by Ella Fields
“You still think I intended to kill you?” He scoffed. “We both know that is impossible.” He headed inside, and confused, I trailed him up the stairs, thinking he was heading back to my rooms, stunned when he walked straight ahead to the doors of his own.
“But you could have done it then,” I said, my skirts clenched in my fist. “You had endless opportunity.”
“I should’ve killed you, yes, and perhaps I once did intend to.” He opened the doors to his rooms, waiting for me to walk in ahead of him before he continued. I shouldn’t have, but I did, and was immediately taken aback by the enormity of the chamber, struck still beside a low-lying chest of drawers with few trinkets on them.
“The first time I saw you sitting on that hollowed-out tree, I knew I had to—after using you to get to that father of yours, of course.” He went on before I could send the wolf skull masquerading as a vase on his drawers sailing at his smug head. “But even having just met you, the mere idea of doing so, of harming you in any way, made me feel odd. A little ill.” His eyes narrowed on me. “Are you a witch playing at being the swan heir?”
I gave him a blank stare. “Not funny.”
“Fine. Would it curdle your blood to know that I like to play with my food before I eat it?”
My tongue threatened to poke a hole in my cheek, and I set the skull down with a thunk.
A roaring laugh scrunched every one of his lethal features, warming and remolding them into something else—something that curdled my blood for the wrong reasons—something I’d rather not see yet knew I would do so again whenever my eyes closed.
They swayed over him, then over his room, the bed twice the size of any other king’s with its bending dark wooden posts and the two oblong windows on either side shrouded in red glass and copious vines. On one side of the bed perched a dark oak desk before a window, inkpots and parchment lined and piled neatly, and a small dining table with two seats. On the other side, upon the wall above another chest of drawers used as a nightstand, stretched a map.
Thick reddened blotches of ink had been splattered upon Sinshell—upon the landmarks he’d poisoned and murdered.
Tearing my eyes from the map to the king, who stood wearing that infuriating mask of indifference, the weight of the dagger in my hand increased.
And I raced from his rooms to my own.
Indecision and disgust and hatred and something else I didn’t want to acknowledge had my limbs tangling in the bedding until the moon had risen high beyond the windows.
Darkness gathered in patches over the floor and in the corners of the room, broken only by lighter shadows that bobbed and drifted.
Look at me, honey bee…
The dagger, tucked under the nightstand, was already warm in my hand when I bent down to retrieve it as though it had been ready and awaiting use.
I didn’t know what I was doing. All I knew was what I was feeling—this broiling, unbearable ache that shattered in scalding waves behind my dry eyes. It fired every limb into action, my breathing into sharp shards of air, and encased my heart in a protective barrier of ice as I exited my rooms.
The hall was empty. No guards stood outside our doors for protection. I was willing to wager the king thought himself protection enough. The cocky, insufferable monster.
Would it curdle your blood to know that I like to play with my food before I eat it?
His soft tone, brutal words, had haunted me for hours. For years, my people had lived in fear and worry that soon it would be them. That soon he would come for us all—leaving no trace of us behind save for the healers I’d heard he’d stolen from us to help his own people.
Even then, they’d be bred into the blood Fae’s history until our heritage was so diluted with theirs, those stolen gold Fae healers would soon be wiped from most everyone’s memory.
No more.
I couldn’t bear it, this torturous game of lust-addled hatred and fear. Fear of him, fear of myself and of what he stoked to life within me, fear for my people and what would become of them should I fall prey to a murderous king and lose myself. Either in death or…
I couldn’t even fathom the thought of it, but this entity inside me, this fate-ordained disaster that seemed like some type of gruesome jest of the stars, made me feel it anyway.
I wanted it gone—over before it unfurled into something that would cost our people everything.
One of the doors opened with a thought, and shocked, I just stood there for a moment as it swung far enough to reveal the darkness within.
When I was certain the swaying shadows over the floor were just that, I crept inside, and the door closed with a near soundless click behind me. My eyes slowly adjusted with each careful step taken toward the ginormous bed.
