center, trailing across her hip. He was so close to touching what she could not let him.
She would not push herself onto the rough of his palm.
The callused heel of his hand kneaded into her hip. She broke the kiss violently, her head titling back with a cry. He would take, and she would let him.
The pads of his fingertips were soft and slow when they glided over her center. Marian muffled a pant as his finger dipped and swirled around her entrance, priming with her own wetness. She could not imagine how it would feel to have something inside her.
He lifted her with a determined groan, backing her against the wall. She buried her face into his chest as his hand plunged down again to stroke her sex. His leather steamed, dampening with her sudden cry as his thumb dragged the glaze of her upward. She gasped haltingly as his thumb flicked over that place she'd found in the dark and feared; where she'd always wanted Robin to rub with his weight on her, in the grass. There had never been enough time.
She writhed under him, frustrated as he fueled her impatience, tracing that slickness around but not over that tiny center. It was as if he wanted it to ache and scream for him. Dots of color were floating, her breath suspended for more.
"You want me," he purred.
Her arching spine went rod-straight. The moment was broken.
"I cannot—"
She waited for the lie.
For his hands. His mouth.
That line of heat, the need to feel anything pressed to her, burned tight and hot when his lips caressed her neck. The guards, the whole village might have heard her when he finally pressed the center of her pleasure. She stopped herself, bringing herself down to panting. Every flick, every circle, precise. Her legs were wrapping around him, for balance and in desperation. One eye opened to see her undulating, moving her slickness shamelessly on leather.
He had weapons...She tried to fixate on this blurred thought as his motions sped. He would never expect...
Touches feather-light, harder. Fast...
The smoothness of that heavy leather was still ripe for the grooves her nails made when his finger finally breached her. It stung for a moment until he drew it out again, slow, slow, until the tip had left her. She throbbed to feel it again. She had enveloped him, held him tight within her. Her heart was going to burst.
He did it again and again until she was thrusting to claim it.
Marian's head tilted and lolled as he pumped in and out, coaxing the heat coiled deep within her to flower open. She was drifting, watching herself from some faraway tide as she bucked, forcing his hand deeper inside her. Little pants were coming from her sealed lips. A bead of his sweat trickled down her breast.
His eyes were hooded when she looked up at him. The dark rash of stubble was clenched tight, the line deep between his eyebrows deepening with each breathy grunt he constrained.
She turned her head to the shadows, terrified. It had all gone spectacularly wrong.
She felt the currents, the blue, instantly. He would not have it.
"Look at me."
The sad resignation of his plea almost shook her from her tenuous equilibrium on the wall. His gaze narrowed as if on some hellbent mission. With renewed determination, his fingers twisted and thrust, filling and abandoning her in brutal succession.
"You are here. Stay here."
His mouth plundered hers as she moved with and against him. It was her body to his, like cords of sunlight pulled tight between them. She was soaring. Too fast.
An aching disappointment shot through her as he pulled out of her and away. Metal scraped on leather.
"Oh..."
The Black Knight hoisted her up, her shoulders bruising against the wall. It was reflexive; that cry of lust and fear as his naked length pressed into her abdomen. Her teeth gritted, her head weightless, not caring that it was resting on his shoulder. She was too aware of those leather arms, the rippling and clenching sinew beneath, ending in those hands gripping her hips for dear life. He need only pull to bring her down, for her to take in what he would give her.
Her mouth opened in a soundless cry as she pushed. It was a single rending, raging and swollen. Every wave of it stung from her sex to her eyes.
Through the watery sheen of her vision, she had seen it. His surprise.
The pain dulled with triumph as she watched his shame; his pride.
He had not believed her, after all.
Little crescents appeared on his sleeves as her nails unlatched. She was descending to cold, hard physicality. He had brought her so low.
"There, then," she hissed. "Something true."
She went as still as she could, ignoring the ripples of friction and pain, him inside her as she gasped a sob. Her knees threatened to buckle as her muscles registered the invasion. Everything about this was real.
A chance, the last sane part of her reminded. Their currency of humiliations had been exchanged.
But she had already been molded.
Stabbed.
Ignored.
Caged.
