by Ella Fields
“What is it you want?”
“We’ve already been over this, and all I want will be mine in no time at all.”
I refrained from scoffing. “In no time at all?”
“Your beloved shall be here”—he pursed his lips, gazing around the room with feigned patience—“oh, any moment now.” Then before I could react or ask him how he knew that, he clapped his hands, and suddenly, we were not alone.
Glamour.
A table with a feast fit for twenty monarchs stretched behind me, another cutting through its center. Glowing fruits overflowed from bowls, and fish and venison steamed the air. Baskets of bread and black goblets filled with wine were scattered between the plates.
And seated at the tables were hordes of people. All of them witnesses to the betrayal I’d just been subjected to.
Though not just any people. Fae, and royalty at that.
Now I knew the reason for the setup of the feast. Three females wearing differing expressions of intrigue and small crowns sat at the heads of each table—the three queens.
Ryle seated himself at the tip of the giant cross the two tables made. Flicking a napkin into the air, he gingerly tucked it within the ruffles of his cream linen shirt. “Do have a seat, my half breed queen. We shall not bite.” The wink that followed those words said otherwise.
A gruff voice seated down the table from him barked, “Speak for yourself, your highness.”
Ryle tossed him a smirk that should have suggested comradery, but instead, the dark-haired male who’d spoken downed his wine with haste and kept his eyes trained on his food.
I wasn’t sure where to look, what to do, or where to sit. All I knew was that I could not leave.
I caught the eye of a white-haired queen with eyes the color of burnt copper. She did not smile, and she did not snarl as she ripped into a leg of chicken with a preternatural slowness and chewed. At her right, a male watched her every move, his large, muscular frame oozing with a tension even I could feel. Linked, perhaps. He was wearing what seemed to be steel and leather. A warrior. Yet it would seem he’d linked to a Faerie queen.
Not that I could talk.
And supposedly, he’d be here soon. I wasn’t foolish enough to believe I could escape Beldine and live to tell the tale. I’d done it once, barely, and had almost died. So I pulled my eyes away and gathered my crumpled skirts. Keeping my shoulders back, I made my way to the only empty seat available. Right next to the king.
It appeared each queen had brought some members of their courts with them, and their curiosity bled into the room as stalking eyes followed me to my seat.
“Can I eat?” I asked the king, knowing of the many tales regarding eating certain foods or wine in Beldine. Some said it would kill you, some said you’d lose yourself for hours on end, and others said it would entrap you, binding you to their lands forever.
He paused in chewing. “I find your sheer rudeness quite appalling.”
Right. Said tales also spoke of ill-mannered humans finding their deaths prematurely. Even so, I was not human. I cocked my head. “That I asked if your food was safe?” My lips curled. “Or was it the manner in which I asked?”
His teeth flashed as did his eyes, and he reclined in his high-backed chair. “Both.”
“At the risk of offending you further, how you choose to receive the question is no problem of mine.”
Silence descended, thick and swift, and I glanced around at the stunned faces. One of the queens, her hair in braids that bounced over her curved, brown cheeks, grinned with obvious excitement. Others were staring down at their plates as if they couldn’t bear to watch.
Frowning, I looked from them back to their High King, whose face was mottled red.
Shit.
It came out of nowhere—so quick I thought I’d been slapped, and I might have. Though it wasn’t by his hand but his power. Thrown with unstoppable force to the side, I couldn’t keep myself from toppling to the mosaic floor.
As I laid there, dazed with my cheek and jaw singing from the impact, I noticed the green and gold leaves and tiny fat cherubs in the cool tile.
“Get rid of her,” I heard Ryle mutter.
Hauled from the room, I was dragged up the stairs, and I had little desire to protest.
After all that had happened, I found the sight, the solitude, of my feathered room with its circled windows a welcome relief.
“Wake up,” a bland voice said from the door.
