by Ella Fields
“You’re an ass.” The wind washed over my face, taking my focus and turning it toward the keep. “With a bad temper.”
“Says you.” Kash’s voice came from far away, low notes of sound, like that of a faraway song, as another reached me. He stopped beside me. “What is it?”
I shook my head, allowing my eyes to skip over the fading night sky beyond the castle. “Raiden’s leaving.”
We headed back. “You must keep learning, Audra.”
“I’ll be fine.” And that was something I finally believed to be true after these past few months. The land spoke to me, and I listened. It touched me, and I touched back. I needn’t and wouldn’t stress over trivial tricks. I’d learn whatever else I needed to when necessary. Though I was sure the annoying male would insist on cornering me for more of these practice sessions anyway.
“There are more important things to worry about.” Like the lord of the east who still laid holed up in his room most nights. When he appeared, it was to eat and talk quietly with Dace and Kash, never once looking my way.
Save for the darkness that pillowed his now often dull eyes and a slow gait that had improved after a couple of days, he seemed to be healing well.
A little more than a week had passed since he’d forced me from his room, and I hadn’t spoken to him since. Instead, I’d busied myself with the menial tasks of getting to know our new court, the ins and outs of how it was run, all the while wondering and trying to discover how self-sufficient it could be without my prince and me.
I wanted to go home.
Kash could stay, and I knew he would if and when I finally asked.
Passing the sentinels on the bridge, I nodded when they bowed and hurried to where I could hear a conversation coming to an end in the hall above.
“Silk,” Raiden said, and I halted atop the stairwell, watching the hard planes of his face slowly soften as we both seemed to marvel at what time had bestowed on us—where it’d taken us. “I wish I could say it’s been fun, but I know your kind do not appreciate lies, no matter how beautifully told.”
“I’ll be returning home soon.” I took a couple of steps closer, failing to think of something else to say as grass green eyes gazed down at me, absorbing my every feature in a way he’d once done long ago.
Dace and Azela stood behind Raiden, Azela clearing her throat and walking to me. Pausing for only a moment, she then threw her arms around my shoulders. “Please do.”
Shocked, I just stood there with my breath freezing inside my mouth. Before she pulled away, I patted her back, evoking a watery laugh.
“Home,” Raiden said, scratching at his chin. “Do you know where that is anymore?” His question, though bothersome in tone, didn’t anger.
For I knew the answer. I knew home was wherever my heart was.
I now knew home needed not be a place.
If it was, then perhaps all this madness would seem easier to navigate. So, for now, I’d follow my gut instead of my heart and go where I was needed—the next best thing.
A slow ache spread from my chest to my head, bouncing hard enough into every crevice that it was almost blinding. “Goodbye.”
Raiden didn’t look back as Azela smiled.
Dace nodded at Kash and me, and saw them to the antechamber, where I knew he’d sweep them into the void and back to Rosinthe.
No sooner had they disappeared than a muffled shout sounded from somewhere deep in the castle.
“Adran?”
Kash sighed. “He’s being kept in the staff quarters under guard in a small bedchamber and making a lot of noise about it.”
“If he continues to bother them, have him sent to the dungeon.”
“You plan to kill him?”
I rubbed my temples and made my way to the stairs. “Believe it or not, I’ve had enough death. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a rotten headache.”
The headache soon became a full-body ache, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d think I’d succumbed to some type of human illness.
Impossible, yet two days after Raiden’s departure, I could barely stand to look at the stars.
Without knocking, Kash entered my chambers at dusk and halted when he saw me leaning against the wall by the bed. “Did you sleep?”
“I need you to do something for me.” I traipsed to the desk, to the document I’d had Temika arrange for me, and tapped it. “I want you to...” My jaw sang and I snapped my mouth closed, rotating it and drawing a slow breath. “Take the title of regent,” I managed to get out. “I need to leave.”
“Audra,” Kash started, something strange changing the dark notes in his voice. Concern, maybe, but I cared not. “Audra,” he said again, and turned me to face him. “You’re pale as fuck.”
“Did you hear me?” I pressed, unable to focus on his dark eyes.
His face swam, fractured with diamonds of light that bubbled and burst. My eyes absorbed it all, causing the splitting inside my skull to become near unbearable.
Kash directed me to the armchair. “Close your eyes.” A cool goblet was placed in my hand, his own gentle as he helped lift it to my mouth. “Sip.”
After a few moments, my heartbeat dragging as though it couldn’t keep up, I peeled open my eyes and slumped in the chair. The burning slowly mellowed to a steady simmer. “Shit.” I rubbed my head and set the goblet in his palm, a tremor in my hand I couldn’t hide.
“You’ve not released enough of yourself into the land.”
“I don’t know what that is supposed to mean, nor do I care.” I swallowed and tried to straighten, Kash kneeling before me now. “I name you regent. You will rule this damned place in my stead.”
“You cannot leave,” he said. “Especially not like this.”
“Do you accept or not?”
“Why?” A question harsh enough to cut through flesh.
I’d have rolled my eyes if I could’ve. “Not to torture you if that’s what you think, and not just because it’ll give you something to do other than wander around in endless gloom until you meet my mother in the ever, but because you are what these people need.” I swallowed once more, my voice cooling. “You and Zad are the kind of leaders they need in my absence, they trust you, but I will not give him to them.” Not without me, I didn’t say.
Watching me for a heavy half minute, Kash then stated, “They might not trust you yet, but they have welcomed you. They prefer you.”
“Over the creature who ruled before me, of course, but nevertheless”—I looked down at my hands, watched the tremors twitch each finger—“I cannot remain here.”