That vision of him, sneering that smile that was not truly his, gloating with that chain over her eyes.
In this moment, for now, the chain was hers to hold.
With shaking hands she put her arms around his neck. Her fists balled, resisting the relief in his eyes as the tip of him pressed insistently into her. She clamped down on his pauldron as he filled her to the hilt with a moan. She dared a glance up at him, wishing she had not. There was a look of fascination and wonder on his face that she could never return.
His hands were hot against her backside, scrabbling to bring her closer. Her hips snapped up involuntarily, greedy for this perfect, terrible feeling. Every part of her pulsed for him, around him.
He slowed with considerable effort, his breathing ragged. For a moment she waited—equally fearful and hopeful that drink had finally bested him. Instead, he braced her in strong arms, leaving her to hang limply against him as he walked her back. Her fist smacked down on his chest when she realized where they were headed.
"No," she rasped. "Not the bed."
Her toes brushed the floor as he stopped cold, his teeth gritted mercilessly. A chill ran through her as she saw it—the side in the dark.
"Fine."
Marian cried out as he turned, flipping her down without warning. Pain shot through her bare shoulder blades as they connected with the wooden table. The goblet had tipped over. The scent of wine was in her hair.
Her backside burned from the friction as he pulled her by her hips to the edge of the table. The legs of the table ground the wood beneath it as he reclaimed her in one brutal stroke. She closed her eyes as he sped, each thrust deeper, trembling her breasts. She gasped when he touched her again where they were joined, already remembering what motions and pressure had almost broken her before.
In a daze, she wondered who this woman was, writhing and sighing. She was here, wet and naked beneath him as he took her. Her ivory legs twined around him, lily vines curving around menace and leather. Where she had wanted them to be.
A bed was for a lady; for softness. This was the claw of rough wood on her back and thighs. She wanted it like this.
The devil's whore.
His.
A keening cry wrenched from her as his free hand clawed trails of white heat up her inner thighs. Her hand clamped down over his, forcing him to harden the pressure that had become too delicate. With a growl, he pressed to the point of what should have been pain. She bucked against him, greedy for it.
And suddenly, she was at the precipice, on the edge of something. No one had ever explained.
It was a fatal decision to open her eyes. He was still there, black hair matted to his brow—his face etched in firelight. Him, handsome and dreadful inside of her. His eyes brimming with her.
Only her.
"Come undone."
He was pleading, not commanding. It was enough.
She clung to him, screaming as her body clenched around him in waves. She was still sighing, slow pulses still gripping his length when he gasped her name, the liquid heat of his release rushing into her.
Marian could not tell how long he lie slumped over her before he wordlessly rolled off. For what seemed like minutes, she stared transfixed at the silvery blue veins above her wrists, at the blood from her neck still smeared. Absently, she scraped it. It flaked away like dried rust.
Shakily, she stood. She limped toward her breeches, tucking her thighs together where the stickiness threatened to spill downward.
A log crunched before it collapsed. It was tired. Resigned. The fire was almost dead now. She was freezing.
When she looked behind her, Guy was rustling aimlessly. She shrunk from the squeak of leather, the knell of dread and arousal, as he pulled up his trousers.
"I had wanted it for so long."
Marian's tongue and throat screamed for water. She could not answer him.
The floor groaned wearily as he walked toward her, the shadow of his hand reaching forward. She flinched. Her scent.
"I wanted it to be enough, Marian. I did."
"I am leaving, Guy."
She swallowed with empty pride at finding her voice as he rose to his full height. She'd felt so much smaller in his embrace than when grappling him, dagger in hand and ready to maim.
"How can you go now?"
The angry heave of her lungs dropped a single tear onto her breast. Any breath he spent on her staying was wasted. The game was long over.
"Did you really think you would win me now? That I'd agree to be your wife?"
She whitened at that flash of abject shame—that humiliation he could never adequately conceal. It was, apparently, exactly what he thought.
"In time, perhaps—"
"You've had all the time in the world! And what have you done?" She lifted her the lip of her jerkin again, rejoicing at the scar he'd given her.
"You have stabbed me. You have burnt my home to the ground."
