Exiled as Useless, I Healed the Demon General Who Fell at My Feet novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: A Handspan
In the Legion's fortress she learns her heal answers only to her own pleasure, and she brings the General's curse back a handspan with his thigh under her.
They carried the General through the gates of Hollowgate on a door.
Kanae walked beside it because he still had hold of her wrist, and none of the twenty soldiers had the nerve to pry his fingers loose.
The fortress was black stone, built into the mountain, with torches burning blue along the walls.
Nobody spoke to her.
Four hundred demons watched her cross the courtyard, grey and charcoal and rust red, with horns of every shape.
She kept her chin up and her robes clean.
She had once walked into a tax audit with a hangover, so she knew how to look like she belonged.
They laid him on a bed in a tower room, and the door had barely closed behind the stretcher bearers when a cold line touched her throat.
"Take your hands off him," a woman's voice said.
She was shorter than Kanae, grey-skinned, with short curved horns and round spectacles that glinted in the torchlight.
A ledger hung at her belt, and a dagger was against Kanae's neck.
"Human," she said. "You smell of the Hero's camp. You smell like the thing that ruined him."
"I didn't ruin anybody."
"Ishkra," the man on the bed said, from very far away.
"General, she is a spy."
"She is a woman with a copper coin in her fist."
Kanae looked down.
She was still holding it.
Ishkra looked down too, and her mouth went thin.
"Take the blade away," the General said.
"General."
"I will say it once. Take the blade away from her throat, or I will take it from you, and I do not have the strength to be gentle."
The dagger lifted.
Ishkra stepped back, shaking with the effort of obeying, and shoved her spectacles up her nose with one knuckle.
"If he dies," she said to Kanae, "I will cut you into pieces small enough to post."
"If he dies," Kanae said, "you'll have no one to blame but the people who stabbed him. Do you want him alive or do you want a human head? I can only offer one of them."
That bought her a very long silence.
"Alive," Ishkra said. "Do it."
Kanae went to the bed.
She put her hands on his chest again.
Nothing.
She pressed harder and felt the heat come and go, a weak flicker.
The black lines crawled right back across his skin.
He ground his teeth and arched off the pillow, and the muscles of his stomach stood out in cords.
"Don't stop," he said.
"I'm trying."
"Then try it differently."
"I don't know how I did it before!"
"Where were you thinking of?"
"What?"
His fingers were still around her wrist.
They tightened until she felt her pulse beating against his thumb.
"When the light came," he said, through his teeth. "Your heart was going like a hammer. I felt it. What was happening?"
"I was scared out of my mind."
"No." His eyes moved over her face, burning gold. "That wasn't fear."
Kanae opened her mouth to argue, and she realized she couldn't.
When she'd put her hands on his chest in the dust, she had felt his skin, enormous and burning hot, and the weight of him against her thighs.
Something low in her stomach had gone tight.
She hadn't let herself notice.
She'd had a copper coin and a dying demon, and the world had gone sideways.
"Ishkra," he said. "Out."
"General, you cannot be serious."
"Out. Post a guard on the stair. Anyone who comes up here comes up over my body."
Ishkra left with a look at Kanae that could have stripped paint.
The door closed.
Kanae stood by the bed with her hands in the air, and her face was on fire.
"This is a medical situation," she said.
"Yes."
"It's not a normal healing."
"Clearly."
"I think..." She swallowed. "I think it only comes when I'm... aroused."
The corner of his mouth moved.
It was the first thing he'd done that wasn't pain.
"Then be embarrassed," the General said. "It's working."
"I don't even know your name."
"Vorhaan." He let go of her wrist and opened his hand against the sheet, palm up, like an invitation. "You can leave. Nobody in this fortress will stop you. I would not blame you."
Kanae looked at the black lines creeping toward his throat.
She looked at the door.
She thought of Raizen's easy smile, and the coin, and all those nights she had put her hands on people who thanked her while she felt nothing glow.
"Kanae," she said.
"Kanae."
He said it slowly.
