Mature Content
The basement was quiet in the way that spaces designed for unpleasant purposes tend to be quiet — deliberately, architecturally, the stone thick enough to swallow sound before it could travel upward and become inconvenient.
Esther sat in the chair they had strapped her into and waited.
She could hear Amanda's footsteps overhead — purposeful, moving toward a different part of the house, the particular cadence of someone going to change clothes for an occasion they were looking forward to. A door opened and closed.
Then lighter footsteps on the stairs.
Dillon came into the room the way he moved through most spaces — carefully, taking up as little of it as possible, as though he had been trained out of the habit of existing too loudly. He was carrying a length of additional restraint that Amanda had apparently left instruction about, and his face held the particular blankness of someone doing a task they are managing not to think about too hard.
He worked quickly. His hands were gentle — not in a performed way, but in the way of someone who couldn't seem to stop themselves from being careful even when the situation didn't require it. He secured the restraints with the minimum tension needed to satisfy the instruction, not a degree tighter, and the whole time he mumbled something under his breath that Esther couldn't quite catch until she focused on it.
An apology.
He was apologizing to her while he did it.
When he finished and stepped back, he glanced up once — checking, the way you check something you've been told to do and want to confirm is done — and found Esther's eyes open and looking directly at him.
He startled badly enough to take a step backward.
"You've been awake?" His voice came out higher than he'd intended.
"Well," Esther said, "if I hadn't been, I wouldn't have gotten such a good look at your face." She held his gaze steadily. "You're quite handsome up close, Dillon."
The color that moved into his face was immediate and total, starting at his collar and working upward. He looked away — at the wall, at the floor, at the torch, at anything that was not her eyes — and seemed to be having a quiet internal argument about what to do with his hands.
"I — you shouldn't—" He stopped. Started again. "I really hoped you wouldn't come here." He said it to the wall. "I was glad to see you. I won't pretend otherwise. But I didn't want this for you." He finally looked back, something earnest and uncomfortable moving through his expression. "If you can wait until midnight — I might be able to find where she keeps the key. I could get you out."
Esther watched him for a moment.
"I planned on coming here," she said. "I knew she was up to something." A pause. "And I wanted to make sure you were all right."
Dillon went still.
"Me?" The word came out with a genuine bewilderment that was more telling than anything else he could have said. The idea that someone had come somewhere for him — had thought about him in his absence, had factored his wellbeing into a decision — had apparently not been a category of experience he had ready access to. "Why would you want to check on me?"
"The last time I saw you," Esther said, "you were almost made to perform a service for her in front of a full guild hall." She kept her voice even and direct — not unkind, but not softening it either, because she had found that people who had been through what Dillon had been through often needed the truth stated plainly before they could believe it was being acknowledged. "And when you reached to set her bag down as you were leaving, your sleeve moved." She met his eyes. "I saw the marks on your wrist."
Dillon's jaw tightened.
For a moment something moved through his face that was too complicated to name — shame and surprise and the particular pain of being seen by someone you had been hoping wouldn't look too closely. Then he assembled the smile he used when he needed to deflect, and it was a good smile, practiced and convincing in the way that things become convincing when you've relied on them long enough.
"There's really no need to worry about any of that," he said. "I'm perfectly fine."
Esther looked at the smile.
"What if I took you with me?" she said. "If I simply removed you from this situation — would you come, or would you find your way back?"
"T...take me?" The smile dropped entirely. For a moment his face was completely unguarded — the face of someone who had just been offered something they had stopped letting themselves want — and the longing in it was startling in its plainness.
He opened his mouth to answer.
"Would you mind clarifying what you just said?"
Amanda's voice came from the doorway.
She had changed into riding clothes — tailored, dark, the outfit of someone who had planned an afternoon that required a certain kind of practicality. She was smiling in the way she smiled when she had heard more than you wanted her to and intended to make use of it.
She crossed the room toward them with the leisurely confidence of someone in a space they control entirely.
Esther looked at her.
"You heard me correctly," she said. "You've mentioned several times how much Dillon seems to think about me. As it happens, I've become quite fond of him as well. So — why not let me take him? He'd be far better looked after."
Amanda laughed. It was a bright, theatrical sound, the kind deployed when something has landed too close to a nerve. "You are so funny, Miss Esther. You took the item I wanted from the arena, and now you're teasing me about taking what's mine?" She pressed one hand to her eyes with the drama of someone performing exasperation. "Really."
"It's entirely up to Dillon," Esther said. "If he wants to stay, I'll respect that and say nothing more about it." She glanced at him. "I simply believe I can give him a better life."
