Chapter 24

"What the fuck were you thinking?" Khysmet demands, storming across the room to stand in front of me and gesticulate wildly. "Ten fucking hours? What could you possibly have been doing there for ten hours? Don't answer that," he says when I open my mouth to respond. "I was about to organize a search party for you, secrecy be damned. I thought, 'She's never been down there that long before, not even once. Is she dead? Is she injured? Is she trapped? How the fuck am I supposed to know?' And based on what you've told me about how convoluted the paths are down there, I never would have been able to find you."

His voice cracks on that last sentence, and my heart cracks with it. I knew he wouldn't be happy about me staying in the tunnels so long today, but I don't think I understood what that really meant until now. The pain in his voice is like nothing I’ve ever heard.

"But obviously you're not injured, trapped, or dead," he continues, "so what the fuck were you doing down there? What could possibly justify running around underground until ten at night?”

“You can answer that," he says when I hesitate.

As my answer, I pull out my sketchbook and show him the symbol that I copied down from the catacombs.

"Do you know what this means?" I ask.

He stares at it for a long time.

"Where did you see this?" he demands.

"We made it to the catacombs. Someone was painting it on a casket and talking about meeting there. It sounds like they change meeting locations often, and the symbol marks where the next one is supposed to be."

He stares at my sketchbook wordlessly for a while before handing it back. Then he puts his face in his hands, rubbing his temples like he's getting a pounding headache. Then, he starts to laugh, a low chuckle at first which gradually builds into a sort of manic cackle. I flinch backward, uncertain of what's going on.

"I can't fucking handle this anymore, Cat," he laments. "You're constantly doing stupid shit that could get you hurt or killed. You spy on my ministers, you get dragged into alleyways, you look for secret doorways, you run around in caves, yet every single fucking time, you get results. Turns out the minister is embezzling, and you effortlessly kill all your would-be attackers, and oh, the cave actually does go to the catacombs, and now you found the freshly painted symbol of a cult that rose to prominence and tried to depose my father when I was nine.

"Why do you have to be so fucking competent all the time, Cat?" he shouts, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me. "Why can't you just do stupid shit for no reason, so that I can be justified in yelling at you to cut it out and stopping you the next time you try something?” He walks away and starts pacing the room. “I just want to keep you safe and happy, but for some reason your happiness is contingent on your getting into dangerous situations at least once a fortnight. And I can’t ever complain about it, because you’re smart and cautious and resourceful and somehow never seem to actually be in any danger. I mean were you even in any danger tonight?”

I shrug sheepishly. “Not really. I heard the people coming well before I even saw their light, and they couldn’t smell us or see us. And we took precautions for just about every other contingency along the way.”

“See? See? What the hell am I supposed to do with that? You’re constantly scaring the shit out of me, yet it somehow always turns out that I was scared for nothing, because you’re happy and fine and totally unbothered by anything, even when you’re hurt. Why can’t you ever run to me and say ‘Khysmet, I need your help, please protect me’? I’ve never felt so useless as when you insist on taking care of every single problem by yourself.”

He walks back up to me and pulls me into a tight hug, squeezing almost to the point of pain.

I don’t know what to say. I can’t argue back at him, since it's obvious he’s only yelling at me because he cares about me. Trying to comfort him would just seem hollow, since I have no intention of staying out of trouble in the future. I just stay quiet and put my arms around him, leaning into his embrace. He rubs his nose into my hair and breathes deep, then recoils.

“You smell weird,” he says. “What is that? I can’t smell you at all.”

“It’s a scent-covering lotion I got from your chemists,” I say. “To make sure nobody could possibly pick me out by smell if we ran into someone in the catacombs. I usually wash it off right after I get back.”

He heaves a deep sigh. “Let’s get you in a bath. We’ll use the one in my room. It’s bigger.”

He puts a hand on my shoulder and starts to guide me out the door. I stumble on my first step.

“Cat? What’s wrong?” he asks with urgency.

“I’m just so hungry,” I whine, suddenly feeling every ounce of exhaustion from my long walk in full force. “And tired. And my legs are so sore.”

Even though he's pissed, I hope he will take pity on me if I ask him. I lean my forehead against his chest.

“Khysmet, take care of me.”

He takes a moment to heave a deep, tired sigh, then he puts an arm under my knees and lifts me up in a princess carry, starting the walk down the hall toward his room. It’s surprisingly comfortable, and he doesn’t seem to have any difficulty supporting my weight. I relax completely into his arms, resting my head against his neck and closing my eyes with a contented sigh. On the way, he sees a servant in the hall and stops briefly to ask them to send food to his room.

“It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it gets there fast and there’s a lot of it,” he says.

“Is she okay?” the servant asks. I don’t recognize her by voice, and I’m not going to crane my neck to look and see who it is, but I’m touched by her concern for me.

“She’s fine, just hungry and tired,” Khysmet relays.

When we get to his room, he walks me straight into the bathroom, which is excessively huge, and sets me on a chair along the wall. Who has chairs in their bathroom? He immediately starts drawing a bath in the biggest personal tub I’ve ever seen – it’s partially sunken into the floor and could fit at least six people stretched out without anyone touching each other. While the tub starts filling up fast, he comes back over to me and starts peeling off my clothes. I try to protest and say that I can undress myself, but he slaps my hands away and insists on doing it for me.

Once I’m fully unclothed, he strips himself down too, adds the heat potion into the water until it steams and a liberal amount of some kind of salt from a sack on the floor, then picks me up once more, stepping directly into the tub and sinking down until we’re both submerged up to our shoulders.

