by Ella Fields
I never saw her coming. Along with so many other fables, the swan princess was just a story told around campfires and before bed. Some were true stories of past events spun with fiction, others entirely imagined to frighten younglings or entertain brethren or would-be nightly companions.
All this time, she’d been a myth. A myth now given flesh and blood and burning golden eyes.
Mine. She was all fucking mine. And Errin’s perfect prince now had a glowing mark upon his back. His death would arrive far sooner than we’d predicted. Far sooner than what was wise.
He’d have ample time to ponder his regret for touching my creature while locked within the bowels of my keep, his blood collecting slowly beneath his hanging feet.
As though she could scent the flare of my ire—the air warmed with my hunger for vengeance—the pacing on the other side of the door ceased. Smoothing a hand over my already perfectly tousled hair, I opened it with a grin.
And was struck in the head by a candelabrum.
I swayed but only momentarily, catching my swan atop the stairs with my arms looped around her.
She squirmed and raged, legs flying behind her to kick me in the shins. I didn’t care. I barely felt it. I carried her back to her rooms and set her on her feet, taking in her swirling golden eyes and the heaving of her ample chest.
Noticing where my attention had landed, she snarled. I smirked. “You are displeased with me.”
I kicked the candelabrum out of the way and closed the door as something trickled down my hairline.
“You killed my father,” she said for what seemed like the hundredth time. “You deceived me, tricked me, and kidnapped me.” Her smile was anything but comforting yet still shockingly beautiful as she growled, “Displeased is far too mild a word, King.”
Lifting my hand, I collected some blood from where she’d struck near my brow and rubbed it between the pads of my fingers. “Try another one, then.”
“What?” She glared, marching backward to the bed when I advanced.
“Another word. Loathing, contempt, ire, hatred, disgust…”
Stopping, she narrowed her eyes and then dropped them to the furred carpet before the bed, long lashes cresting her cheeks. “Just… go away.”
“So you can try to escape again?” I asked, intrigued and humored. “Tell me, sunshine. Why wait until I arrived when you could have easily found another way out?”
Her silence was telling, loud in the way it spoke of all we both already knew.
“Because I’d find you,” I said, gently, softly, clasping her chin in my bloodied fingers and lifting her eyes to mine. “Wherever you go, no matter how far, nor where you hide, this”—I rubbed the blood on my thumb over her bottom lip and watched her pupils explode with her rush of breath—“will never fail in uniting us should one of us seek the other, and my swan…” Her eyelashes fluttered, my thumb brushing, tempting those perfect lips to close around it.
I grinned, my cock harder than it had ever been before in my life, pushing at the confines of my pants in such a way that I knew when she swayed into me, unable to stop herself, she could feel it.
My lips skimmed her temple, a low groan accompanying my words as hers wrapped around my thumb to be introduced to her silken tongue. “My darling swan, never will there come a day, a night, a fucking minute of time when I won’t need you near.”
I vanished before I did something reckless. Before I bent her over that bed and lifted her skirts to explore the flesh I knew my words, my touch, stars—my fucking presence alone, had dampened.
I vanished to my rooms, and in the silence, the roar of my blood in my ears helped drown the one that ravaged my throat as I gripped my length and rid the need she constantly stoked to life.
Opal
That violent roar, the one that arrived minutes after he’d left my rooms, echoed through the walls and sank deep into my bones, urging my fingers places they’d rarely ventured before.
I wouldn’t do it, refused to because of him.
Ignoring the desire, the ache that lived and breathed like a second entity inside me whenever he was near, was akin to dragging a knife over slippery flesh, hoping the blade didn’t slip or slice.
I couldn’t let it. Not after what he’d done, the magnitude of it all, and not when I now knew who he was.
My enemy, born and raised to be nothing but as the many rumors suggested.
To take him inside my body would not only cause shame but it could also cost me my life to let my guard down in such a way, regardless of whatever the stars had decided.
It was not the decision of fates so far removed from us to decide how our lives would unfold, not when handing our faith to them meant certain peril—more bloodshed and death.
Yet I could not leave. I could not step one foot outside that door with the intention of escape. He’d know. He’d follow. To flee home, though my heart bruised with longing to do just that, would be selfish.
I would bring darkness to our city gates, to our people, and they’d already seen and endured so much.
In an effort to stave off thoughts of cherry blossom trees, torn hearts, and wide, pleading eyes, I’d discovered the rooms were stocked and luxurious enough to suggest that maybe the king had indeed not intended to kill me. That maybe, he’d been waiting to steal me. That or they’d once belonged to his mother or one of his lovers.
I discarded thoughts of the latter with bristling annoyance.
For hours, meals delivered and left outside my door, I sat upon the irresistibly comfortable bed and paced each length of the room, thinking, regretting, worrying, trying to conjure a strategy that might end this madness.
But when madness was all we knew, all any of these savages knew, what hope was there to garner something else?
The answer came with the rising of the sun, its golden glow leaking between the thorn-knotted branches obscuring the two windows on either side of my bed and the view of the river in the not too far distance. Instead of acting upon it, I dragged my breakfast inside and savored each bite before deciding on sleep.
