by Ella Fields
Swinging one boot in front of the other, I dragged my fingers over my instruments, blood splattering onto the stone floor. Oh, the things they’d seen and done. I chose the scissors for my next task, noting they were gleaming—evidently not used as much as the hacksaw, hammer, and varying other devices.
The prince moaned and whined. I whistled, thoughts of Opal beneath me in my bed never too far from the forefront of my mind. If I were being honest, too often it was the only thing I could think of.
Kiss me, she’d said, so rough—as though it’d tainted parts of her to make such a plea.
I opened the scissors and sliced them across the asshole’s abdomen.
The way she’d shuddered at my touch, shaking as she began to come undone in such a slow-building, blissfully torturous way.
I closed the scissors around the tip of his nipple and snipped.
Agony. She’d been ensnared in the most exquisite type of agony, mostly naked beneath me, breasts heaving and her skin flushed and misted, her eyes struggling to focus, to stay open at all when it had arrived.
Blood gushed over the handles and my hand, and with his screams nothing but white noise, I then stabbed him between the ribs.
When it all had finally gathered enough to break, and she’d overflowed with pleasure, shaking relentlessly with it, as I’d spilled myself all over her.
Another stab, this one to the gut, the scissor blades separating while still inside his stomach.
“Dade.” Her voice came to me. So soft, so fucking sweet. A summer fruit given soul.
And fuck did she taste just as sweet. So divine, I wanted to devour—
“Dade.” A half-shouted growl this time, followed by a touch at my elbow.
I recoiled, whirling and yanking the scissors from the prince’s gut while doing so, blood flicking through the air to splatter at Opal’s feet.
The prince screamed, garbled and continuous, but I could barely hear it.
I heard nothing as Opal’s gaze flitted behind me to the mangled prince who’d tried to steal her maidenhead. Who’d tried to steal what was mine. Who sought to use her for his own gain, marry her, defile her, humiliate her…
I turned and said, “I’ll be right back, dear prince.” Then I slogged him in the face hard enough to send him into black nothing.
“Sunshine,” I said between my teeth, both enraged and ecstatic she was within touching distance of me. Touch her I did, taking her gently by the arm and leading her out of the dungeon.
Her head kept twisting over her shoulder, her reluctance to walk away from what she’d seen evident in her weighted steps. “Where did you find him?”
I sent flame into the sconces of the dark hall, and they danced toward the vine-patterned ceiling. “That matters not. What are you doing down here?” I stopped when we reached the spelled hallway, firelight flickering in her eyes.
“I…” She chewed her lip, then released a rushed breath. “Well, I was looking for you.” Her cheeks reddened as she said gently, “I couldn’t find you, so I followed your scent.”
I scowled, unsure if I’d have believed her if it weren’t for the embarrassment, that annoying shame she was so fond of harboring, entering her voice, skin, and those golden eyes.
“You said you’d show me the city,” she went on, her hands scrunching in the skirts of her creamy gown of lace and satin. “At night, and I’ve been waiting but…” Her nose crinkled, and fuck if I didn’t want to lean down and nip it, then kiss it, then do the same to those sin-infused lips. “Are you going to kill him?”
Already, noting the way her eyes kept darting around me, over me, I knew she wouldn’t let this go. She wanted to know more. I could tell her.
Or I could live up to the abomination she thought me and take advantage of her curiosity for an evening outing and steal some more time with that luscious mouth of hers.
I tossed the scissors I hadn’t been aware I was still holding over my shoulder. They hit the ground with a clang. “Fine. Let’s go.”
If she thought I didn’t notice what she was doing, she was both beautiful and delusional.
And I was a fucking fool for allowing it.
Opal
“What is it exactly you wish to see?”
The king seemed reluctant, annoyed, and I knew it was because I’d taken him from his task of torturing the prince. He’d washed his hands in the kitchens, instructing me to wait at the top of the stairs, but when he’d returned, a carriage already waiting below the Keep’s steps, I saw either he’d done so in a rush or his skin was stained.
It would forever be stained with his acts of brutality.
Inside a carriage as dark blue as the night sky, I twisted to face Dade. He was staring out the circular window, but I knew he wasn’t seeing the hedges we ambled past, the fountain, nor the willow-lined road we’d begun to roll down.
It might have been new to me, but he’d seen it all before. I missed taking such things for granted in my own home. The walls, the treasures kept within, all just things until they’d been stripped away from you.
“The clothing boutiques,” I finally admitted. “I find myself rather fond of your fashions, the comfort of the gowns and nightwear, the materials. I wish to meet the people who craft them.” In part because I wanted to see if they were slave workers, golden Fae stolen from my kingdom.
“So you can remake clothing of a similar fashion?” Before I could say yes, he added with a slight sneer, “For when you return home?” He looked at me then, and in those blue eyes was not the same creature who’d cornered me in the halls outside our rooms the day before, the creature who touched me with a violently gentle reverence that melted and seared.
In those eyes loomed the predator he’d always be.
The monster who’d damned and killed hundreds of souls, who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of others, including my father.
