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Before the war, if you asked Manuela how her love life was going, she’d wail that only a terminal case of the Tailtean trots and an international whiskey shortage could make it any worse. And those weren’t jokes, those were fears!
She could never have imagined what fate had in store.
Five years later, she couldn’t lure a man within twenty yards without him breaking into a cold sweat and jumping at shadows, or gazing into his glass like even the ice cubes would bite. They hadn’t been threatened. Manuela had mouthed off at the Emperor often enough to ensure they hadn’t been threatened. But all it took to send her hard-won suitors galloping away was a single glance from Her Majesty's Murderous Menace.
No, not that menace, the other one. The stabby one. Alright, not particularly clear either; every Adrestian wore their share of daggers to bed if they wanted to make it past thirty—not that Manuela was even approaching thirty! The point was, that Goddess-bedamned Death Knight was trampling her love life into the muck faster than a five-legged foal, and there was nothing she could do about it.
If it were a crush, she’d understand. It wasn’t easy for a man to resist her charms. But all she’d ever done was spit in his face and call him a monster. Like some blighted feral cat, he seemed to take it as both the highest compliment and a welcomed degradation. Well. Maybe that wasn’t all she’d ever done, but still. A lifetime in the opera had made her immune to the most nobly roguish of villains, so what did it matter if they had once had a moonlit assignation on a stormy battlefield, where a raging knight of sheer darkness abducted her from the field and spirited her away to heal him. She still remembered the way her blood-soaked hands had lit up in a shimmer of ruby with every crack of lightning, his breath heaving at her throat, his tremendously inappropriate but equally tremendous boner eager for attention as her Faith fought to keep him on this side of the veil…
Not romantic in the slightest. But when the breeze kissed her ear, Manuela shivered at the memory even so.
Wait. Hadn’t she sealed the room?
She frowned at the tightly closed office window, bolted to keep the finches and sparrows away from her specialty stash of herbs, and turned to check the door, equally bolted to keep the nattering teenagers away from her specialty stash of—
Goddess fucking hellfire, there he was looming in the doorway again.
“Can I help you?” Manuela snarled to cover up her jitters.
At least this time it was Jeritza filling the door frame with his significantly less foreboding presence. Visitations from the Death Knight himself were worse, because tall dark and handsome didn’t count for shit when the tall and dark part was grisly painted armor reeking of Reason and bile. Plus he never remembered to wipe his sabatons before tracking slaughter onto her carpet! And the Jeritza underneath all that was just…twiggy, mostly. A young buck who’d never managed to grow into his own horns, too caught up in the make believe of a horseback bogeyman. She wouldn’t call him handsome, either. He just had a placid void of emotion that polite society called a face. Artfully proportioned, sure, but terminally awkward.
He wouldn’t even enter the room without her explicit permission, which was really taking the whole blood-sucking terror of the night shtick a bit far.
Manuela cleared her throat pointedly, and her visitor’s gaze slowly made its way back from the unopened wine bottle on the table and the two empty glasses.
“I require medical aid,” Jeritza intoned with his usual gravity.
She sloshed a glass at the knife sticking out of his lower abdomen. “I can see that.”
His brow furrowed minutely, both infuriated and enthralled by her lack of reaction at the lovely new burgundy dyeing his pale tunic. Manuela hated herself for the smile she had to hide behind another sip of wine. He’d been showing up with an injury once or twice a week for well over a month; she deserved to be a little frustrating in turn, didn’t she? Just because she’d been a school nurse didn’t make her a nursemaid!
At length Jeritza nodded to himself, looked down at the knife, and yanked it out in a gushing splutter of gore. “I require medical aid,” he repeated over her ear-splitting scream.
The whole room lit up in a maelstrom of Faith, Manuela’s irises blazing with holy light as she pulled the man inside and slammed shut the door. He went down easy when she hauled him onto the examination table, but his hands settled in his lap rather than putting pressure on the wound, not bothering to offer the politeness of self-preservation.
“Macuil’s heaving tits,” she hissed as she fumbled for her emergency field kit. “Thought you’d be leaving dead rats on my doorstep, not your own grinning corpse.”
Jeritza inclined his head in picture-perfect nobility, though why he’d ever emulate the bratty students was beyond her. “The Emperor does hate rats,” he agreed solemnly.
“Don’t you fucking dare.”
Breathe, Manuela. Breathe. Her illustrious Faith would keep the fiend stabilized for at least ten minutes, and her steady hands would stitch him back together as mad as before. Sure, her office was hardly sanitized, but considering how often he’d had his guts out on the battlefield, it was unlikely to be the death of him.
She could always cover it up on the autopsy.
“What did you even do?” Manuela finally asked once she began peeling back his tunic from the wound. Aside from a few stray threads of matted linen, it was a clean puncture, yet deep enough to have nicked the back of his ribcage.
“I believe the instigating party referred to it as a ‘Food Fight.’”