I knew I could’ve likely left the room at any time, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t slept either. Sifting through some books, I found nothing but a few worn journal entries and fictional tales of the Fae that looked to be stolen from Rosinthe. After stacking them as I’d found them, I’d then watched the sun dance down through the branches in the ceiling, listening to the water and squealing, squawking, and baying creatures outside as the castle quieted.
Now, with the stars glittering through the window, bouncing off the violent sprays of water beneath, it seemed everyone was wide-awake.
I’d heard shouts, laughter, and even some screaming. But I’d continued to gaze out the window, study the room I’d been thrust into, and wait.
I didn’t deign to let the guard know I was also wide-awake.
Standing, I ignored the dress that’d appeared, a thin mixture of satin and ribbon that I knew would be vastly revealing, and marched to the stone-faced male at the door.
His slanted and darkly observant eyes tracked my every move. Tall and imposing in leather pants, he wore matching boots and a shirt with a metal breastplate, and I wondered what he was.
I wasn’t left wondering for long.
Out in the hall, another guard stood waiting. With a nod to his friend, he walked ahead. A gray and black tail, tufted at the end, bobbed behind him.
A shifter. I was willing to wager the one behind me, whose eyes dug into my back, was also one.
Dragging my fingers through my hair, I wished I’d taken the time to search for a brush, but I soon lost all interest in vanity when I heard a feminine moan roll up the stairs we descended to the throne room.
The tables were gone. Inside were feathered mats, and upon each one, a pregnant female in various stages of undress.
When I halted, the guard behind me growled, pushing me forward. Turning, I hissed at him, but that only brought me a wolfish smile.
The king was not on the dais. The throne was empty, and as I let my eyes roam the room, I realized why.
He was fucking a female from behind, cupping her large stomach in his hand. Her eyes were closed as her ass gyrated with every violent thrust. Meeting my eyes over her shoulder, the king grinned, then threw his head back with a roar that shook the cavernous room and released himself inside her.
Rising, he didn’t bother tucking his cock away. It hung between his legs, flaccid but already thickening as he strolled between the females toward me.
I tore my gaze from it and folded my hands before me, unwilling to appear ruffled.
“Winter queen,” he said, a little breathless. With a swipe of his hand over his mouth, he licked his lips. “I do feel I should apologize for my... outburst last evening. Tense times and all that.”
I cared nothing for whatever he meant by tense times, so I said nothing.
He smiled, wane and wicked, as if guessing that would be my response. “By all means, do take a seat.”
He gestured to his throne, and a replica appeared beside it. “It has been a long while since a queen has ruled alongside a king here at the Onyx Court, so it might be a little dusty.”
The thought of sitting there and watching all this had my empty stomach roiling, but I knew I had little choice. And walking to the dais, the king’s burning eyes upon me, I then noticed the males.
Half veiled in shadow, they lined the walls, most of their expressions hidden or wrangled into indifference. Some wore warrior garb, others the glittering, ruffled, and colorful robes and tunics of nobility, and some wore labor-stained tunics and boots tha
t’d seen far better nights.
All of them bled burning tension into the room.
The throne tightened around me as though molding to my frame. Inwardly, I coiled tight, but outwardly, I reclined, laying my arms upon the armrests.
Eyes danced upon me, the king standing in the middle of the ginormous room with his stiff cock pointing straight at me. I knew I would likely pay for my snark, but I would much rather be returned to my rooms than stay here anyway. So I flicked my hand. “Proceed.”
The king’s brows jumped, and a few of the males upon the walls shifted.
One of the guards who’d delivered me, stationed at one side of the doors, laughed with his eyes.
I waited for King Ryle to explode—hoped for it even—but as if he knew I wanted that, he smiled. A cunning fox. The slight point to one of his ears revealed itself as he yawned and ran a hand through his sweat-misted hair. “My, my, this is harder than one would think.”
I grinned even as my stomach turned. “I’m sure.”
“Perhaps you could help me.”