This was not the type of plan that could be planned, but rather, came down to sacrificing oneself in order to survive—and maybe, just maybe, it would provoke change. Whether it would work, I didn’t know, and though it would sicken me to try, the days and nights ahead seeming endless, one thing was painfully clear. Without the gathering of more forces from across the sea, we had nothing else.
I had nothing else.
All I had was him.
The king of wolves. A savage monster that, for reasons I was only just beginning to wholly absorb, purred and preened at the mere scent of me.
The door opened without any resistance as it had some hours ago when I’d retrieved my food.
It would seem the kitchenhands had been quick to take note of what I did and did not eat—providing me more fruit with breakfast and lunch and smaller portions of meals.
I half wondered if the king had requested that no one enter my rooms or if the staff merely did not wish to. Though I was willing to wager that when I returned, my bed, that I’d already made myself, would be remade and the tray consisting of a carafe of water and my mostly eaten dinner would be gone.
The hall was silent, eerily so, as I gathered my hair, still damp from the quick bath I’d taken upon waking long after the sun, and walked toward the closed doors at the end of the hall.
Without needing to check, I knew whose rooms lay beyond the intimidating large wood. Engravings of thorns and vines twined throughout the enormous arched barriers, his scent, smoke and cedar, pungent inside his lair.
But he wasn’t in there. His rooms lay empty, yet I didn’t bother trying to turn the brass handles. They’d be locked, and even if they weren’t, I didn’t want to see what horrors lurked inside.
His scent alone was a trap, a tempting call to lure me into certain darkness. Already, I stood upon the precipice, readying myself to leap into the shadowed depths below, painfully aware that I might never r
eturn.
And though I was certain I could do it—certain that I had no other choice—I didn’t get the chance. I wound down the staircase, and the giant one after that, and came to a stop in the grand foyer, turning this way and that.
No one, not one single soul, had passed me by. No one stood at any of the alcoves and doorways. No staff, no guards, no king.
Instead of walking out through the main doors, where I knew sentries, as silent as they might be, were standing, I veered left across the foyer and rounded the back of the stairs to find a parlor at one corner—walls of bookshelves circling a chaise and a gleaming black piano—and then moved on to the pair of looming doors behind the staircase.
Roses, red and yellow, stained the oblong sections of cut-out glass, sunlight dripping through them and down the varnished wood beneath. They opened soundlessly when I willed them to, exposing a terrace beyond and two silent sentries who didn’t so much as turn to look my way. Stepping stones, circled by tufts of grass and tiny white flowers, paved the way from the stone terrace to the emerald-green lawn.
More roses, alive in reds and blacks, unfurled in rows of circular beds before a giant hedge. As I waded closer, my skirts gathered away from the dew lingering upon the grass, I discovered it was not a hedge but the entry point of a maze.
“A game,” said a deep voice from behind.
I whirled, my pulse skidding and my heartbeat pounding, to find a huge male with dark brown hair tucked behind his ears. His smile slowly spread to his near-black eyes as he chewed on a bone small enough to pick between teeth, his fingers tucked within the edging of his trousers.
I didn’t trust the feigned casual stance—that he wouldn’t be on me within a failed breath if he thought it necessary.
“If you dare,” he continued, raising a dark brow.
“I’m not fond of games,” I returned, glad my voice remained steady.
He noticed my glance at the guards some yards away on the terrace, his smile climbing higher into his cheeks, dimples popping. “Yet here you stand.”
Every muscle coiled, ready to spring into feather and flight. As if he could sense that, the male just laughed. “Fear not. I’ve been warned not to harm you, swan.”
“That’s… lovely,” I muttered.
“Indeed.” Those dark eyes slid over me, a slow perusal that raised every hair on my body. “Others have been given the same order, though I would not press your presence upon certain… people.”
I frowned, sure there was a clear message behind those words, one I couldn’t read, but I nodded. “Where is he?”
“The king?” he asked, knowing full well that was who I meant. “The royal cove.”
My stomach sank, and my half-formed plans withered. The gold, all that gold he’d helped me to weave, and he’d just… kill the merchants before they could so much as barter for it.
Boiling. My skin boiled with each tense breath, and I turned away from the tall, staring creature to collect myself momentarily before asking, “You did not wish to go with him…?”
“My name is Fang. I was given orders to keep an eye on things here. You are free to roam the grounds, but might I caution you to wait until the king returns.”
Fang. The king and his wishes could go rot. All that gold thread…
I took a step toward the maze, needing away from yet another beast wearing the skin of a Fae male—needing away from this place and its king and his every abominable action.
“Princess.” A warning I refused to heed.
I rounded the opening in the hedge and allowed myself, even if just for a little while, to get lost.
Dade
I kicked the fallen lad’s shoulder, toeing him to his back from the rock on which he’d died.
What remained of the captain’s face after landing on the rock was too bloody to make out. It mattered not. I crouched down and patted his pockets, sniffing, finding what I needed inside his coat.
