When he was done with her, he stood and left the room, locking the door behind him.
Rolling onto her side with her back to the room, she listened silently to the human priest who had started crying at some point. He had been forced to listen to the brutality of Neah and while she had done her best to remain silent, he was eager to hurt her in any way possible. The knife getting a lot of use.
He was still murmuring, begging Eros to come for them. But she knew Daemon wouldn't listen.
"He's not coming," she said after half an hour of listening to the man beg.
"How do you know?" the priest asked.
"Because I know him. He stopped listening to the prayers a long time ago," she told the wall. "None of us listen to the prayers."
The man had gone silent, his sobbing breaking off as he took in what she said, and it took him a good three minutes to be able to fully process.
"You're a Goddess?" he asked.
"Does it matter?"
He didn't reply, but she felt his eyes on her and he moved off the floor, approaching her. He reached out with a trembling hand to gently pull her dress back down over her hips.
"I'm sorry…" he whispered, his hand resting against her arm. It was oddly warm, soft, and alive.
"If you want to survive, you need to remain silent and stay in the corner, so he forgets about you," she said. "I don't know how to escape the caves, but the others might help you if you can get out of this room."
He moved away from her as she sat up, inching her way up the bed so that she could reach her stomach and press against it. There was no swelling yet, but hopefully there would not be any.
"What are you doing?" the man asked.
"Checking to see if I'm pregnant," she said with a shrug.
"How would you know that already?" he asked.
"Because I can't have normal children, I will give birth to a new world like this one and it takes about two days." Odds were he was going to be dead soon anyway, so it didn't matter if he knew.
"You what?" he demanded, sounding outraged.
"Go sit in the corner, human. Pray silently and maybe if you're annoying enough your God will come just to shut you up," she said, unsure of if the tightness in her abdomen was life, or just her tension.
He moved away obediently, sitting in the corner of the room and making himself look as small and invisible as possible. It was fairly effective given he was wearing black, but she doubted it would work. The room stank of his fear, among other things.
***
Neah returned an hour or so later and she could feel his eyes on her back as she sat facing the wall, her arms around her legs and her face buried in her knees. The human had been silent the entire time, though she heard the occasional sucking in as he started to ask a question, but then changed his mind.
Neah approached the bed and brushed her hair away from her shoulder, leaning down to kiss the bare skin gently. "Hello, my love," he said in a husky voice. "I brought dinner."
He offered the plate to her, and she lifted her head to look at it curiously, the smell of fresh meat and oddly, strawberries drawing her attention.
Taking the plate slowly, he made a soft sound of pleasure as he moved around to sit on the bed facing her side, watching her intently as she looked at the food. She was so incredibly hungry, and yet she didn't want to eat anything he gave her.
"Eat," he ordered, meeting her eyes as she looked sideways at him.
His smile was fading, and his eyes narrowed. So she was prepared when he screamed "Eat!" but it still made her jump.
Picking out a piece of meat, she bit half of it off and chewed, his anger fading as he watched her.
"Good. There's no need to be difficult," he said gently, reaching out to stroke her hair, and he frowned with his fingers catching in the long strands.
Leaving the room, he returned after only a few minutes. He picked up a mass of her hair, working a comb slowly through the tangled mess while she ate.
"You're so beautiful, you should be taking better care of yourself," he scolded gently.
She nodded in silent acceptance of his words, unable to come up with a response.
"If you're good, I'll let you have a shower later," he coaxed, and she nodded again, unsure what it meant by 'being good'.
Saving the strawberries for last, she chewed on them slowly as he finished combing her hair and braided it with a speed and skill she found a little disturbing. How many times had he braided hair that allowed him to become so efficient?
"Lie down," he said.
Picking up the bowl, she offered it to him.
He took it and set it down on the desk while she laid down on the bed, remaining silent as he crawled on top of her. This time she didn't have the priest to listen to, and she tried to block out his quiet sounds of pleasure, but it was difficult without something else to listen to. She wished she hadn't told the priest to stay silent, at least if he was praying. She could hear something that wasn't soft moans and gasps of her name in her ear.
***
The days slipped by into weeks, and she had started hiding food in the blankets to feed to the priest, though she didn't know why she bothered. He was a coward and when she noticed the first signs of swelling in her abdomen, he had adamantly refused to help her in any way. It had been agonisingly painful to cause enough internal damage using her nails to cause the pregnancy to fail. The priest had been horrified by her actions, but she couldn't let Neah create a world from her.
When he had returned and saw all the blood soaking the mattress, he had demanded an answer, and she had jumped to the first answer she could think of. "I miscarried."
He hadn't believed her at all, but when he examined her, there was no denying where the blood had come from.
"I'm sterile," he said, staring at her intently.
"Evidently you are not," she said, standing at the foot of the bed while he stripped the sheets off the bed.
He had exploded into a rage as something clicked in his brain and his fingers had closed around her throat, crushing the wind out of her.
"Who has been in here fucking you?!" he raged.
She could do nothing to protect herself, bound and helpless while he choked the life out of her.
"No one has been here!" the priest yelled and Neah spun on him, completely forgetting the priest even existed.
"Who the fuck are you?" Neah snarled as she slumped to the ground, gasping for air and wheezing.
"The priest you forgot about."
"How are you still alive? It's been weeks."
There was an awkward silence as Neah turned to look down at her and knew she had been keeping food for the human.
"Did you fuck her?" Neah asked slowly, fury building up in him.
"It's only been you," the priest said.
"Impossible. I can't procreate."
"Sobek…" she wheezed, both men looking down at her.
"What about him?" Neah asked in a lethal voice, but she couldn't suck in enough air to finish her sentence.
Reaching down, he dragged her up by the arm and lifted her chin to straighten out her airways. Relieved, she sucked in as much air as she could.
"Sobek is… my ancestor… his blood means I… can reproduce with any species… I was pregnant to the lich…"
He let go of her suddenly and she slumped down to her knees, leaning back against the wall with her head tilted back to keep her airways clear while her body repaired.
"A Lich can… you know… have sex?" the priest asked.
"Trust me, he has no issue getting an erection," she said and yelped in pain at Neah slapped her.
"You are my wife and will not mention your past with any other man!" he raged.
"Yes, Neah…" she whimpered, tasting blood where her canine had cut the inside of her cheek.
"Sobek…?" Neah asked, and she nodded.
"God of military power, royalty… and fertility. He's also a bit of a jerk, in case you were wondering…" she said, pushing herself slowly to her feet.
"Sobek…" Neah said softly. "You can give me a child because of him?"
Looking up at him, she bit her lip and shook her head. But his manic gleam had grown feral.
"I can't, Neah," she whispered. "I can't give you, or anyone, a child."
"You can reproduce with any species," he said.
He was inching closer to her, and she backed away from him.
"I can't have children," she gasped, pressing back into the wall, but his hand lifted and he gripped her hair, dragging her forward and bending her over the footboard of the bed.
It was excruciating, the chains digging into her hips, the metal digging into her and the pain of the freshly healed cuts being torn back open as he took her. She clenched her eyes shut, trying her best to remain silent. But it was agony and she couldn't hold in the sounds of pain that overtook the sounds of his pleasure.
He gasped as he stepped back from her, panting at the expenditure of energy.
"Don't cry, love," he whispered, pulling her up with a gentle arm around her neck.
She didn't know when she had started crying, but she suspected it had been a while, the mattress stained with her blood and now the watery black of her tears.
Turning her to face him, she flinched as that long tongue dragged up her cheek and he sighed, pulling her against him.
"Don't worry, we can try again. This time you won't lose it," he murmured, stroking her hair and rocking her gently in his arms.