“I doubt I have the right... equipment for whatever it is”—my nose wrinkled, gaze jumping over the patiently waiting females—“you’re doing.” Some trembled, but whether it was in fear or excitement, I didn’t know.
He mock-gasped. “How rude of me to forget how woefully uneducated you are of those whose power you stole.”
I bristled but smiled.
His answering smile made some of the females weep.
Fear then, I decided. Most were trembling with fear.
“Allow me to explain,” he said, dragging his long fingers down the spine of a female. All of them were on their hands and knees, heads bowed as though they could not stand to look up.
A glance at the walls told me why.
The males standing there were the babes’ fathers, the female’s spouses, and quite possibly, their linked ones.
Ryle paused behind an orange-haired mother, and she cried out. He hushed her, smoothing her hair down her back, then crouched down to grip one of her hanging breasts. “Just like you half breeds, we value our young and the creation of life above almost all other things.”
She was quivering now, but her head snapped up, eyes locking on a male along the wall.
I didn’t look. I didn’t dare as Ryle stared at me across her back. “One out of three babes will survive infancy. Our power, our bloodlines, are just too much for their tiny bodies. But in recent years,” he continued, voice roughening as his eyes fell away from mine, and he positioned himself behind the female, “we are lucky to see one in five babes survive.”
“Dare I ask how this helps?” I said, surprisingly calm. Although I thought it all outrageously hideous and unnecessary, I was curious.
“A recent trial on my part,” the king admitted, his fingers now between the sniffling female’s legs. He frowned at what he no doubt did not find there, but he didn’t care to prepare her before he moved forward and aligned himself. “Some five or six summers ago, I thought to fertilize the mothers just as my power, my very existence, does the land of Beldine. Twice a year, every expecting female in the realm is brought here for my blessing.”
“Has it worked?” Perhaps a very dangerous question to ask the unpredictable king, and in a room filled with simmering, hostile tension, heartbreak, and fear.
He didn’t answer, which was answer enough. He plowed forward, and the female screamed in various bouts of differing agonies.
I wanted to disappear inside myself. Of all the atrocities I’d experienced, of all the wicked things I’d done with my own two hands and magical abilities, not once had I ever felt like this.
Helpless, horrified, and disturbed right down to the dregs of my soul.
A low growl cleaved the stale air. The faerie’s cries grew louder, her fingers bloodied, digging at the tile before her feathered mat as though she could pull herself away.
Bonds, almost translucent, had wrapped around her neck, an invisible leash the king pulled taut to keep her still as he fucked her without mercy. Within minutes, as though her pain or this entire ordeal excited him, his head rolled back and a sound akin to a purr climbed up his throat.
Another growl, louder and rumbling this time, and then the male she’d been staring at on the wall leaped forward. With a flash of night-bending shadows, he was no longer a male, but a formidable midnight black wolf.
My fingers curled into the sharp spikes of birch at the ends of my armrests.
Ryle didn’t pause. He didn’t even need to look at the guards.
He was everywhere he needed to be, everything he needed to be, without lifting a finger.
A chain of gold-coated iron looped around the wolf’s throat before he could so much as lick his female’s face. He was wrenched back by the guards, groaning and snarling and snapping, and Ryle only needed to glance at the wolf for him to yelp and land in a lifeless heap on the ground.
The female beneath the king screamed. “Quain!” she cried, long and loud as the guards dragged the shifter from the room.
I’d almost thought him dead until I saw the twitching of his back legs before he disappeared.
Ryle shuddered, spilling himself inside the crying female, who I was assuming was also a shifter, and as he moved onto the next, I felt myself drift away.
For the remainder of his so-called blessing, no one dared to disrupt him. No one dared to breathe louder than Ryle’s barely contained grunts and groans.
For whatever reason they’d been here the previous day, his other guests were not in attendance. I studied the females who’d been abused but were still expected to wait in their positions of servitude until the blessing, rite, whatever form of torture it was, had ended.
