His free hand rustled, doing something with the bag. A glimmer of something rainbow-coloured, flimsy like lace, fluttered in the corner of my eye.

And then my ear was on fucking fire.

This was different from the hateful, pleasurable fire of his breath on my skin. This felt like actual fire. I cried out at the shocking pain of it, my entire body going rigid. Behind the burn there was sound, too, buzzing rising like my head had been filled with hornets.

What had before been a tremble became a vicious, quaking tremor. Every muscle shook so violently I distantly wondered if I was about to have a seizure. The pressure at my jaw eased, but I barely noticed it above the agony in my ear. My hands flew upward. I wanted to rip my own fucking ear off, but Asha Wylfrael was in the way. His head was bent, his mouth against the burning place, his lips moving rapidly. So, I scratched and clawed at him instead, all thought gone from my head, reacting on pure instinct to the pain. He didn’t move. Didn’t react to me clawing at him like a feral animal. Didn’t even pull back when I grasped a chunk of white hair that had fallen loose and pulled as hard as I could.

The burning began to fade so slowly I almost didn’t notice it. The buzzing died down, too, and through that buzzing came words.

Asha Wylfrael’s words.

Words I could fucking understand.

“It won’t last long. Just hold on. Blast, your kind must be extra sensitive. It will ease, Torrance. It will ease.”

I tried to form words in response, but the shock of the encounter – the pain and his mouth and understanding him speaking to me, speaking my name – left me voiceless.

The burning, just as Asha Wylfrael promised, kept easing away, until eventually there was nothing left but a slight prickle.

But now, I wasn’t sure if that prickle was caused by whatever he’d done...

Or his mouth still hot against the skin of my ear.

I panted raggedly, my arms shaking around...

Around his neck.

At some point, wild with fear and pain, I’d stopped scratching at him and had started clinging to him, like I’d needed some solid anchor to hold onto. Our positions had completely changed. My feet were no longer touching the floor. I straddled his thigh, my crotch pressed against his hip. My back wasn’t sealed to the wall – his arms were there, wrapped around me like an embrace. One of his hands was splayed along my lower back, the other cradling the base of my skull, fingers buried in my hair.

You hurt me, I wanted to say. Wanted to sob.

But that would make me even more vulnerable than I already was. Instead, I merely croaked out the word, “You.”

A tiny flicker of tension went through Asha Wylfrael’s hold on me.

“Yes. Me.”

Holy shit.

It wasn’t some fluke or some hallucination caused by pain. I really could understand him.

“What... what did you do to me?”

“I gave you something that would allow us to speak to each other. I did not expect that it would...” He faltered, his voice nearly softening. But then he hardened it, freezing it like ice. “It was necessary.”

“Necessary!” I gasped. “You should have warned me!” My voice fell to a whisper. “You’re a monster.”

“Monster... I suppose to someone as fragile as you, I would appear so.” I felt his mocking sneer against my ear as well as heard it in his voice. “I did not know you would be that sensitive, though being so well acquainted with how weak you are, perhaps I should have guessed.”

Weak. Easy to hurt. Easy to kill.

“Let go of me,” I hissed. I ripped my arms away from his neck, the neck of the man who’d murdered my friends. His own arms didn’t move, apart from a slight tightening of his fingers in my hair. My scalp tingled as the tips of his claws grazed me. Not enough to draw blood. But almost.

“Now that you can understand me, little human,” he muttered darkly against my ear, “I will explain the situation to you in the bluntest possible terms. You humans invaded my world and stole things from my land. When I found the others here, they tried to kill me with laughable, stupid little weapons, so I destroyed them. You were abandoned by the survivors, and now you are the only one left to answer for the crimes of your people.” His mouth got so close that his lips dragged harshly against my skin when he spoke next. “I am not a monster, but a god. You are my prisoner. And you do not command me.”

But he let me go anyway.

It was only sheer hate, and the need to prove to him that I wasn’t weak, that kept me from collapsing when my feet hit the floor. Asha Wylfrael stood back from me, observing me keenly but coldly, his gaze sweeping up and down as if assessing me and finding me lacking in every way. His eyes lingered just a half-second too long at my chest before he turned away from me. I looked down to see my nipples taut and pointed, pressing outward from beneath the thin fabric of my T-shirt. I crossed my arms over my breasts, wishing now that I’d put my stupid bra on even though it was still so wet.

Asha Wylfrael didn’t say anything else, striding away from me to the door. But instead of going out, he stopped there, as if waiting for me to follow.

“What?” I snapped. “What do you want now?”

For a long moment, as if purposely making me wait, he didn’t answer. Instead, he reached up and untied the blue ribbon from his hair, the style dishevelled from my scratching and pulling. He ran his claws through the long, silver-white strands, smoothing them behind his shoulders. He still didn’t speak, turn around, or answer me as he retied the ribbon. When the bastard was done fixing his hair, he let his hands drop and spoke forwards, into the doorway.

“Come. We have a visitor.”

A visitor?

“Is that why you had to fix your hair?” I blurted. “Don’t want them to see how much I messed it up? That your prisoner was able to touch you, to do something to you?” I was being careless. Stupid, really, provoking him like this. But the pain and the adrenaline and thinking of Suvi and Min-Ji made me too angry to care.

“Come,” he said again, his tone clipped. “He will not leave without seeing you. I do not want to have to drag you there. This day has worn my control thin and I do not wish to break something.”

“Break something? Me, you mean?”

He still didn’t fucking look at me.

“Yes.”

“Why do you even care!” I cried. Now that I could understand him, and him me, all the confusion and fear of the past few days exploded into questions. “Why did you even let me live at all? I’m supposed to answer for my people’s crimes but you don’t want to break me, so what does that even mean? I’ll just stay here forever in this tower?”

“Do not mistake yourself,” he said, finally turning around. “I have plans for you. Interrogation, to start with, now that we can speak to one another.”

I reached up and rubbed my ear, shocked not to feel anything inside it. No chunk of metal, no technological translator clipped on like something from a sci-fi movie.

“What did you do to me?” I asked again. “What did you put in my ear?”

“A piece of the whisper weaver’s web. The pain has stopped, I presume?”

He asked it almost flippantly, like he didn’t care about the answer, but there was a slight adjustment of his posture – a nearly imperceptible straining forward and tensing of his wings. His whispered words from before came back to me in a tumble. Just hold on, Torrance...

I gave my ear one more stroke to be sure, but other than some lingering sensitivity, there was no pain. I still had no fucking clue what he’d put in there, and I could only hope that it wouldn’t start burning a hole in my brain from the inside out eventually. But as of now, my ear pretty much felt OK.

“I’m fine.”