Dillon had turned away from both of them.
His shoulders were rigid. His hands were clasped in front of him, white at the knuckles, and the breath he was taking was the careful kind — the kind you take when you are trying very hard not to make a sound while something inside you is coming apart.
"You are such a slut," Amanda said, pleasantly. The word came out of her with the ease of something she reached for comfortably, a well-worn tool. "You already have three beautiful men doing whatever you want. What could Dillon possibly offer you? Breathing?" She laughed again. "He's barely useful to me, and I actually own him."
"He doesn't have to offer me anything," Esther said. "That's not how I operate." She looked at Amanda steadily. "Dillon is a remarkable person. Taking him out of this situation would allow him to become what he's actually capable of. I believe that sincerely."
Amanda started to say something.
Dillon made a sound.
It was small — a sharp, involuntary catch of breath — and then his shoulders shook once, and then he was crying with the particular silence of someone who has had years of practice doing it without making noise, without drawing attention, without giving anyone a reason to use it against him.
He had been betrayed by every person who was supposed to protect him. His family had sold him. The woman who purchased him had taken everything else. He had stopped expecting kindness — had reorganized himself around the absence of it, had found his place next to Amanda because at least she was consistent, at least he knew what to expect, at least she would not leave him which was the one thing he feared more than the whip or the things she made him do when no one was watching.
And then Esther had walked into the guild hall.
He had felt it before he had understood it — that particular shift, something in him turning toward her the way a plant turns toward light it hasn't experienced before and doesn't have a name for yet. He had stared, and tried to stop staring, and failed, and Amanda had noticed and turned to look and had wanted her for entirely different reasons, and afterward Amanda had made him perform for her frustration in the ways she always did, and he had gone somewhere else in his head the way he had learned to go, and had thought about pink jewel eyes that had glanced at him once across a crowded room and had somehow, inexplicably, seen him.
He wanted to say yes.
He wanted to say yes so desperately that it frightened him, because wanting things had historically preceded losing them.
"Ugh." Amanda looked at him with the particular distaste of someone watching an inconvenience perform its inconvenience publicly. "Disgusting. I almost want to be rid of him entirely, except—" she paused, considering— "I think I'd miss him, somehow. Which is incredibly irritating."
"Or," said Esther.
The restraints were gone.
She was simply standing — between Amanda and Dillon, having crossed the distance from the chair to where Amanda stood in the time it took Amanda to blink — and her fingers curved under Amanda's chin with the delicate precision of someone who could, if they chose, do something very different with that hand.
Amanda went rigid.
"I could just kill you," Esther said.
It was said the way one might say I could just take the carriage instead, as a perfectly reasonable alternative being weighed against other options.
Amanda's complexion went through several changes in rapid succession. "I — please—" She swallowed carefully, aware of the fingers at her chin and what they implied about the distance between her and a very bad outcome. "I won't — I won't bother you. I swear it. Whatever you want—"
"The thing is," Esther said, tilting her head slightly, "you smell extraordinary." She leaned in, and her nose traced the line of Amanda's jaw with the unhurried appreciation of a connoisseur identifying something unexpectedly fine. "It would be such a waste." She drew back just enough to look at Amanda's face, which was doing remarkable things. "So I've decided not to kill you today."
"Thank you," Amanda breathed. "Thank you, yes, absolutely—"
"In exchange," Esther continued, her thumb tracing a slow line down the side of Amanda's neck, "I want something from you."
Amanda, whose eyes had not fully recovered their focus, made a sound of assent.
"Your family will adopt me. I need a noble background in this city — in this world — and your family's name will give me that. Your father is a Marquis. That's sufficient." Esther's other hand came up to support the back of Amanda's head with a gentleness that was somehow more unsettling than roughness would have been. "You'll arrange it when you return to the capital."
"I — yes. Yes, I can do that."
"And Dillon." Esther glanced back at him briefly. "If he chooses to come with me, you will not pursue it. You will not pursue him. He walks away free."
Amanda's eyes cut toward Dillon for a fraction of a second — something complicated passing through them, something that in a different person and a different life might have been called attachment — and then she closed them.
"Done," she said.
"Good girl," Esther said, warmly. "Now hold still."
She pressed her lips to Amanda's neck first — a soft, almost tender contact, her tongue finding the pulse point and tracing it once. Amanda made a sound that could not decide what it was.
Then Esther's fangs found the vein.
