A Killing Moon

by Alexis D Craig

  Legs locked around him, Cora strained against him, the intense friction spurring him to faster and harder strokes until the door was softly knocking against the frame and her tits bounced with the motion. Her creamy pussy hotter and wetter the longer this went on, feeling her juices drip down his balls as the room filled with the sexy obscenities of wet flesh smacking against flesh as he filled her cunt again and again.

  ‘“It’s so good, baby. I’m so close,” she breathed as she threw her head back against the door, arching her back and offering him her breasts to suck on as he slipped a hand down between them.

  “Oh! Yes! Fuck!” she practically howled as her eyes came open and she met his gaze. He smiled around his mouthful of her nipple as his fingers rubbed against both sides of her clit.

  Her body clenched all at once around him, everything going taut for a moment as time stalled and he saw her at her most perfect and beautiful. Neck and back arched away from the door, her hands on his shoulders as her body held him inside her so fucking tightly.

  Finn lost it, his strokes losing their rhythm until finally he filled her one last time, his ball sack contracting as wave after wave of release burned through him. His whole body throbbing, mind just on fire as he slowly came back to himself. His breath warm and wet against her skin as he sighed against her shoulder and rubbed his face against the crook of her neck.

  For a few moments, the world consisted of solely them two, their desires, their breaths as they both came down from their highs.

  “I should probably move,” he groaned softly against her skin. He would gladly die in this spot and regret not a damn thing, but alas…

  Cora snickered weakly. “Yeah, probably. I’m not sure I can feel my legs.”

  “That makes two of us.” He huffed a quiet laugh to cover the surge of pride that went through him at her admission. “Come on, I’ll hold you up.”

  She unwound her legs from behind his back, and he waited until she was steady on her feet before readjusting his clothing, unceremoniously stuffing his softening cock back into his boxer briefs and pants. For her part, she stood staring at the husk of discarded silk forlornly.

  “This is going to be a pain,” she predicted as he fastened his pants, already mostly put back together.

  And she was right, so very right as none of the tape worked anymore and they couldn’t get the folds to lay correctly, the neckline gaping obscenely leaving one of her breasts exposed. It was wrong how hot he found that but getting hard for her again would only pose more problems, not fewer. She didn’t give up, though, trying to press the tape back into place to no avail. At some point they had to concede that the dress would never again resemble the outfit she’d spent the night dazzling the glitterati of the shifter kingdom.

  “It’s alright,” he soothed as she hiked the one shoulder of the dress up with a huff.

  “Really?” she scoffed bitterly. “You’re okay with me walking the halls with my tits out?”

  “No, I never said that,” he chuckled and took the jacket of his tuxedo and held it up for her to slide her arms through.

  She purred at the warmth, the weight of the jacket seeming to ease her distress immediately. “It even smells like you,” she preened happily as she buried her face in the shawl collar.

  Seeing her in his clothes did something to him, not that his wolf needed any help in the possessiveness department where she was concerned, but goddamn. Seeing her in his clothes was almost as arousing to him as seeing her in only her heels. He marveled again at her beauty, how perfect she was to him. Maybe even for him.

  That line of thinking though came with its own problems as the events of the night intruded into his mind. He sighed as he looked around the room to ensure they’d leave nothing behind when they made their escape.

  Seeming to sense the change in his mood, she smiled ruefully. “I guess we should talk about it, huh?”

  He nodded. “I think we’ve avoided it long enough.” She sighed next to him but didn’t say anything else. “I’m sorry about your parents.”

  She shook her head immediately. “Don’t be. I’m not.” Even as she said he could hear the remnants of bitterness in her voice. “They lost me a long time ago. It just became official a few years ago, but I was of no use to them long before then.”

  He knew that was a damned lie, but he wasn’t going to poke a wound that had been so recently reopened. Unable to think of anything else to do, he wrapped his arm around her waist, tucking her into his side and resting his cheek on her head. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s not your fault,” she reassured him.