Manuela couldn’t be sure if he jumped at her bark of laughter or from the way she slapped her palm over his wound for an extra pulse of healing, and frankly she didn’t care. He enjoyed it either way. A moment later he was sighing into her touch, all nasal, and she knew damn well he was getting his rocks off.
His head tilted forward as the last breath of Faith poured into him and slowed his blood to sludge. In most men it incited terror. In Jeritza it brought a terrible ease, as if the constant onslaught of his own pumping heart was what whipped his demons into a frenzy, and only with his lifeblood secure in her power could he finally rest.
She really preferred not to think about it.
“Lean back. You’ll have to wash your whole uniform, you know. There’s pudding on your collar.” Manuela detailed every stain, reaching for any topic to ramble on about while she undressed him. Well, his torso. He hadn’t yet figured out a wound that would get her to take all his clothes off at once—leprosy, maybe—and they damn well weren’t lovers so he wasn’t getting any niceties out of her.
Awkward enough that he just laid there gazing across the room at her anatomical model with the knife in its forehead. She could almost hear the Death Knight’s rasping echo in her ear, Goddess I wish that were me, save that he never used that voice off the battlefield. Here in her office he was only ever…polite. Aloof. Not acclimated to a world without its glossy gore and seeking it like one of the monastery cats after a fresh crop of catnip. Or every monastery cat at once, really, like he was herding them in that strange brain of his, and all of them purred in delight when she laid hands upon his flesh.
Today she knotted his pudding-spattered tunic around his arms and hooked it behind the table’s back, pinning him down for her own protection, or something. He went a little glassy-eyed and shook his head awful quick when she asked if he minded.
On the battlefield there was never any time to enjoy the perks of the job. Like how the Archbishop got to stroll behind all those plush and kneeling behinds whenever she got the urge, or Hanneman’s academic conferences where all the men went to the sauna to compare corporeal Crest effects. Well, nursing left no time for taking in the scenery when a handsome chest had made a bony pincushion of its own lungs, but Jeritza very thoughtfully ensured she’d always get a free eyeful.
Did she need to touch his chest, clinically speaking? Did she need to philosophize over the marble planes of a body so weaponized he couldn’t possibly be hydrating properly? To trace the devastating peaks of his hipbones like a forensic dietitian, an archaeologist desperate to decipher where all that sorbet had gone, because it certainly wasn’t baking muffins on top?
He burned beneath her hands. Skin, bone, all of it a bonfire of desire. Manuela stopped questioning it weeks ago, because Crests or bloodlust or lusty blood, what did it matter?
All that mattered was this: her palm smearing down over the gaping agony of his wound, his breath curling out between his clenched teeth.
His cock straining in his trousers.
Hello, she almost said. At least someone appreciates me. But the levity caught in her throat, stoppered up like a wine bottle, and she couldn’t laugh at corks and cocks with a man bleeding out on her table.
The moment she pulled away, Jeritza jolted after her. The restraints held, but like a caged beast it only worked him to greater frenzy. His wild panting filled the room with incoherent need as his blood pooled upon the table.
Manuela swallowed hard and stood. “I need to—“ She caught herself.
No. This was not a half-coin titty dreadful. She would not complete that sentence. She would not voice the word probe.
“Sit still,” she snapped instead, hoping Jeritza would follow any command to the letter while under her thrall.
There was no real way to get a read on him; forget putting a finger on it, she couldn’t lay a fist on his intentions. One moment he was a petrified stagehand caught in front of the curtain when the lights came up, and the next he swanned about like a vainglorious understudy, expecting all the world to dance to his maudlin tune. Yet instead of trying to captivate a crowd he was here, trembling, his blood still warm on her fingers.
It couldn’t be validation that he sought. Her approval counted for something in the theater, but here among all these Crests and noble titles, she wasn’t exactly granting anyone a quick path to fame. Not that Jeritza cared a wit for his place in society. Feral creature that he was, maybe he only needed someone to see the human in him, to confirm that all his parts were in place beneath his skin like the model he so adored.
That, she could do.
“Wounds to the gut are dangerous,” she explained in a low, sultry tone, the kind used to lure a man over before bashing his head in. “So we’ll keep this brief.”
There was nothing short about the moan that poured from Jeritza’s lips as Manuela pressed her well-manicured thumb into the wound. With her palm flat against his stomach, she traced the line of each quivering organ and whispered Faith against the snarls of old scar tissue within. It was too slippery to tell old from new, but she wouldn’t escalate into opening him up further and giving him new ideas. She couldn’t have him dragging himself around with his chest flapping open.
Vivisection went well beyond the boundaries of freaky fun times.
So did this. But as long as she didn’t look down at her hands it was fine. In her dreams they still dripped with rubies, still donned their brutal lace, and the claws of his gauntlets reaching for her waist were never far behind.
