Shadows and Light by Cari Z. Page A

be given up under any circumstances. Therein lay the rationale for inuring an apprentice to torture.
    It had started the very first day he’d been brought here, deliberate discomfort for the sake of toughening him up. For years it didn’t go beyond discomfort, deprivation of sight or sound or several senses at once, being placed in uncomfortable physical positions and told to hold them until Xian returned. He’d climbed the chains dangling above him and held himself in the air for hours, trembling, needing to let go but needing more to make his master proud of him. The few times Rafael had failed to last until Xian’s return had been harrowing for him, not because Xian was angry, but because he was angry at himself. His need to belong to Xian, to keep him happy above all else, had been the driving force in Rafael’s young life.
    They hadn’t lived in total isolation. Xian was well known among the High Ones, and many of his contemporaries had had apprentices who he’d encouraged Rafael to get to know. He’d had a few friends, far more acquaintances. Rafael remembered meeting Daeva when he was ten, mere months before Myrtea let him fall to the Lower City rather than give him the First Draught. He hadn’t liked the arrogant youth when he was young, and their reluctant alliance as adults hadn’t done anything to make Daeva more palatable.
    Rafael had occasionally wondered, as a child, why Daeva had been forsaken and left to make his way in the Lower City alone rather than been killed. Was it kindness? Years later he realized that the greatest punishment Myrtea could inflict on a man like Daeva, so self-assured, so proud, was to cast him into the mud like the animal she equated him with and leave him to wonder about the cause of his disgrace. It wasn’t kindness, it was cruelty, a cruelty he only fully understood after he himself was exiled from the Upper City. Living as a failure was far more painful than the brief agony of death.
    They had both lived, Rafael because his body was too full of his master’s blood to stop healing the wounds he inflicted on himself before Feysal interceded, and Daeva for reasons of his own. Rafael had come full circle, from a childhood spent aching to please Xian to five years of bitter hatred as he hunted down High Ones unmercifully, and now back in bondage to his master.
    Rafael cast his eyes up toward the chains. He’d spent long hours hanging there, sometimes full in the air, sometimes with his feet touching the floor. The blood of a High One could heal mortal wounds in large enough quantities, and Xian had taken him to the brink of death several times. The inspection, the instruction, the attention…
    He had loved it.
    He was sick. Rafael was sick, he had to be. Mentally unstable and emotionally unfit. Perhaps that was why the council had refused to let him take the First Draught and become one of them. Rafael had blossomed under his master’s hands, learning to withstand brutal amounts of punishment while reveling in the fact that, when he was in this room, Xian thought only of him. All of his attention, all of his care, was focused solely on his apprentice. It didn’t matter that he whipped him bloody, broke bones, raised him up and dropped him the long distance back to the floor. He was doing it for Rafael, to make him better, to make him worthy of being a High One. Rafael would have endured anything for Xian, with pleasure. Sometimes literally.
    Eventually, as he learned how to control the pain, his master’s touch began to make him hard. Before that he’d barely noticed his libido, he’d been so exhausted with the constant training. He’d been hanging here, in this exact spot, arching from the snapping kiss of the whip. Xian had stepped close and trailed a finger over the marks on his back, smearing the blood slightly, following the rivulets down over his ass into the crease of his thigh. Rafael hadn’t been able to stop it. His erection had been almost immediate, and