She climbed onto the bed.
The mattress dipped under his weight and hers, and she knelt over his thigh in her white robe with her knees on either side of his leg.
He was so big that she seemed tiny sitting on him.
She wasn't a child.
She was twenty-seven years old, and nobody had touched her in two years.
"Tell me this is a terrible idea," she said, and her voice shook.
"It's a terrible idea."
"Then tell me what to do anyway."
His gold eyes dropped to her mouth and came back up.
"Take the robe off your shoulders."
She did.
The cloth slid down her arms and pooled at her waist, and the torchlight moved over her bare breasts.
He drew a slow breath through his nose.
"Good," he said, low. "Come here."
Kanae leaned down, and his hand came up and closed over her breast, so large it covered everything.
His thumb dragged across her nipple, once, hard.
She made a noise she'd never heard herself make.
"There," Vorhaan said. "That's what I felt."
Light flickered under her palms where they rested on his chest.
The black lines shivered.
"Again," she whispered.
He did it again, rolling the nipple between his finger and thumb until her hips jerked.
The heat in her stomach spread down her legs.
"Sit on my thigh," he said. "Don't be shy about it. I need you wet."
That should have embarrassed her.
It lit her up.
She lowered herself over his thigh, and the rough black cloth of his trousers pressed between her legs.
She was already damp.
He could feel it, she knew, because his jaw flexed and his breath came out unsteady.
"Move," he said.
She rocked forward, and the seam of the fabric dragged over her clit, and she gasped.
"Again."
She rocked again.
Her hands were braced on his chest, and the light came up under them in a soft pulse, white and gold, sinking into his skin.
The Brand drew back from it.
"That's it," Vorhaan said. "Look at me."
She looked.
His eyes were molten.
He was sweating, and his chest heaved under her palms, but his voice was steady and slow.
"You're doing very well, Kanae. Keep going. Take what you need from me."
"I can't, I'm..."
"You can. I'm not going anywhere."
She ground down against his thigh harder, chasing the pressure.
Her robe had slipped off her hips, and she was naked above the waist and shaking, and the warmest hand she'd ever known was moving up the inside of her knee.
It pushed under her skirt.
It slid up her bare thigh, slow, and she stopped breathing.
"Ask me," he said.
"Touch me." Her voice cracked.
"Properly."
"Please. Touch me, Vorhaan."
His fingers found her through her underthings, and she nearly came apart on the spot.
They were enormous.
He pushed the thin cloth aside, and the first touch of his rough fingertip on her clit, slick and bare, made her cry out.
He drew a circle.
Another.
Slow, as if he had all night and no pain at all.
"Wet," he said, almost to himself. "So wet for me, and I've done nothing yet."
"Don't talk."
"Then come."
The light under her hands flared bright enough to throw shadows on the wall.
Kanae rode his thigh and his fingers together with her head thrown back, and her hair fell out of its cord and down her back.
She'd never done this in front of anyone.
She'd never been wanted like this by anyone.
He watched her face.
"Good girl," he said, rough. "Let go."
She came with a sound she couldn't have stopped for money.
The orgasm tore through her in long hard waves, and her whole body clenched around nothing and shook against his thigh, and the light poured out of her hands in a white flood.
It filled the room.
It went through him.
When she could see again, she was slumped over his chest with her cheek against his heart, gasping.
She lifted her head.
The Brand had pulled back.
A black web had covered his whole left side, and now there was bare grey skin from the ribs to the breastbone, a clean handspan.
Vorhaan stared at it.
Then he put his huge hand on the back of her head and held her there against him.
He didn't say anything for a while.
His heart was pounding under her ear.
"That," he said finally, in a voice that wasn't quite steady, "is the first time in a month I haven't felt it."
Kanae pushed herself up on shaking arms.
His fingers were still on her skin, still slick, and he made no move to take them away.
His gold eyes held hers.
"Name your price, healer," he said.
She was naked from the waist up on a demon's lap, and she'd never felt so clear-headed in her life.
"Tomorrow," she said.
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