  “Okay,” he agreed because there was nothing else he could do.

  She let him hold her a moment longer before she looked up at him. “We should probably go.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, we probably should.”

  Cora stepped away from him and stretched her arms over her head with a lusty purr. “Thank you for this. I clearly needed it.”

  “Me too, apparently.”

  She laced her fingers with his as he opened the door, checking the hallway before leading her outside.

  “So that was your brother, huh?” he asked after looking around to make sure they were truly by themselves.

  * * *

  CORA

  The click of her heels seemed to echo through the empty marble halls. She paused long enough to lean against him to remove her heels so she could be blissfully barefoot on the soothingly cool marble floor as they kept walking. “Yeah. Yeah, it was.”

  “He was hitting on you? That had to be both awkward and unpleasant.” He chuckled a little but looked concerned when she didn’t share in his mirth.

  “He wasn’t hitting on me.” It was still so much to take in. He was the one bankrolling her mission to keep Finn safe. He was the one who sought her out. Her, the family outcast. Was he alone? Did her father know? Was he involved? What was the real endgame now? How was this all supposed to work now?

  Finn, smarty-pants that he was, arrived at the conclusion all by himself. “Your handler!”

  “Keep your voice down,” she growled, yanking at his arm in agitation. This was not a conversation she wanted to have outside of his suite where she could monitor for listening devices.

  “What the hell, Cora? What else aren’t you telling me?” He had the audacity to sound pissed off like she hadn’t just found out herself.

  She held up a single finger as they neared his chambers. “We will discuss this shortly, but not here.”

  “Oh, we’re going to discuss it.”

  Her snarky retort was cut short by a scream, a younger feminine scream, coming from the end of the hallway. It was loud and quick, and they both took off in that direction. Finn and Cora arrived just in time to see a young woman fall from the upstairs landing and come to an abrupt stop in midair, dangling from what appeared to be a bedsheet or curtain around her neck.

  She was dead, whoever she was, not even really twitching and it was beyond surreal. Driscoll came barreling around the corner, wide-eyed and frightened looking. “I heard a scream. Highness, Cora, are you alright?”

  She didn’t know how to answer, unable to look away from the horrible sight in front of her.

  The vulture followed her line of sight upwards until he, too, gasped. “Holy shit!” Fumbling with his radio, he summoned backup and a medic. That done, he immediately began tending to them. “Highness, you can’t be here. Cora, please come with me,” as he herded them into a sitting room at the other end of the hall. The one they’d just left.

  Chapter Fifteen

  FINN

  They didn’t really have time to process the levels of awkward in being together in the room in which they’d just fucked, because almost as soon as they sat down, Driscoll was back and leading Finn away to keep the witnesses separated. It was protocol, she’d assured him, even though her eyes looked concerned.

  He hadn’t expected that it would be several hours before he’d be allowed to see her aga
in. By the time he and Cora were allowed to go back to his quarters, the sun had long been up and all he wanted to do was fall over and collapse.

  There was a cart waiting for them in the room with silver domes and a carafe of coffee, which drew Cora like a moth to a flame with a moan of gratitude. Despite the tension between them, he smiled.

  “You keep making noises like that, we won’t get to the coffee,” he joked as he sank down onto the couch with a sigh.

  “Uh huh.” Her lips twitched. “First order of business, though, has gotta be getting out of this damn dress.” She laid his jacket carefully on the side of the bed before dropping the blue dress from her shoulder with barely a shimmy. Bold and unashamed, she walked across the room and collected her pajamas, clearly aware of Finn’s eyes on her. Finn didn’t even attempt to hide it, unabashedly enjoying the show as he poured them both a cup of coffee.

  * * *

  CORA

  With the clothes on, she was a bit more hesitant, maybe a little more inclined to pay attention to the unresolved tension and anxiety between them. She took his jacket from the bed and traded him for a steaming mug.