I’d taken him from his next kill—had thought to distract him because even though I couldn’t stand Bron, I couldn’t have him die in that nightmare of a dungeon. Not when the repercussions would be vast, and he could be of use in sending an important message.
And so I’d lured the wolf from his captured prey by offering myself as his next meal, yet I was evidently foolish and flailing.
And failing.
I swallowed over the swelling in my throat, wishing he would blink already. Wishing things were different. That he wasn’t who he was, that he wasn’t all the horrors he’d committed, and that I could climb into his lap and erase the winter from his eyes.
“I think we both know that I’ll never return home.” That seemed to do it. The king blinked, his eyes narrowing with the lowering of his thick brows. “So I would like to spend my time doing things that I enjoy.” The lie flowed smoothly, softly, from between my lips. So much so, that I wondered if it were because there was more truth to the words than I’d known until I’d set them free.
If this were any other male, any other time, any other life, I’d love nothing more than to see to the things I loved the most. Mending, perfuming, exploring, and gardening.
But those things were a waste of time and selfish. I’d discovered so the hard way. My people were dying and would continue to.
Dade released a breath through his nose, his nostrils flaring slightly. “You would like to spend your days with your passions? Mending and gardening?” A little lift to his lips, then he said, “But I hear you already spend a lot of your time in the gardens.”
I tilted my head, then looked out the window. “Define a lot, my king.”
“I think my cock just ripped the seam of my pants.” I coughed, dragging my eyes from the lights that had begun to twinkle through the window and back to the smirking king. “Say that again.”
I scowled. “No.”
“Yes,” he purred.
“Do you grow…” I scrunched my nose, irritated that I didn’t have the right words and deciding on, “erect whenever someone calls you their king?”
�
�Erect?” he said, delight lighting his eyes, raising his brows. He laughed, then reached out a finger to trace down the bridge of my nose. “Only when my mate does.”
I snapped my teeth at his finger, grinning. “My mate you may be, but you are not my king.”
“Ah, she admits it. Then why did you say it?” he asked, all velvet curiosity.
“It was a barb,” I stated coldly. “Sarcasm. Do you know what that is?”
“Do you know how erect I am?”
I smacked him in the chest on reflex, playfully and without thought.
He caught my hand before I could retract it and brought it to his mouth for his lips to glide over the skin of my knuckles, eyes never leaving mine while he listened to my heart whoosh and thud. “Look,” he murmured to my skin, eyes darting behind me.
He scooted over the leather seat to my side as I looked out the window. Breath tumbled from me and through the open glass into the night beyond. Up ahead loomed a bridge large enough for two carriages to cross at once, the river reflecting the vegetation and large rocks that nestled along it, as well as the night sky.
“Here they come,” the king said, his voice at my neck, stirring tendrils of hair and warming my skin. We left the bridge with a gentle thump, then meandered through a cropping of giant oaks and the gaps between. Starlight sprinkled over the leaping squirrels and packed dirt roads and pathways.
Not just starlight, I soon discovered as we exited the foliage and entered a clear grass valley, but lights. Dazzling and blurring, they lit up the heart of Vordane in neat lines that stretched farther than I could see seated inside the carriage. Though I suspected that unless I was in the air, I still would not be able to capture all that awaited us.
Streets, cobblestone and narrow, were filled with two-story cottages made of brick and wood and stone. Shops intermingled amongst them as well as smaller homes. A cluster of manufacturing halls, thatched and worn but well-loved, was the first to appear through the window, their chimneys expelling puffs of smoke that dissipated inside the night sky.
A distillery. A metal shop. A carriage repair shop. A cookware supply shop… the signs were all the same and hanging above the wide metal doors, a few locked and sealed tight for the night.
At home, we had some similar sheds crafted for such things and more, for there was surely more upon the other side of the carriage that I hadn’t seen, but nothing as tidy, as large and as obviously needed, as any of what gathered before and after my eyes.
The city was a coiled, jeweled serpent, homes and shops glued to one another in a loving, untidy yet organized fashion, light swaying from windows and doorways, from fires and sconces and torches. I’d entered another maze, this one crafted in straight, square lines that stretched farther than I could walk in a day.
Peering closer, the king’s heat at my side, I waited. I waited, and I watched the groups of citizens we passed by. Some were huddled on doorsteps, gossiping and laughing. Others were serving patrons outside of squashed and spacious restaurants.
Many were looking straight at us and bending at the knees.
I sat back, forgetting not for the first time just who I’d journeyed here with and wondering why in the stars I hadn’t seen it. The hatred, the fighting, the thievery, and the unrest.
With a ruler such as the one seated right next to me, the stories were endless. Tales told of the vicious Vordane and its smiteful king who governed his people with a talon-sharp fist.
I was grateful when the king tapped the ceiling, and the driver pulled the horses to a stop. Dade climbed out before me, and before I could deny him, he grabbed me by the waist and set me upon the uneven cobblestone.
I gripped his arms, then righted myself and pulled away, turning in a slow circle to see where we were. At the end of a street that stretched into forever, most of the lights out save for two sconces outside a large wooden door with many a metal lock.
The door was open, laughter and raucous noise emptying out onto the street from inside. I nearly smiled, relieved to have found some truth to the tales we’d all been told, and steeled my shoulders for what may greet us on the other side.