In it, upon his back and shirtless, the king slept. His bare chest, sculpted by the stars and scarred by his own deeds, rose and fell. His arms, boulders of muscle, were folded behind his head, exposing tufts of golden hair in his armpits. His lashes crested his cheeks in curls of shadow, perfect lips parting with each soft breath.
Our kind wasn’t prone to such things as snoring, though I had thought the wolven blood Fae, even while not in their beast form, might do so. His scent—stars, his fucking scent was everywhere, and dizzy from it, I halted by the side of the bed, overrun with the urge to think this through, perhaps find another—no.
Teeth gritting, I threw myself onto the bed and pressed my blade to his thick, exquisite neck within half a failed heartbeat.
He smiled, a slow reveal of his teeth while his eyes remained closed. “Do it,” he purred throatily, and then his eyes opened, blazing and hooded. “Mate.”
Blood trickled as my hand trembled and the blade slid against his skin—that word said aloud cleaving all that I was in two.
His smile didn’t wane, but his arms unfolded and came around my body, hands gliding up my back. One clawed finger scraped over the gossamer, tearing the sheer white nightgown. That claw took its time traveling the expanse of my spine until my nightgown drooped over my arms, my breasts nearly exposed.
The king’s eyes never left mine.
The blade slipped from my fingers, clattering to the floor as the king swatted it away and grabbed the back of my head.
My mouth crashed into his. Desperate and starving, I collapsed over him and my lips parted his, teeth catching his tongue.
He groaned, flipping me to my back, and loomed over me with glowing eyes. His head lowered, a rough laugh dancing over my mouth a second before he nipped my upper lip. “You truly wish me dead, sunshine?”
His wings, although not visible in this form, unfurled as shadows upon the walls, rendering everything except for him in total darkness. I didn’t, couldn’t answer. Horror tried to form a place in my vacant mind when my thighs parted, allowing his body to settle against mine.
He chuckled, the sound deliciously heated over my seeking lips. His forearms rested on either side of my head, fingers smoothing my hair from my face. “If you did, you’d have aimed for the head and not my throat, mate.”
I growled. “Stop saying that.”
A golden brow quirked. “Ashamed, are we?”
He knew I was, and I wanted him to know, as I hissed, “More than you’ll ever be able to comprehend, savage.”
If I’d offended him, he hid it well. Dade hummed, then recaptured my lips for a quick taste, murmuring between teasing brushes, “I want to properly shame you…” I felt him tremble when my hands slid over his back, muscle and sinew shifting. “I want to feel you, to torture you with my mouth, fingers,” he groaned, “my cock.” He swallowed, his voice changing, graveled. “I want you slick, so slick that your pulse will forever quicken at the mere thought of me.”
I moaned, pressing my hands into his toned waist—pressing him against me. His hips began to rock while his hand trailed down my side, taking my ruined nightgown with it. With his eyes on mine, he tore his mouth away, lips skimming my chin, journeying slowly to my thudding pulse. He pressed his tongue
against it, and we each exhaled a sharp breath. Dragging his mouth over my chest, he then lifted high enough to gaze down at my breasts.
“Fuck,” he groaned, and then he was squeezing, licking, caressing, and driving me so wild, I was writhing underneath him, on fire and burning higher with every breath.
On his knees between my spread legs, my tattered nightgown split apart once more with a slow swipe of his claw. It tickled over my stomach, stopped right before my mound, and then retracted as Dade ripped the fabric with his hands before gazing at what lay beneath. He cursed again. “Do you always sleep with no undergarments?”
“I-I…” My voice was too thick, too useless.
“Do not answer that,” he rasped.
Unsure what to do with my hands, with my naked body on display beneath this giant male, his eyes twin pools of burning ocean upon mine, panic raced in.
And then he touched me. His eyes remained on mine, and he touched me with such careful precision, his lips parting with a low groan at what he found. “I fear I might explode in my pants.”
“Take them off,” I urged, suddenly desperate for the sight of him.