“Captain Lesands,” I murmured so Scythe would hear, “was given minimal, basic orders.”
“I don’t understand.” He said what the rest of us, if we had half a brain, were thinking. “Where’s the gold, then?”
We were not after the gold woven from myself and my swan. No, we were here merely for the sport of it. Keeping the gold-embroidered clothing from leaving our shores was but a bonus.
A bonus that further kept the human king and queen from gathering foreign armies to our land.
We hadn’t been given misinformation. I’d heard it myself, and the wolves who’d eked out a living in the human villages and farms, glamoured to appear less than what they were—had backed that information up with their own findings.
Three ships were to enter the Royal Cove after sunrise. Only one had done as predicted, all its inhabitants now dying on the sand at our feet, dead, or swimming out to sea to take their chances with the ruthless beasts of the ocean instead.
I stomped toward the water where Scythe was holding a flailing man’s head beneath the surface, his eyes gleaming as the man came up for air, sputtering and coughing.
He growled into the gent’s face, “Where are the others?”
“Others?”
He shoved his head back underwater, then tore it out by his hair. “The other ships, you useless fuck.”
“I do not know of—”
His words were cut off as Scythe shoved him underwater once more. Though we didn’t need him to tell us what I’d already figured out.
A gull shrieked overhead, flapping away as eagles and crows began to swarm, lured by the scent of blood and dying flesh. Gazing up at them, then down at the parchment in my hand, I read over the meager contents again.
“So we have coordinates and one task.” Scythe released the man when he went limp, the sea swallowing his head and then his torso, and brushed his hands over his leathered vest. I squinted at the frothy bay, thinking out loud. “Collect the goods and set sail immediately. No goods, but we have two missing ships.”
“A decoy.” Scythe frowned at the harsh glow of the midday sun.
We’d arrived before sunrise, but we hadn’t attacked when the ship anchored in the cove. No, we’d waited for the king and queen’s regiment to arrive. When no one had, we’d watched the human sailors, listened to their lilted accents as they’d talked amongst themselves on board, then realized from their careful conversation that something was amiss, and they’d had no plans to leave their ship.
So we’d decided to remove them from it ourselves.
“Pile every single body and limb back on board,” I roared, scrunching the parchment in my hand, then setting it aflame. “Leave the ship in the harbor but set it on fire.”
“A message.” Scythe flicked blood from his cropped head of black hair. “I like it.”
“We’ve indeed been duped,” I said, annoyed beyond reason to have my suspicions confirmed. “They must have scaled the cliffs beyond the castle. That or they lowered or just tossed the clothing to the other two ships.”
Scythe followed my line of vision to the beach, the gray blurs of the seaside village that’d been vacated long ago, to the city beyond. “Should we head that way? We can cut them off as they leave.”
“It won’t work.” I was the only one amongst our legion who could fly. Vordane had three legions. Scythe commanded legion one, legion two belonged to Fang, and my uncle commanded legion three—the only legion with flyers.
I governed and outranked all, but not even I was riddled with enough wrath and greed to send my warriors over guarded land in hopes of reaching the sea and ships at the cliffs beyond. Such a task would require more than one legion unless accompanied by foot soldiers, maybe even some of the grunts still undergoing training.
Taking the cubs out for missions they were not yet equipped for would not only see many of them killed—such wasted potential—but it would enrage many.
I was never in the fucking mood to deal with disgruntled mothers.
“We return home,” I said at long last, tear
ing my eyes from the city of Errin and all the cretin that awaited me inside. Their deception rankled, and I was certain they’d hoped for just that as much as they’d hoped their stolen product made its way safely from our waters.
I wondered how they felt about their missing captive. Now my captive. My swan.
The thought made me feel a little better about being tricked, and many warriors gaped at me, perplexed as I waded through them all wearing a smirk.
Oh, those human royals would be mighty pissed. Why, I was willing to bet they hadn’t even alerted my swan’s dear mother. For it would reveal them to be the bumbling fools they were, as well as anger the grieving widow to the point of war.
I’d send an anonymous tip myself, knowing the gold queen would send every soldier, every able-bodied creature, to Errin—eliminating many from both kingdoms. Perfect. Far less work for me.
Alas, I’d come to learn my swan would most certainly not appreciate that.
Oh, how she fucking enraged me.
Stars, I loathed her and all she stood for. I loathed her nearly as much as I wanted her. I’d been cursed. I was sure of it. The bird was both my remedy and my affliction.
Fortunately for all, I’d never been afraid of hard work. The human royals could wait. The itch to lay eyes upon my feathered princess could not.
In a flare of bone-crunching flame, I shifted, the minor wounds I’d garnered on our hunt healing. While the warriors hefted and dumped body after body onto the ship, I leaped at the hillside, claws sinking inside soft sand and blades of grass, wings unfurling as I withheld a rumbling roar and shot into the sky.
Opal
Silence crept after me like a shadow at my back.
Birdsong from the trees above waned and died, rustling leaves stilling. Gazing up, it was as though a glass ceiling had rolled overhead, trapping the world outside and me within.