"If I could take those things back, Marian—"
"Just those? Those to appease and win me. You do not get to pick and choose!"
She watched as his handsomeness warped and lined with hatred. It was comfortable for him: being the villain when being anything else was too hard.
"You will deny me until your last breath, won't you?" he said with a sneer.
"I deny nothing." She hurried with the rest of her fastenings, looking up at the beams of the ceiling. Crystal tears clung to her eyelashes.
"And I will never tell you what you want to hear."
Her eyes fell on the bed to avoid him, only to realize her error in looking there. It was too easy to see him in it now as he might lay, eyes closed in peaceful sleep. She wondered if the image was true to life. If his lashes were so long and so black.
"I once told Robin," she whispered, "that you had another side."
"And I know you saw it," he said hoarsely. "I was ready to die for you."
Another tear's weight gave way and splashed. Her mouth pursed angrily, knowing his words were true.
"I wanted you to die for them too. Like he would have."
"You wanted me to be like Hood."
As he shifted, the light hit the tired creases at the corners of his eyes. She thought of the things he had seen, the secrets he might have told her if she had said yes. If she had stayed.
His jaw was rigid and determined. She had conditioned him to beg, and so he would.
"Once this pact is done, everything will be different."
The curl of his half-smile was genuine as he took her hands in his. A wave of cold washed over Marian again. It was an innocent gesture, too innocent after what had passed between them.
What she had done.
It came from her without warning, a sound both feral and foreign. It should have been complicated; easy to repudiate Guy's existence and excuse why she had given him what she'd sworn she never would. But not even she, so practiced and skilled in the art, could manage it. The truth was hideous and plain.
It was, very simply, that Robin was dead. Before that, he had left her for the Holy Land.
Guy had destroyed anything and everything. He would burn the world to the ground for gold and glory. But he never left her.
A great hero once said that everything was a choice. However wrong it was, Marian had made hers.
Something glinted out of the corner of Marian's blurring vision. It was shining in the sputtering fire. She walked toward it, memories washing over her from before the mask was torn and she was lost: Thief, Lady, and Liar.
Her fingers scraped for the chain. She whisked it from the table and moved toward the window. She looked back only when she'd reached it.
"I did not want you to be Robin, Guy."
For a moment, she saw him as he was, once. Gilded in firelight. When the flame flickered again, she saw him weathered in the brutality of now. Blue coals and depths and anger in the dark.
A man who knew he'd lost.
She gritted her teeth against her pity, forgetting what was given and what she would now need to take. In recompense, she gave him the most honest look she ever had. It, and her last words, were gifts he'd never understand.
"Being a good man would have been enough."
She did not look back again before she swung down the rope and jumped. Jolting up from the mud, she felt the breeze of arrows sailing past her cheeks. The only other sound was that shout from above; a bark; a scream. Her name.
She clicked her tongue as the horse reared, soldiers right on her heels. Her body pitched in the saddle, too harshly for what her body had endured. Another arrow, sailing far closer, clattered pointlessly against a fence post.
It was black as pitch, but she knew well the veins of these roads. Daylesford Abbey was leagues from here, off the road past Kirklees. It would pass through an old drop point that those who still sung the name of Hood would remember. The girl would know to look there for her necklace.
Someone would know to look.
Stars lined the edge of the sky beneath strips of cloud above the black twist of road. She blinked only when she was sure her eyes were dry.
Somewhere past Clun, as sleep and anguish clawed at her, she saw him. It was more ethereal than a thought, but too lucid to be a dream.
It was the day, that dusk, her world should have ended. The Sheriff had returned too late, this time. Guy had burst through the doors above her, awash in mauve. He was running down toward her when the cannonball hit.
Marian stumbled and ran, straining for his fingertips as the floor rumbled beneath her. She was only feet from him when the stairs collapsed.
His face was in shadow, all save for those sapphires, glinting with fear and love. As his arm reached down for her, the setting sun shifted. For a moment he was only a shape haloed.
The angel. Black.
It was the angel she chose to remember as they stood, awaiting a cataclysm of fire and ash. When the end came, they were parted as they should be.
Two strangers turning into dust.