The sound Amanda made this time was unambiguous. She flailed — both hands coming up, feet leaving the floor briefly, a sharp cry that the stone walls swallowed efficiently — and then the struggling became less coordinated, and then it stopped, and then Amanda was simply held upright by Esther's arms, her head fallen back, her breathing slow and present but distant.
Esther drank carefully — not enough to harm, enough to satisfy, enough to seal an agreement in the oldest way she knew. When she withdrew, Amanda's head lolled forward, consciousness retreating to somewhere quiet and dark where it would stay until morning.
Esther caught her and set her down gently against the wall. She found a clean piece of linen nearby and folded it into a pad, pressing it to the marks at Amanda's neck with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone who had been doing this for three thousand years and had developed opinions about aftercare.
She stood.
Turned.
Dillon was still standing exactly where he had been, but he was no longer crying. He was watching her — had been watching the entire time — with an expression that was not fear and was not disgust and was not any of the things that expression usually was when people witnessed what she was.
He looked like someone watching something that confirmed a feeling he had already been carrying.
"Do you have a handkerchief?" Esther asked.
He had it out before she finished asking, crossing to her and pressing it into her hand, his eyes going briefly to the small trace of red at the corner of her lips. She cleaned her mouth, folded the cloth, and handed it back.
"She'll be fine," Esther said. "She just needs to rest."
Dillon looked at Amanda — slumped against the wall, breathing slowly, looking more peaceful than he had probably ever seen her — and then looked back at Esther.
"What you said," he started. His voice was careful, the way voices are when they are carrying something that can't afford to be dropped. "Up there — about taking me with you. If you meant it — if you would truly have me—" He stopped. Swallowed. "I want to go with you. Whatever you need from me, whatever you want me to do — I want to go."
Esther looked at him for a long moment.
Then she lifted her hand and placed it against his cheek — warm and unhurried, the way she touched people when she meant it.
"Even with blood on my hands?" she said, with a small, honest smile.
Something released in his face. "That doesn't matter to me." He turned his face very slightly into her palm, the instinctive lean of something that had been cold for a long time and found warmth. "My own hands aren't clean. They never have been." He met her eyes. "I've been able to use dark magic for as long as I can remember. I don't know why. I've never known why."
Esther studied him.
She filed that away somewhere important, behind the warmth that was moving through her at the particular quality of his trust — this boy who had been sold by his family and purchased by someone who had made his life a series of careful degradations, standing in a basement and telling her his hands weren't clean, as though that were the thing she needed to know before she could decide about him.
"From this moment on, you are mine," she said. Her hand stayed where it was. "You will not choose another master. You will not choose another lover, unless that changes in a way we both understand." She searched his face. "If any part of that is something you can't accept — right now is the time to say so. You can walk out of this room and I will not stop you and I will not hold it against you."
Dillon's throat moved.
"I swear myself to you," he said, and the simplicity of it — no performance, no flourish, just a fact he was stating because it was true — was more affecting than something elaborate would have been. "This day and every day after it. My loyalty. My respect." A pause, quieter than the rest. "And if you ever want it — my body."
Esther shook her head slightly.
"None of that matters," she said, "if I don't have your heart."
Dillon looked at her.
Then he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her — not tentatively, not with the careful hesitation of someone asking permission, but with the sudden completeness of someone who had been carrying something very heavy for a very long time and had just found somewhere safe to set it down. His face pressed into her hair.
"You've had my heart," he said, quietly, "since the moment I saw you."
Esther let herself be held for a moment — felt the tremor in his arms that he was trying to conceal and didn't comment on — and then reached up and tilted his chin, pressing her lips to his forehead with a warmth that was entirely her own.
Dillon went very still.
Then, slowly, the rigidity in his shoulders dissolved.
She stepped back, crossed to where Amanda was resting, and set a folded sum of money beside her — enough to cover what Dillon's papers had originally cost, and then some, because Esther had decided that fairness in transactions was a principle worth maintaining even when the other party was unconscious.
She straightened.
"Let's go find that inn."
The city outside the McMillan mansion was bright and indifferent and going about its afternoon with the cheerful momentum of a coastal town that had more pleasant things to attend to than the interior lives of its visitors.
Esther moved through it with Dillon half a step behind her, Raven having materialized onto her shoulder somewhere between the mansion gate and the main street, and the mood between the three of them was lighter than the basement they had just left might have suggested.
She checked in with her other lovers briefly — the twins still deep in the work of rebuilding the palace, the wolf clan having arrived and thrown themselves into the effort with the organized enthusiasm of people who needed something to do with their energy. Thor was on his way. Two days, maybe three.
Good.