He didn’t, and I frowned. Then featherlight fingers, fingers that had ripped heads from bodies and decimated entire towns and villages, touched me as though I’d break if he did not do so with extreme care. Up and down, they brushed over me, turning for his knuckles to do the same. They caught my folds, opened them slightly, and I moaned long and loud, delirious in a way I’d never experienced before.
Noticing—noticing everything—Dade repeated the action, swapping his knuckles for the pad of one thick finger, but not before he dragged his tongue along them.
Hypnotized with no breath left inside my lungs, I watched his eyelids flutter. Those heavy lashes lowered with his hand as he stroked and circled, and I twisted my lip between my teeth as every limb tingled and my blood heated beyond anything that could be considered safe.
“Kiss me,” I choked out, and he was over me in an instant, still working me toward a slow entrance into oblivion.
Our lips met and parted, his tongue matching the circular swipes of his finger. “At first,” he said, his voice so deep that some of his words cracked, “when I realized what’d happened that night in the cave, that I had bonded to you, I couldn’t believe it.” His breath rushed inside my mouth. “I didn’t want to…”
His finger crawled to my entrance, toying, and we both moaned.
“But when I saw you again, I knew, even as a swan, that this was real, real in a way that felt right, no matter how much I thought to refuse it. And now…” He circled again, dragged his teeth over my chin, along my jaw, and licked my erratic pulse. “Now that I’ve got you in my bed, in my arms, on the brink of breaking beneath me…” He groaned, teeth clutching gently at my skin. “I can see that the stars made you just for me.”
I couldn’t talk, could hardly stand to believe a word he said, let alone try to swim away from the feelings his touch, that he, was drowning me in. My eyes widened when he rubbed me, and his nostrils flared as his hooded gaze darted all over my face, reading and learning.
I heard his pants loosen and felt his skin burn against mine, though he hadn’t moved to rid them. “You said…” I swallowed hard, catching the back of his head when he made to rise. “You haven’t done this.”
“I didn’t lie.” He hissed when his length replaced his fingers. He didn’t enter my body. He ground into me, harder than stone and perfectly positioned, and I was flailing over the side of a cliff, just waiting to be pushed.
Crazed with sensation, I tilted his head to lick the blood from his neck. The cut sealed shut beneath my tongue, and he shuddered, sliding harder against me. Stars cluttered behind my closed eyes, our labored breaths a violent song in my ears.
“Opal,” he groaned, and my name had never quite sounded like that, like a vow made with four simple letters.
A wave swept in, and I was thrown off the cliff, completely submerged beneath all that he was as he rocked into me, my head caged in his hands while I struggled to open my eyes and draw breath. His own eyes were a furious blue, his thumb at the corner of my lips as he choked on a curse and stilled. Something warm spilled over my lower body—and didn’t stop until I’d quit shaking and my lips grew slack against his.
A satisfied growl climbed up his throat, filled my ear as he dropped his head into my neck, where it stayed for fracturing moments. Then he rumbled, rolling to his side and keeping my body aligned with his, my head placed under his chin above his thundering chest, “Don’t you dare leave.”
And I didn’t.
Not until morning arrived when he was called away at dawn.
Opal
Shadow Keep might have appeared abandoned from the outside, but inside, it was alive and overflowing with the hum of activity.
And I was tired of staring at the same walls, riffling through the same pages of books that couldn’t hold my interest, and of my own twisting, dangerous thoughts.
Upside down and inside out, they twined and separated and unraveled only to knot into bite-sized chunks of growing anxiety that would always end with me pacing the room.
Yesterday, I’d stayed in my rooms, feeling the king’s indecision and need as though it were my own. For as much as I hated to admit it, it was my own. He hadn’t knocked, hadn’t entered as though the place belonged to him—for it certainly did—and I hadn’t had the guts to seek him out.
Today, even amongst the steady vibration of life on the other side of my cell door, I could feel his absence. That and my own self-loathing were my constant companions, and I wanted to be rid of them.