I sigh deeply as the water, bordering just on the edge of being uncomfortably hot, surrounds my body and seeps heat all the way into my bones. My sore muscles cry out in relief. I try to move over so I’m sitting beside Khysmet instead of in his lap, but he holds me firmly in place.

“Khysmet, how am I supposed to wash myself if you don’t let me go for even five seconds?”

“Don’t worry, sunshine. I’ll wash you,” he purrs gently into my ear, making goosebumps erupt all over my body despite the heat.

"Y- You don't have to do that," I protest. "I can wash myself just fine."

"I know you can wash yourself. You'll like it more if I do it, though. Trust me."

Before I can protest any more, I hear a door open in the other room, presumably the food that Khysmet requested. They got it here fast. My stomach growls in anticipation. Hopefully Khysmet washes me quickly so I can finally get something to eat. Unexpectedly, though, he calls out to whoever has brought in my dinner before they head back out the door.

“Hey, did you bring any sort of finger food?” he asks. “If you did, could you bring it in here?”

My face flushes bright red, even more than it already is from the steam. No. No no no. I’m completely naked. So is Khysmet. I’m in his lap. We haven’t used any soap yet, so there’s not even bubbles in the water to at least provide the illusion of modesty. As far as compromising positions go, this is about as compromising as it gets. Once more I struggle to free myself from Khysmet’s grasp, but he’s got one arm around the top of my hips and the other across my lower ribcage, locking me in tight against him.

As a last-ditch effort, I cross my arms and legs to at least attempt to cover myself in some capacity, just in time for Annika to come into the room bearing a tray of little sandwiches. I almost can’t bring myself to look her in the eye. When I do risk a glance, though, much to my relief, she’s politely looking away. I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to speak to her normally again. It’s baffling to me that Khysmet doesn’t care, but I suppose that his modesty is perfectly preserved, since I’m blocking the view. Not that there’s much to see until he gets hard. Which, I realize thanks to a sudden poking sensation on my ass, he now is.

Annika leaves the room as soon as she can, without saying a word. The second the door to his study closes, I reach behind me and smack him on the side of the head.

“Ow. What the hell was that for?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe for forcing me to expose myself in front of poor Annika, who did not ask for that either by the way,” I say in an accusatory tone. “Or maybe for getting turned on by forcing me to expose myself. Heck, maybe both.”

“You’re so cute when you’re shy,” he replies warmly, hugging me even tighter against himself, which grinds his dick more firmly against me. “And I didn’t force you to expose yourself. I let you cross your legs and cover your nipples, didn’t I?”

I groan in exhausted irritation. I’m too tired to fight him.

“Just wash me already, so I can eat and go to sleep,” I command.

“Yes ma’am.”

His hands are exceedingly gentle as they rub circles up and down my body, kneading into tired muscles in a way that has me moaning in ecstasy and relief. Despite my professed desire to wash myself, I am in fact enjoying this deeply. I decide not to be shy about it when he gets to the more intimate areas of my body, though I do quiet down a bit in the hopes of not alerting him to how aroused I’m becoming at his touch. I’m too tired to handle an orgasm right now.

I’m leaning over the side of the tub eating sandwiches while he rubs my back, when I finally work up the courage to ask something I’ve been thinking through the whole bath.

“...Are you still mad at me?” I ask in a small voice.

He takes a long time to answer, just rubbing sudsy circles into my skin in silence. Eventually, though, he speaks up.

“No,” he says. “Not really. I don’t think I can stay mad at you for very long. Especially since, strictly speaking, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

I exhale a tiny sigh of relief. I didn’t like being yelled at by him. More than that, I didn’t like knowing that he was actually angry at me. I know he holds grudges, and I really don’t want to be on the receiving end of one of them. I’m not really sure what I would do if he were to suddenly start being cold towards me. I don’t want to think about it.

“I will have to punish you, though,” he adds after a beat.

I blink. “Wait, what?”

“Dip your head in the water. I need to wash your hair.”

I comply with his request, but once my hair is wet, I turn around and stare at him with a furrowed brow.

“What do you mean you’ll have to punish me?” I demand. “I thought you just said I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Well, you scared me," he explains. "It wasn’t necessarily ‘wrong’, but at some point you have to learn to stop doing that."

He moves to rub soap in my hair, but I push his hands away so I can address him more directly.

"What are you going to do to me?" I demand.

He shrugs. "Don't worry, I'll think of something fun."

"That actually worries me more."

He manages to get to my scalp and starts massaging the soap in. Despite my continued concern about this "punishment" he's talking about, I melt into his soothing touch with a sigh.

"By the way," he says, "I'm coming with you tomorrow."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I know you want to go back to that place in the catacombs and try to catch the meeting. I'm coming with you."

I look at him in disbelief. "You really want to walk for ten straight hours in rat- and spider-infested tunnels just to try to catch a meeting that we'll almost definitely miss?"

"You do. So I'll accompany you. I'd rather be with you and able to personally see to your safety than be here wondering about it."

I hum thoughtfully as I rinse my hair in the water. "I guess that makes sense."

After my hair is soap-free, Khysmet declares me clean and lifts me out of the water. I’d say I’m getting sick of him doing everything for me, but with how bone-tired I am, it’s honestly a relief to not have to do anything. After the warm, soothing bath, I feel like I’m fading in and out of consciousness as it is. He towels me dry, and before he takes me to bed, he retrieves some kind of lotion from a medicine cabinet and rubs it into my legs. Almost immediately, the soreness starts to go away – not completely, but it recedes to a much more manageable level of pain.

With the pain lessened, the last barrier to my falling asleep drops. I barely manage to stay up as he carries me to his bed and lays me down, then crawls in beside me. As I feel him wrap every part of his body around me to leech my heat, the last bit of my consciousness slips away and I fall into a deep sleep.