Master. Raven's voice arrived in her mind with the particular precision he used when he had information he considered significant. I would like to share something about your new companion. Privately.
Esther glanced at Dillon, then reached up and touched Raven's chin briefly — a small gesture that extended a subtle telepathic barrier, keeping the conversation between them.
Go ahead.
My data on Dillon Bennett has returned some unusual results. A pause, in the way that Raven paused when he was selecting his words carefully. In his previous life — before this one — Dillon was the Prince of the Underworld.
Esther's stride didn't change.
Her expression didn't change.
But something inside her went very, very still.
That is why he has access to dark magic, Raven continued. It isn't a learned ability or an anomaly. It is his inheritance. It follows him across lives.
Esther let that sit for a moment.
Prince of the Underworld.
She thought about the way he had looked at her in the guild hall — before Amanda had even approached, before any of it — that fixed, helpless attention that had not been purely about beauty. The recognition in it. The way he had felt, even then, like something she was supposed to find.
She thought about who he would become, once the walls he had built around himself over years of surviving had been given somewhere safe to come down.
King of the Underworld, she thought. Eventually.
Yes, Raven said simply. That would follow.
Esther exhaled slowly through her nose.
She looked back at Dillon — walking just behind her, hands clasped in front of him, watching everything with the careful attention of someone recalibrating what the world might be allowed to contain — and felt something in her chest settle into a shape she was getting more familiar with every week.
She released the telepathic barrier.
"This way," she said, and led him toward the inn she had identified that morning.
The passersby, it turned out, had noticed the blood.
This was reasonable. She had been wearing a significant amount of it when she left the mansion, and while she had tidied herself during the walk, significant had a way of leaving impressions. The looks that followed them down the street ranged from alarmed to very alarmed, and by the time they had checked into the inn and she had cleaned herself properly and changed, a cluster of knights in city livery were waiting in the cafe downstairs where she and Dillon had settled to wait.
They were human.
Esther looked at them and felt the familiar ease of a skill she had been using for three thousand years settle into place.
She was entirely cooperative and very helpful. She described, with genuine-seeming distress, the monster that had attacked her just outside the city — the unexpected ambush, the quick thinking that had dispatched it, the unfortunate trajectory of blood that had resulted. She pointed in the direction she had come from with the confident specificity of someone who had absolutely been there.
The knights thanked her for her time.
They left looking satisfied.
Esther turned back to the table, where Dillon was sitting very straight and watching her with an expression caught somewhere between impressed and delighted.
She settled into the chair across from him and picked up her tea.
"Coffee?" she said. "Tea? Are you hungry?"
He was standing.
She looked at him.
He was standing beside the table, not at it — the posture of someone who had been trained, through a variety of methods, to occupy the space adjacent to rather than at a table when their presence had not been explicitly invited.
"Sit down," Esther said.
"I'm your servant now," he said. "I'm fine standing, my lady."
Esther put her tea down.
"I'm ordering you to sit," she said, in the tone of someone who has decided that some instructions require framing in the language a person currently understands. "I cannot have a conversation with someone who is standing at attention. Sit down, Dillon. Next to me."
He sat.
The speed of it was almost funny — the immediate obedience, and then the slightly stunned expression of someone who had just sat down at a table and was not entirely sure what to do with the experience.
"Now," Esther said. "What would you like?"
His face went red.
The particular redness of someone who has not been asked what they would like in some time, or possibly ever, and has been caught completely off guard by the question. He looked down at the table. His hands fidgeted. He answered with great precision to the surface of the tablecloth.
"R-rose milk tea," he said. "And — if it's not — I mean, I'm fine with just the tea—" He stopped. Forced himself to continue. "Strawberry shortcake. If that's all right."
"Are you fond of sweets?" Esther asked.
He glanced up, and the expression that crossed his face was the one she was beginning to identify as the face he made when something pleasantly surprised him. "I — yes. Very much. Lady Amanda would occasionally give me her leftovers, and I found I always looked forward to the desserts most."
Esther looked at him for a moment.
She turned and flagged down the staff.
"We'll have rose milk tea," she said, "and one of every dessert you currently have available."
The server blinked. "...Every—"
"Every one," Esther confirmed pleasantly.
Dillon made a small sound. "My — Miss Esther, you don't have to—"
"I am not about to be outdone by Mandy's leftovers," Esther said, with the serenity of someone who has made a decision and does not require further input. "You will try each one until you find your favorites. That is the task."
Dillon looked at her.
He looked at her the way, she was beginning to notice, he looked at things that he didn't have a framework for and was in the process of building one. Like a person learning a new word — turning it over, testing its weight, finding where it fit.
