by D. D. Chance
Taming the King
Witchling Academy, Book 3
D.D. Chance
I swore nothing would screw up the alliance I'd finally forged with the king of the Fae.
Then I was captured by his mortal enemy.
❤️ : It's Complicated
Marrying the brutally gorgeous, fiercely proud, and irredeemably arrogant High King of the Fae wasn’t on my punch list a few weeks ago, but it was the fastest way to keep my people safe.
Then the Fae’s ancient enemies strike. The darkly twisted ruler of the Fomorians rips me into his underworld prison…and tells me I’m now his bride, too.
Even worse? Once my beautiful Fae king learns how I’ve unwittingly betrayed him, his only solution is war.
To stop the bloody battle that will destroy two of the most powerful races across the realms—and take down Earth’s witches too—I’ve got to call in every favor and squeeze every last drop of magic I can from my Hogan blood. It still might not be enough.
Because witches’ hearts are meant for breaking, traitors hide around every corner, and when it comes to Fae, Fomorian, and especially witchling magic—nothing is as it seems.
Taming the King is a slow-burn rejected mate Fae kidnap fantasy romance, and book 3 of 3 in the Witchling Academy series.
Contents
1. Belle
2. Aiden
3. Belle
4. Aiden
5. Belle
6. Aiden
7. Belle
8. Aiden
9. Belle
10. Aiden
11. Belle
12. Aiden
13. Belle
14. Aiden
15. Belle
16. Aiden
17. Belle
18. Aiden
19. Belle
20. Aiden
21. Belle
22. Aiden
23. Belle
24. Aiden
25. Belle
26. Aiden
27. Belle
28. Aiden
29. Belle
30. Aiden
31. Belle
32. Aiden
33. Belle
34. Aiden
35. Belle
36. Aiden
37. Belle
38. Aiden
Epilogue
About D.D. Chance
1
Belle
“I need a wife.”
The words rang in my ears, panic knifing through my stomach as the scents of spices and ocean water, cool night air, and jasmine swirled around me. I stared at the obscenely gorgeous and, hello, damned near naked guy in front of me who’d uttered them, knowing for a stone-cold fact I couldn’t trust my eyes or my nose in this place. So why did I think I could trust my ears?
This dickhead had stolen me out of the human realm, straight-up sending an army of slithering goop creatures to pull me down into this goddess-forsaken hole of a prison realm. He’d forged some sort of unholy alliance with the coven who had betrayed my family hundreds of years ago and who were still betraying me today. And now I was his prisoner.
A scant few weeks ago, none of this had been on my calendar. All I’d wanted to do was run my tavern, provide safe passage for those who needed refuge, and—eventually—break free of the contract that had bound the witches of the Hogan family to the Fae. Instead, I’d been found by my family’s mortal enemy and swept into the Fae realm, I’d reopened the ancient academy of witchling magic my grandmother had left behind under extreme duress, and…well, I’d married the High King.
It’d been a busy week.
But while I didn’t have time to ring up my therapist just yet to work through all that, I did know that what I was seeing in this hellhole was not real. In the current glamour he was rocking, this leader of the slime pack could have chosen to show up as man, a Fae, or a Marvel superhero. All I knew for sure was that he wasn’t showing up in his true form, the oily, dripping creature I’d come to know as a Fomorian.
I needed to remember that.
As if he could hear my thoughts, the asshat on the dais inclined his head, a hard smile curving his lips. Illusion or not, the guy was hot as hell. Big as a linebacker, tautly muscled, with a rugged, iron-jawed face, brilliant teal-green eyes, and thick, white-blond hair spilling over his shoulders beneath his steely spiked crown, he stared at me with a palpable rage that seemed barely kept in check. He wore nothing but a thick black drape over his lap, though I was pretty sure he was showing off that particular glamour just to shock me.
It didn’t shock me, but the only thing more obvious than his twelve-pack abs was that whoever or whatever this guy was, he belonged on top of that dais, seated on a throne. This was a king. He might be king of the bottom-feeder eels, but that didn’t change his royal station.
“It’s Lyric,” he said abruptly. “My name. King Lyric. You’ll want to remember it.”
“I’ll be sure to alert the media.” As I took a cautious step back, King Lyric leaned forward, eliminating the space I’d barely created between us.
“You think you know so much,” he sneered. “Relying on the stories that have been fed to you, the illusions that were allowed to reach your feeble eyes and mind. You know nothing.”
“Yeah, well, I know enough that every time I see you guys, you look like filthy slimeball creatures from the Black Lagoon,” I said, conjuring up the image for him because I knew he was tracking my thoughts. “Even when I wasn’t facing you directly, I could see that through a portal or across a field. That’s some pretty impressive magic for none of it to be true.”