Some had skin as white as the moon, others a rich honey, and some as dark as the hatred that wafted from the helpless males who’d been forced to watch. There were some with pale green skin, some with gills and webbed feet, others with hoofs and furred legs who I knew had to be lesser Fae or part of whatever they deemed as Unseelie.
The nobility stood out, not only due to their more human yet entirely unearthly traits but also for their wings. A deep blue rimmed with aqua, the insides speckled with black silken-looking splotches, butterfly wings sprouted from the back of a brown-skinned faerie. Her silver hair was short, giving view to those pointed ears, studded with countless tiny ruby red jewels. The female beside her, her skin almost translucent, also had wings, though hers were gray and feathered like a pigeon rather than the grand mass of what was pinned behind me.
Zadicus’s wings.
Even facing away from them, I could not forget the sight. I doubted I could ever forget. Like that of an eagle, the midnight black feathers were long, luminous, and plenty.
I withheld the urge to shake the sight of them away. Not because it was hard to believe, but because it was not. I could feel him, his essence and scent, rolling off them. As though they watched me. As though they still lived. As though they waited to join their counterpart.
As though they were a piece of his soul, and darkness knew why, but he’d been forced to leave them behind.
A pair of forest-floor-brown eyes were staring at me, causing me to exit from my trance and soak in their strength as their owner waited patiently for the king’s game of control to end.
An end I knew would stain the souls and relationships of those present for years to come.
I nodded, just a hint, and the female blinked, her lithe, milky-white fingers reaching up to brush over her chin.
Her stomach did not protrude as much as most of the others. I wasn’t sure of the duration of pregnancy for the Fae, but I silently implored whoever might be listening, watching, that she would not have to endure this again.
She glanced back at the ground, and I folded my hands in my lap, my hunger, my own aches and pains, a backdrop to the misery taking place beneath the dais.
At long last, with the final faerie blessed, the king let out a satisfied huff, taking his time to rise
and fasten his pants. He still had his boots on, and I wasn’t sure why that pissed me off almost as much as his attitude toward his transgressions. But it did.
I wanted to kill him. To peel his skin from his flesh and study what laid beneath before pinning it to the walls of this room to drip endlessly forevermore.
“You seem to be having some violent thoughts, dear Audra.”
My teeth were grinding. I relaxed my features, knocking some hair back over my shoulders by shaking them. “Whatever do you mean?” I said with sweet malice.
Another huff, and then he was stalking between a row of expectant mothers, indicating with a wave of his hand that they were free to leave.
He slowed as he approached, and though I kept my attention fixed firmly on him, I didn’t miss the way the females raced off the floor and to their respective partners, or how a few of them seemed too broken to move, forcing the males to go to them.
“Let us not play games,” he said, running his fingers through his hair, sweeping it back in a way that was far too pleasant for such a horrid being. “It would not be fair, being that you can lie, and I cannot.”
I bit back a retort and smiled. “But of course.”
Quick as lightning, he jumped up the steps to his throne, leaning heavily over its side to whisper with an excitement I wanted to murder. “So what was it? Did you daydream about killing me? Hurting me?” He gasped, chuckling low and deep. “Oh, please, did you wonder if I were to fuck you, too?”
It was then it truly struck me that no matter how many fables and tales were told, there would never be enough to adequately capture the color of darkness that resided inside Beldine’s king.
Every instinct screamed at me to lean away, but I held still and tilted my head. “You wouldn’t dare sully yourself with a mere half breed like me.”
“You did unlock the doors for us,” he said, dragging a fingernail over the wooden armrest. “You erased the curse. I’m not sure I’ve thanked you for that.”
“Indeed, you have not,” I said in an iced tone that warned him not to try.
His lips pursed, eyes falling to my mouth. “Some other time, maybe.” As he reached out to touch it, I froze, his cool finger against my skin hardening my blood beneath it. “How in the mother of fates did you get these beautiful things?”