"Why?" he said. Not ungratefully. Just genuinely, quietly confused. "Why would you do that? I'm just—" He stopped himself.
Esther set down her cup and reached across the table. She curved her finger and thumb around his chin, tilting it upward until his eyes met hers and had nowhere to retreat to.
"You are mine now," she said. "I told you I would take better care of you. I intend to do that. Starting today, starting with this." Her thumb pressed very gently at the corner of his jaw. "Will you allow me that?"
"I'm not worth—"
"I did not ask you to evaluate yourself," Esther said. "I asked if you would allow me to take care of you. Those are different questions."
Dillon's throat moved.
Something behind his eyes was doing the complicated work of rearranging — walls being assessed, certain ones being slowly, carefully, voluntarily lowered for the first time in a very long while.
"I don't want to be a burden to you," he said.
"You became my responsibility the moment I chose you," Esther said. "Your burdens are mine now. And mine are yours — which means you have a responsibility to receive what I give you." Her thumb moved to his lower lip, the softest contact. "Starting with letting someone take care of you. Even if it's uncomfortable at first."
"Yes," he said. The word came out smaller than he intended. Then, with more steadiness: "Yes. I won't resist your generosity anymore."
"Good." She released his chin. "And — Dillon."
He looked up.
"Call me Esther."
The staff began bringing out the desserts.
They arrived in a procession — small plates, each one different, arranged across the table until there was barely room for the tea. Dillon looked at the spread with the expression of someone who had been told the sky was a different color and was only now seeing it for the first time.
"Miss Esther," he said, and his voice had a quality to it that she didn't quite have a word for.
"Esther," she corrected.
"Esther." He said it carefully, like something that needed to be handled gently the first few times. Then, slightly louder: "Thank you."
He said it looking directly at her, and the brightness in his face — unguarded, unperformed, the simple expression of someone experiencing something good and not yet knowing how to make it smaller — made something in Esther's chest do something she was getting increasingly accustomed to and still had not entirely named.
"Eat," she said.
He picked up a fork and took his first bite of the lemon meringue — and his expression did the thing that expressions do when the body receives something it has been wanting without knowing it was wanting it. His eyes widened slightly. His shoulders came down a fraction.
"So cute," Esther said, to herself, mostly.
Raven, from her shoulder, said nothing and looked out the cafe window with the expression of someone who had seen this coming.
An hour later, Dillon had made his way through most of the plates with the focused dedication of someone approaching a project seriously, and had decisively identified the lemon meringue and a dark chocolate torte as his foremost favorites. The remaining untouched plates he had gathered carefully and asked the staff to box up.
Esther watched him take the boxes outside, where a small cluster of people who had been sitting on the edge of the street near the cafe looked up with the wariness of people accustomed to being moved along rather than approached.
Dillon distributed the boxes with the matter-of-fact kindness of someone for whom this was simply the obvious thing to do with food that was still good and people who could use it.
Esther watched him from the cafe window.
He came back, settled into the chair, and found her looking at him.
He started to look away.
She reached across, caught his chin — not holding it this time, just a brief touch, a redirect — and when he looked back at her she brought her thumb to the corner of his mouth, cleaning away a small trace of strawberry cream he had missed.
She brought her thumb to her own lips.
Held his gaze while she did it.
"Too sweet for my taste," she said, "I think. Though I suspect you would taste considerably better."
The color that flooded his face was extraordinary.
"Please don't tease me, Miss — Esther," he managed.
She stood, held out her hand, and waited.
He took it.
They left the cafe together, walking into the Seacliff afternoon with the ocean moving blue and bright at the end of every street, and Esther felt his hand in hers — tentative at first, then gradually settling, fingers adjusting until they were simply holding, with the naturalness of something finding the shape it was meant to be in.
"Who says I was teasing you?" she said.
Dillon looked at the side of her face.
Something was happening in him that was different from anything he had experienced before — different in quality, in temperature, in what it asked of him. With Amanda there had been fear dressed in obligation dressed in the hollow mechanics of performance. He had learned to be useful, and had learned to make himself not feel the rest.
This was the rest.
He wanted to be near her. Wanted to hear her voice and watch her eyes and find out what she found funny and what she thought about when she went quiet. Wanted to be the person standing beside her when things happened, rather than the person standing behind.
He was not accustomed to wanting things.
He found, walking beside her through the coastal city with her hand warm in his and the sea air moving around them both, that he was not entirely opposed to getting used to it.
For now, he kept it to himself.
But he kept it.