The stars made you just for me.
Growling, I collected my tea tray and decided I’d return it to the kitchens myself. He wasn’t here, and I shouldn’t have cared if he was. I was on a mission to save my people, this entire realm, so encountering him was part of that plan. Using him, taking advantage of what the stupid stars had ordained, was all I had.
But I knew it was no longer that simple.
Mate.
There was no questioning it, no fighting it, though that was exactly what I’d been trying to do since that night in the cave. I’d keep fighting it. I vowed to. Rejecting a mate, a bond forged between two souls, was not exactly common, but it happened time and again.
Though in rejecting one’s mate, they typically did not see them again or at least did their best not to. For an untold period, I was stuck with mine. So I had to discover if there was a way to reject the inevitable as others had done while also being in such close proximity—while all I could think about was shredding his flesh from his bones at the same time I fantasized about shredding his clothing from his stupidly magnificent body…
The door opened silently, the hall empty outside, as per usual, and I shook my thoughts away.
One day at a time.
It’d been two since I woke alone in his bed, his scent as smothering as the furred blanket he’d draped over me, and I’d gained no clarity. Only more torment to accompany a new breed of want that now laid nestled beneath my skin.
It seemed to purr at the thought of him, at the memory of his smooth skin sliding over mine—
“Princess.” I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and blinked at the young pixie. She curtsied, spindly fingers lifting her apron from her long, delicate legs. “May I take that for you?”
I should have said yes. Instead, I offered what I hoped was a sweet smile, my cheeks still warm, and asked, “Actually, I was hoping I could see the kitchens?”
The pixie blinked, her green eyes large and her pink lips slack.
“If you don’t mind,” I tacked on. “It’s just… well, I’m terribly bored. I would love to offer a helping hand, but I understand if that would offend you.” Such things were true. To take over someone else’s task was akin to making them feel or seem inferior, and though many had tried to adapt to a more kinder way of thinking over the thousands of years of our existence, it still stuck
with many. “I’d be happy to merely deliver it and then see myself to the library.”
Eyeing me curiously, the purple-haired pixie nodded once. “Okay.” Sweeping her hand behind her, she said, “Allow me to escort you, then.”
Relieved, I followed eagerly, nearly losing a spoon from the tray. “What is your name?” I asked as we rounded the stairs and moved swiftly down the long hall.
“Gwenn,” she said, then smirked. “I know yours, Princess Opal.”
I smiled. “Then now we are even.” At the top of a spiraling set of wooden stairs, knots of oak in the railing worn smooth under my hand, I couldn’t help but prod some more. “How long have you served your king?”
“The king employs us all,” Gwenn said, and I almost tripped down a step in surprise. “We are paid handsomely.” She turned at the bottom, smiling wide with pride-filled eyes. “After six years of saving, I’ve purchased my parents’ home for them.” She stepped back as I stepped into the warm glow of one of two large rooms. “Soon, I hope to start saving for my own.”
“Gwenn! What have I told you about bragging?”
Gwenn made a face at me before turning to the older female. “I’m not bragging, Mer. I was just telling the princess that we are not expected to serve. We do so willingly here in Vordane.”
I didn’t miss the jab in her words, no matter how succinct nor sweetly said—nor did I miss the way the female called Mer tensed at the long wooden counter in the center of the next room, her back to me.
She turned, her golden ringlets pulled into a tight, low bun at the base of her thick neck, and scowled. With a cluck of her tongue, Gwenn ambled back over to me and took the tea tray from my hands. “What brings you down here, Princess?”
I gestured to where Gwenn had skipped off to, a row of three sinks with soapy water frothing from two. “I wanted to return the tray.”
“But we send someone to do that for you.”
“She wanted to explore, Merelda,” Gwenn said, returning with a threadbare towel that Merelda snatched from the pixie’s damp hands without removing her eyes from me. “Clearly,” Gwenn said with a twinkle in her eyes, “a tea party with the elves wasn’t enough excitement for her.”