  “Looked better on you than it ever did on me,” he murmured as he rose from the couch and took it from her. He moved over to the closet as she sat, treating him to the same level of scrutiny. Damn but he was pretty, it was unreasonable, brain-melting even, the muscular lines of his back as he changed out of his tux, his squeezably muscular ass. He didn’t bother with his shirt, just threw on some sleep pants and headed back to the couch.

  She couldn’t be expected to concentrate on breakfast, or the niceties of conversation when he was dressed like that, right? Her eyes skipped down the ridged landscape of his chest, over the dips and swells of his abs to the hint of v-line just above the loose waistband of his pants. Jesus.

  They picked at the bowls of fruit that had been left for them, drinking black coffee, wary of the condiments again. His cheeks looked a little hollow, she noticed, and the lack of regular meals was becoming a concern. Last thing she wanted was a starving wolf on her hands.

  “I told them we were together,” she informed him over her second cup of life-giving elixir. “When they asked about what led up to us finding the girl, I told them I was with you.”

  He nodded. “I did, too. Did you tell them what we were doing?” His wicked little smirk sent a shiver through her at the memory.

  “I said we were talking.” At his scoffing exaggerated cough, she giggled so hard her nose wrinkled. “What? I told them I was in your jacket because of the way the dress was held up.”

  Finn blinked, incredulity plain across his face. “And they believed that?”

  Cora rolled her eyes. “They didn’t say otherwise. Why, what did you say?”

  “I told them we were talking and taking a late-night stroll together, which is how we ended up on the scene.”

  “Not entirely inaccurate.” She nodded, they could work with that. So long as neither of them lied outright, just didn’t come up off the entire truth, they could dance in the gray area for as long as they needed to. “So long as we’re on the same page, we’re good.”

  He set his mug down and laced his fingers across his belly as he crossed his ankles with his feet on the coffee table. “At least about that anyway.”

  “Meaning?”

  She absolutely was not ogling the way his biceps bunched up as he crossed his arms over his firm pecs. “You weren’t going to tell me your brother was bankrolling your mission?”

  Cora exhaled sharply and pushed to her feet. She hadn’t really had time to process that yet and didn’t know how she felt about it. It was somewhere at the intersection on the Venn diagram of ‘pissed off’, ‘used’, and ‘betrayed’. “I found out just before you did, trust me.” She collected their coffee cups and cleaned up their breakfasts, leaving the cart in the hall. When she returned, she flounced down on her corner of the couch with an annoyed harrumph. “I don’t know how, or why. Or for whom, honestly.”

  He sat up at that, bracing his elbows on his knees. “You don’t think he’s the leader?”

  She closed her eyes as she thought about it, rubbing the spot between her eyes to stave off a burgeoning headache as she mentally ran through the information they had. “I think he’s the face, but I don’t think he’s the final word. He doesn’t have that kind of money but apparently makes a damn good middleman.” She wasn’t comfortable running spy craft past Finn and the Night Watch Commander’s warning to her played over in her mind. “We need to talk to Vasi.”

  Thankfully, he didn’t fight her. “Agreed.”

  Just then, a knock at the interior antechamber door sounded. “Finn! It’s me.”

  “Speak of the devil,” she muttered. Cora got up and let him in, looking him over from head to toe. “You don’t look like you have horns.”

  His blue eyes narrowed. “Do I even want to know what that means?” He looked wrung out, worn, his gray suit, normally perfectly pressed and put together now limp and wrinkled. His hair had long come out of its bun at the base of his neck and was now tied back in a half-assed ponytail that left his bangs free to drape around his face and angular jaw.

  “Have you seen the news today?” he asked, sounding almost as serious as when he had his gun on her and thought she was a gold digger.

  Cora shook her head and got up to grab her clutch from the night before. She hadn’t even thought about her phone since the evening before. “Not yet. Something we should be aware of?”