It wasn’t like Manuela was trying to watch his face for every flicker of manic arousal that lit up that placid mask, she just needed to make sure she hadn’t missed anything. One time his kidney had been so bruised that blissful tears leapt to his eyes when she nudged it, and without that tell he could’ve died. She couldn’t risk leaving any shards within the wound track, no matter how he’d treasure such a gift.
As she thumbed the long line of his liver, Jeritza’s breathing finally steadied from halfway stricken to fully stimulated, and Manuela breathed a sigh of relief. Thank the Goddess. Now she wouldn’t need to feel so guilty about the sopping heat whining for attention between her own thighs.
Manuela’s free hand braced lightly against his lower torso and dragged a firmly clinical line down to his arousal. The throbbing of his heart quickened around her probing finger; hadn’t she always joked about wanting a man’s heart in her hands?
He bucked against her, biting back a low groan of desperation, and Manuela carefully leaned her weight down. She didn’t stroke his cock no matter how he barked and swore, just wore him down with unyielding pressure. It was a shame they never got around to much more than this. She would bet her best stilettos—blades AND heels—that he’d enjoy a half dozen other kinds of penetration, his pulse racing wicked around her wrist. A healthy libido did such heavy lifting when one needed to feel the grounding force of life. It didn’t always need to be her thumbing through his entrails.
By the time she finished tidying up his vital organs, exhaustion had begun to take its toll. Thankfully his battered flesh needed no such, uh, specialized consideration. Manuela withdrew her hand and quickly wiped it off on the unsullied remains of his tunic, lest he start trying to sensually suck it off her. This time he didn’t protest when she rose to fetch a basin, washcloth, and her suturing kit.
This was the boring part. The weirdly unsexy part that nevertheless felt the most like edging. Jeritza wouldn’t get riled up from something as inconsequential as a needle piercing his skin, and Manuela had to actually pay attention or she’d stitch his guts to his belly button. Seamstress she was not.
But his mouthwateringly deranged dick was right there. And she’d already kicked off her panties when she went for the suturing kit, so absolutely nothing was stopping them except the damn Cethleannic Oath. Manuela ran through the words with every stitch: May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain.
Except blue balls were pain too, weren’t they? Weren’t they, Saint Cethleann?! Have mercy!
Jeritza’s cock twitched and she pierced the last line askew, but fuck it, good enough. Before he could squirm another inch, Manuela whipped the blade from her ankle holster, cut off the loose threads, and stabbed it four inches deep into the crotch of his pants to pin him to the table in one frantic sweep. One leg up and over and she was in his lap.
The table groaned ominously but didn’t give, thank the Saints, because she didn’t need her pride mouthing off when satisfaction was finally in sight.
“Any complaints?” she asked, already halfway up on her knees to show off the glistening wetness of her inner thighs.
Jeritza’s head tilted in eerie contemplation of her entire person. Surely he wasn’t squeamish about the stains on her dress, seeing as half of them were his.
His hand moved toward the fall of her skirt—wait, when did his hand get free—and in the blink of an eye he was twirling her ankle knife between them.
“Your aim,” he drawled.
Manuela snatched up the blade and whipped it over her shoulder, where it thunked straight into the heart of the anatomical model.
Jeritza grinned, all teeth and promise and goodness, she needed a stiff one. Drink, dick, whichever. What was it she said about his looks? Strike that from the record; there was much to be said for feral creatures after all.
His unbound hands slid up her thighs from knee to hip, smearing her desire against her flushed skin, fluid for fluid. His grip tightened into the plush of her behind as he lifted her easily, just one more steel-boned horror in his hands, and brought her down in starstruck alignment for his cock to tease her entrance.
Pressure, not movement. Bastard.
Manuela surged forward to bite at his lips and swallowed him down in swift absolution. At once his hips raced to keep pace, surging into her with all fragile restraint forgotten, a terror set to consume.
Yet he never quite did, she realized as he all but gagged himself on her tongue. He never broke skin, he never forced or demanded, never made her cry in anything but ecstasy. He knew no shame, but for every annoyance, he gave her back pleasure tenfold. Sure, she wished he would pay more attention to her gorgeous tits than to the sweat beading down her neck, but she couldn’t win them all.
Adrenaline could fill in for victory, couldn’t it? Or ecstasy, or intimacy—
Jeritza’s hands settled at her waist, mortal flesh and bone instead of razor-edged obsidian, and Manuela raised hers to stroke the limp falls of his hair. She tangled her fingers and pulled, relishing in the way he faltered on a moan. Yet what caught her eye most of all was the sight of her own thumb trailing over his cheek, ruby-ringed beneath the nail.
There was poetry there. Something about light in the darkness, pearls and swine and the muck of the world, and making good enough—something worthy of a opera buffa at the least—Ballad of the Dick Knight—but Jeritza’s teeth sank into her neck and dragged her back to reality with a shriek of delight.