Lyric’s bite of laughter was sharp. “Be glad you will never see how you are presented to us,” he assured me coolly, his tone sly enough that I was caught between wondering if we appeared like quivering bug larvae, barely able to move on our own, or simply as we were—naked, fresh meat thrown before a hungry rabble. I knew he wanted me to wonder, and I stiffened, trying to force my mind to go blank.
“But it can’t go blank, Belle Hogan,” Lyric purred, his mouth twisting into a mocking grin as his teal-green eyes glinted with satisfaction. “That is the greatest distinction between humans and Fae. You can no more school your thoughts into obedience than you can fly. When it all could be…so much easier.”
He lifted a hand almost lazily, and I bit off a squeak as I lost the sensation of the floor beneath me. I drifted up a good two feet from the ground, my hands awkwardly shooting out to either side as if I could flap my way to safety. I tipped my head back, trying desperately to hold myself in place—and realized another weight had left me too. The spelled emerald crown and shackles of my service to the king of the Fae, my grandmother’s invisible jewels that I’d willingly donned to enhance my magic and make Aiden stronger…had been ripped away from me. They’d never been visible since the moment I’d slipped them on in the Fae realm, but now the crown no longer pressed down on my forehead, the shackles no longer gripped my wrists.
How was that possible?
The king’s quiet laugh curdled through me, too amused, apparently, to be tracking my thoughts for the moment. “Your chin is so high in the air, it’s the only thing keeping you counterbalanced. But good for you. Most of your kind would already be spinning in somersaults, huddled and crying.”
“You spend a lot of time torturing humans?” I asked, keeping my arms rigid at a forty-five degree angle from my body, my fists clenched, and resolutely not thinking about the fact that I was hovering a couple of feet off the floor.
Instead of answering me, the king sat back in his obsidian throne, extending one foot indolently. With the crook of his finger, he gestured me forward—pulled me forward, really
. I had no control over my own body except for my fists, which I held tight, forcing my muscles to stay rigid. It was the smallest freedom, but it was mine. I held on to it as I drifted forward to rest about six feet in front of Lyric, our eyes level by virtue of the fact that I was floating well above the floor.
He smiled, his sinfully beautiful lips curving into a sneer that still somehow looked good on him. “I didn’t bring you here to scare you, Witch Hogan. I could have done that easily enough by haunting your dreams. The dark of night is our province. It has always been. We hunt in the shadows, and in those shadows, there is subtlety and nuance when we choose it. There is also sickness and fear.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. This close to King Lyric, I could see that his eyes practically glowed with malice, his fair skin dusted with a blond stubble that might have been lined with gray. For all his apparent age, he didn’t seem any less virile or powerful. And dude worked out. His biceps and forearms looked like bunched-up boulders. His hands were as big as catcher’s mitts, and his legs were thick as pony kegs.
He watched me take him in, and his smile deepened. “That’s pretty careful scrutiny from the witch who’s been claimed by my rival,” he drawled, but I’d known that jab was coming and took my time returning my gaze to his face.
“For a big ball of goop, you clean up well,” I allowed. “But I’ve been around your type long enough to know you show your victims what you want them to see.”
“Not here,” the king said, gesturing at the empty hall. “Here we are as we first appeared to your pitiful race, in our true forms, when we choose to take a form at all. As I said, we are the creatures of the night, the wraiths and shadows you consider ghosts. The Fae, the lightbringers, they also began as little more than shafts of sunlight gamboling through the fresh and untraveled spaces of your world. Light and dark. Evening came, and morning followed, the cycle playing out in the time before time.”
Once again, I knew better than to believe him, but there was something almost right about the brand of revisionist history he was trying so eloquently to sell me. “You’re offering that explanation as if the human experience was the most important, and that you, true creatures of power, had to change your form in order to please us.”
“Not exactly.” Lyric shrugged. “We had to change form so you could please us more. It’s a subtle but important difference.”
He laughed as I blinked, clearly pleased that I’d stumbled into the trap he’d carefully laid, then continued. “You have to ask yourself what humans could possibly offer the Fae, or any higher being—well, perhaps not higher, but different, certainly. What is the quintessential human gift? We have sex, physical delight, sensuality, riches beyond imagining, magic—though not the codified version you all excel at.”
“So that’s it?” I asked, though I somehow suspected that answer wasn’t quite right. “You want us because we can make magic?”
He gestured lazily, and I floated up and down with the movement, a cork bobbing on an open sea. “Too few of you humans have that power, though all of you could. It’s why you regard it with such fear. No. What we want from you, what we crave from you, is a different kind of power. Come closer, Belle.”
I stared at him, knowing he could pull me to him against my will, but there was an undeniable flicker of contrarian heat within me. I wanted to move closer, with the reckless insatiable curiosity of a moth to a flame. I wanted to lean into King Lyric’s dark energy, needed it.