  Vasily growled and drove his fingers through his hair in irritation, frowning when they got hung up on the hair tie. Once he got that sorted, he stared at Finn critically. “Look, I know you didn’t do this.”

  “Of course not,” Cora snapped, growing more and more annoyed as she scrolled through her news feed and read the increasingly breathless and lurid allegations.

  “The fact this got out so quickly, with so many salient details from an ‘anonymous source close to the palace’,” he held up the air quotes, “tells me someone’s out to get you.”

  “Out to get me how?” Finn asked as he reached for her phone. Cora held it just out of reach because he didn’t need the stress of seeing everything she did. He bared his teeth at her, but still she didn’t give in until he sat back in a huff. “Fine. What does it say?”

  Scrolling back down, she frowned. “Not much of anything substantive. A lot of intimations, supposition, and conjecture, but not a lot in the way of actual fact. It does lead the reader to draw some unsavory conclusions, though.”

  Finn cradled his head in his hands, fingers tangled tightly in the golden blond strands. “Shit.”

  “I know,” she soothed, rubbing soft circles on his back. “Don’t worry yet, though.”

  “How can I not worry?”

  “You didn’t do it. We weren’t even on the same side of the building and got there just after the fact.” She looked to Vasi to confirm and only got a cringe in response.

  “And then there’s the matter of the note.”

  Both Finn and Cora blinked at him. “What note?” she demanded.

  “She had a note in her pocket.” He dug through his pocket and produced his own cell phone.

  “That said,” she prompted when he trailed off.

  Scrolling as he read, he quoted, “That said she couldn’t go on. She was having an affair with a royal, and since he planned to leave her, she wanted to assassinate him by poisoning his food.”

  “An affair?” He sounded offended at the very idea. “Did the note say who?”

  “Clearly, it wasn’t you.” Vasi blinked at him meaningfully and she couldn’t help her snort. “The letter didn’t say but…”

  “Well, since we know Finn’s been with me, that leaves only two other male royals. And one of those,” her eyes cut to the prince briefly, “hasn’t exactly been able to hoist a mainsail in quite some time.”

  Finn’s hands went to his eyes to rub vigorously. “Oh my God.”

  Vasi blan
ched, echoing his best friend’s horrified expression. “Please do not ever, ever say that again.”

  She sighed impatiently. “Delicate sensibilities aside, you have to admit, this all seems… convenient. Like overly so, no?”

  Vasily shook off his disgust and threw open the two couple buttons of his black dress shirt after loosening his tie. “Ain’t it just?”

  Cora was quiet for a little while, eyes gone to the middle distance as she turned these new pieces of the puzzle over in her head. “It’s beautiful,” she concluded, raking her upper lip with her teeth.

  “I know, right?”

  * * *

  FINN

  “What’s beautiful?” Finn asked, looking between the two of them with growing concern.

  “It’s neat,” she repeated, her dark eyes clearing and flashing over to gold.

  Vasily nodded, dipped his chin once, his eyes now hard and cold, yellow, maybe orange. “Too neat,” he agreed.

  “I’m assuming you have handwriting analysis on it, yes?”

  His best friend nodded again. “It’s protocol and it’s got a rush on it. We’ll know more soon.”

  Finn growled as he lost all patience with the two soldiers. “I’m gonna need you two to stop sharing a brain and start sharing with the rest of the class.”

  Cora took his hand, lacing their fingers together and petting down his arm with an expression of sincerity on her face that gave him pause. “Somebody’s doing a bang-up job in making it look like you had a hand in this.”

  He blanched as he blinked at her, suddenly exceptionally nauseated. “I’m sorry, what?”

  Vasi put his phone away and steepled his hands as he continued to stare, unfocused into the distance. “By intimating the affair, the letter hits all those tabloid titillation buttons that’s gonna have the paparazzi all over you and your brother. They’re gonna want dirt, and if they don’t get it, they’ll make it up. You know how that goes.”