But the king walked past the door, and I frowned before hurrying to keep up, wondering where he was going.
He stopped outside a darkened store, knocked once, and murmured words to someone I couldn’t see when the white door with its blue trim opened a crack. “Of course, my king. Come on inside. I’ll just be a moment.”
The king looked back to where I still stood in front of a dark bungalow that sat between the tavern I’d thought we’d be entering and what I soon realized was the king’s preferred dressmaker.
Her shop was lilac painted walls, lavender-scented candles upon every surface, and fabrics that tempted me to drool as I flitted about like a fly at a picnic.
When the female returned, a brunette with sharp honeyed eyes and short curls that bounced around her neck, she curtsied. “Apologies, my son needed the last two pages of his book read to him or he’d have screamed the place down.”
Dade chuckled. “A tyrant in the making is what you have, dear Olivianna.”
The female grinned, gathering her layers of sheer blue skirts and nearing me. Familiar. That they were familiar enough with one another that she would keep her king waiting while she tucked her son into bed made something sour in my stomach.
“Princess Opal, it is a pleasure.”
I waved her off, my annoyance dripping away as Olivianna showed me around her store and told me of how she’d fallen into dressmaking after she’d been forced to repair her mother’s best dress. “I’d not only soiled it with wine but tore it on the window ledge while climbing back inside my parents’ house.”
Afterward, over tea, she divulged that her son was conceived that night, and although she was not in contact with the male who’d chosen to be with another and to serve in one of the king’s legions, she thought it was a sign.
“It wasn’t even that I’d mended it that well.” She leaned closer, laughter in her eyes. “It was that I’d enjoyed it and had wondered what it would look like if I’d made some more alterations.” She poured herself a smidge more tea from a crystal teapot. “So I began to dismantle some of my clothes, and not long after, sought a business loan from my parents.”
“What did they think?” I couldn’t help but ask. “Of your son, and the male who just left you to raise him alone.”
She stared down at her tea, then lifted those eyes that I now guessed were often smiling. “They didn’t know until I was a few moons from giving birth, and by then”—she shrugged—“I was making just enough to keep my new store afloat.”
“So you live upstairs?”
Olivianna nodded. “There are two rooms, a kitchenette, and a washroom. Besides, I do my best work at night when Ryon is sleeping.” She winked as she blew on her tea. “After a wine or two. So I like to be close to everything I need.”
We left soon after, Dade loading up the carriage that was now parked across the street in front of a run-down looking butcher with a mountain of fabric.
Guilt gnawed at me, a nibble that wouldn’t cease. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t paid Olivianna—as well as allowed her to kiss both his cheeks—for the sack of coin he’d left upon the table next to the book he’d been reading said she was paid handsomely.
No, as much as I loathed to admit it, I didn’t need the material. I wanted it, of course, my heart singing at the sight of all the various cottons and silks and rayon, but I shouldn’t have taken it so far as to actually take it.
I’d not only distracted the king from his murderous ventures, I’d used him to gain something I had no freedom to enjoy.
I had to get over it. I had to grow used to doing such things.
For it would take far more than some pieces of fabric to keep him from hurting more people.
“I don’t know what to say,” I murmured, gazing at the colors attempting to swim out of the storage compartment beneath the driver’s seat.
“I’d say you should thank me, but I’d rather you kiss me instead.”
My cheeks instantly burned, the driver busy but still well within earshot.
Dade brushed his thumb over my warm cheek, then jerked his head to the side of the street we were standing on and took my hand. “Have a drink with me.”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” I said, no longer in the mood to see the violence of this city.
“Nonsense. I saw the way you eyed it earlier.”
The tavern seemed too dank, too dim, to house a royal such as Dade, yet oh-so-perfectly fitting for the beast that lurked beneath his skin.
Behind him, my fingers caught in the curl of his, I watched him prowl toward a barrel-made countertop, all eyes upon us. Their attention was ignored, as was any greeting thrust his way, as Dade leaned over the counter to say something to a silver-haired male with piercings along one arched ear and eyes a blue so deep they were nearly purple.
I stayed behind him, watched the way the muted glow of a fire lamp turned his blond hair to a murky, shadowed sandy hue, and studied the broad expanse of his back beneath his black tunic.
The one he wore tonight was tight, though I didn’t think it was due to it being ill-fitting, but rather, due to the fact that he fit it too well. Muscle shifted, bunched and straightened as he pointed at something on the dark shelves behind the bartender. One leather booted foot was kicked over the other, his weight leaning into the aged wood that balanced atop the barrels and appeared to have been cut from a ship.
Throwing a glance around the mostly empty tavern, I pulled my fingers from his, noting the fear in some lone and older patrons who were finishing their drinks with feigned casualness. There was more curiosity than fear from a group of females, and even hunger in those who were giggling, trying to build up the courage to approach their king.
The easy way the king had communicated with Olivianna flushed hot irritation through me. I hadn’t realized I’d been making a face until the females smiled ruefully and retreated, and Dade turned around, a decanter and two glasses in hand. “Shall we?”