“Yes,” he breathed as I drifted closer to him. “Humans explore. You seek. You are driven almost desperately to experience what might happen next, and that is something that the gods—or what you style as gods—will never have. That core yearning and fierce determination. That need for something more. It’s what allows you to become the shapers of your own destiny, and when it is focused on one of us—”
Once again, the king shifted his appearance, and now it was Aiden, High King of the Fae, who sat in front of me, every bit as large as Lyric, but with a face that made my heart shiver, my lips part. Piercing blue eyes, a mane of dark hair, beautifully sculpted lips, and a hard-clenched jaw. I knew it was false, this image. I knew I was being teased and taunted. But I drank it in greedily anyway, unsure if I would ever see Aiden in the flesh again.
“Ah, yes,” the king murmured, his tone changing subtly so that it sounded thick with emotion—even real heat. “I steal this from you to show what I can give.”
He leaned forward fractionally, his face—Aiden’s face—near mine, his lips parting as well. I had felt those lips on mine. I’d tasted them, and they’d tasted me, scoring lines of heat and need over my trembling flesh. But King Lyric didn’t kiss me. He didn’t have to. I felt my breath catch anyway, my body suffused with heat that was almost electric.
“I can help bring the magic within you fully to life, sweet Belle. You know I can.”
“Bullshit,” I shot back, anger and a strange anxiety leaping up deep inside me. “I have all the magic I’m supposed to have.”
Lyric’s grin was intense, one thick, winged brow arching up. “Ah, but will you use it? Will you let it flow within you as it so desperately wants? Who are we to say what you will make or unmake? It’s your choice alone. But don’t you want to learn how to make that choice?”
I didn’t say anything more—couldn’t, really, with the mounting hysteria surging through my veins. Lyric edged closer, and waves of heat and frigid chill flowed over me, one after the other as he fixed me with a hard gaze. “The Fomorians who have descended into darkness have more magic that’s accessible to humans than the Fae do. Right now, we need you more than the lightbringers. Help me free my people, and I will help you access power beyond imagining.”
“But you’re at war with the Fae,” I answered, hating myself that I felt compelled to continue this conversation at all, but not wanting it to end. The power that spilled off King Lyric curled around me like a living thing—and wasn’t more power what I wanted? Couldn’t I do more good the stronger I was? Would the power of this king be enough to help me fight the coven who’d betrayed me, and save the witches and monsters I’d dedicated my life to helping?
“We don’t have to be,” the image that was Aiden murmured, and then the space before me cleared, and I was once more staring into the deep, inscrutable, glittering teal-green eyes of the Fomorian king. “Work with me, Belle.”
2
Aiden
The room lay in shambles. Every shelf overturned, every scroll jar shattered, every book ripped from its casing, strewn across the floor. The rage still roared through me, unbanked because I had not found the one thing I needed more than anything else. The history of my own fucking people.
“How can it have been destroyed?” I demanded of Cyril for easily the fiftieth time. Tall, thin, and pinch-faced, my advisor watched me without expression, as exhausted as I was and possibly just as frustrated. Because there was no answer to the question.
“They were different times,” he offered again, the response he had devolved into after all others failed. The response that was possible, though it was no less maddening.
I sank to my knees with a rough groan. “How could we ever have believed that history, even flawed history, history we no longer believed was captured correctly, was not worth keeping?” I asked the question blankly. “We can always make a decision about words that might be lies. But if we don’t have any of the words to begin with, if we don’t have any recollection of what came before, how can we know what decisions to make? We didn’t spring from nothing.”
“You aren’t completely without your history,” another voice rumbled, soft, unassuming. Not fully present either, because Jorgen the djinn had already been the recipient of more than a few books thrown his way. Now he hovered in barely corporeal form, long since having tired of trying to catch every tome chucked at him. Far easier to let them pass through him and hit the wall.
“You saw him burn them,” I grumbled, speaking of my grandfather, King Or
in. “Burn the records of the Fomorian filth who tried to destroy us. You didn’t stop him, and neither did Reagan Hogan. His own witch had no power over him destroying history, or chose not to exercise her power.”
Jorgen gestured soothingly. “Your grandfather made no attempt to raid the archives until after Mistress Reagan departed the Fae realm. She had no power in this place after that. As to what King Orin destroyed—I was given to understand it was only information to do with her, because he sought to rid his memory of the witch who’d betrayed him,” he said with the longstanding patience of a man forced to recite the same explanation a dozen times over. “It was only later discovered that most of the records of the Fomorians’ attacks on the Fae realm were included in his purge, and when they were burned, related tomes in every library in the land caught fire as well, the books of history all linked together.”
“So this is all we have, then,” I said, shoving my finger at the open book before me. “A single description of pushing back the Fomorians from our shores a hundred years ago, plunging them back into the shadows of their domain after yet another botched attempt to infiltrate our realm, dripping in seaweed and filth.”