He understood what I hadn’t decided yet, placing the goblet upon the dressing table. “You will split your time then.”
“Perhaps,” I offered as the outrageous, unique situation I’d found myself in reared its head again.
Unblinking and arms crossed, Kash nodded once. “As you wish.” He strode out of the room a breath later, and I flopped over the arms of the chair, closing my eyes.
They reopened when I felt him moving up the hall toward my rooms, a dark, inescapable storm.
With that fluidity that made my every sense wake up and pay attention, he walked right in and closed the door behind him. I watched as though in a dream as he crossed my bedchamber and stopped mere inches from my bare feet.
Eyeing my nightgown as though it offended him, he sneered, “Too good to join your new court for dinner?”
“I’m unwell,” I stated blandly, too bland for the enormity of whatever it was that ailed me.
Zad said nothing as he stepped forward and took my hands, pulling me from the chair to my feet. Without any warning, he kissed me.
It wasn’t soft and loving—it was raw and unbridled determination.
Shock rendered me immobile, but only for a failed heartbeat, then I kissed him back with that same amount of savagery, wanting even while I had him.
Copper welled over my tongue from his teeth, his groan a rumble I greedily swallowed. “You wicked fuc
king creature. How vile your soul must be.” Rough and sweltering, his hands roamed everywhere. They fisted the material, then tore my nightgown from my body.
After a bruising squeeze of my hips, the rustle of his clothing hitting the floor, he turned me, pressing his naked form to my naked back. Strong arms wrapped around me from behind, his teeth at my neck, velvet tongue lapping.
Breathless and disorientated and uncaring I could fall if he weren’t holding me, I laughed softly. “Are we talking about me or yourself?”
He didn’t laugh. He bit me, and I withheld the scream, trapping it inside my throat. He didn’t numb the pain. He did nothing to soothe it. He gripped my breasts in his large hands and squeezed. “Did he touch these?”
“No.”
“Liar,” he hissed.
“He didn’t,” I said, needing him to believe—just needing him.
Twisting us, he lifted me to the desk and pried my legs apart. Fevered gaze holding mine, he dragged a hand down the center of my chest, over my stomach, and stopped where I needed him most.
He pushed a finger inside, eyes hooding when my back arched, and I moaned, rocking forward. “This?”
“No,” I said.
He huffed, withdrawing.
I gaped, trying to loop my legs around his smooth, toned waist when he fisted his cock. He pumped the long, thick member, eyes on mine, and then they drifted down—down between my legs, his teeth scraping his bottom lip.
His arousal was so extreme, I could smell it—the barely leashed desire to take and own and claim and erase.
He just needed the truth. To be reminded I was, and always had been, his.
If only he’d believe someone capable of lying.
With a cruel calm, he asked, “Did he see you?”
I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. “Yes.”
He froze, the head of his cock touching my entrance. Enraged eyes lifted, and I did everything I could not to cower. “How?”
“Zad,” I pleaded.
Gripping my thighs, he pulled me onto his waiting cock, and I moaned so loud I did almost scream from the size of him, from the absence of him.
“Fucking how, Audra,” he gritted.
Panting, I tried to adjust to the delicious burn. “He...” Zad picked me up off the desk, and I could hear his teeth grind, see every muscle flex with the urge to kill a male who was already dead. Oh, he was furious, and I couldn’t resist trailing my fingers up his arms, marveling at the sight, at the primal menace rolling off him. “He painted a portrait of me, but he did not see much.”
He snarled, ducking to sink his teeth into my neck. “Darkness, Audra. I fucking loathe you.”
My nails sank into his biceps. “I love you.”
“You don’t, you like the way I make you feel, the way my cock fills you like nothing else ever has. You’re infatuated, attracted to me in agonizing ways because we are linked, but it is painfully clear you do not love me.”
He was wrong. So unbearably wrong. “I do.”
A large hand smothered my mouth, then retreated as he growled and flipped me around to take me from behind.
“I will talk regardless of if you can see me.”
“Talk all you want. I’ve become adept at ignoring lies.”
“Why are you here then,” I said, a whimper escaping when he left me only to slowly crawl back inside.
“Because this”—he reached around, smacking my clit, and I trembled, my breath stuttering as lightning coursed through me—“is mine, and though I wish otherwise, I cannot control the need to remind you that.”
“You’re an asshole,” I said.
He yanked my head up by my hair, then wrapped his hand around my neck, pushing my chin to his mouth. His tongue licked at my jaw, a long, slow swipe, the arm around my stomach, banded to my hip, kept me trapped. “I want to destroy you,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I want to fuck you until you can’t breathe, can’t see, can’t feel anything but the shape of me every time you move.”
I tried to talk, but then his teeth scraped my neck, and all I could do was tremble and moan.
“I want you so blind with need, so fucking ruined for me, that you feel even a scrap of what it’s like to burn when I torture you with another female.”
This wasn’t him, or maybe it was. Maybe his time in Allureldin—his terminated marriage and his quiet life away from the treachery and debauchery of Beldine—had only blanketed those base desires. The instinctual reflex so many of his kind had—hurt them, deceive them, and be hurt tenfold in kind, should you live to be tormented in such devious ways.
Still, I pleaded to him, to the male I’d fallen in love with, had linked with, for that was who I needed. Now and always. “We both know you cannot do that to me.”
He rotated his hips, and I mewled, about to detonate, even with the widening fissures inside my chest. “We’ll see,” he growled into my neck when he pumped and then grinded his hips, and I fell apart. He held me up, teeth pulling at my skin and his fingers now between my legs, rubbing. “That’s it,” he purred. “Drench my cock like a good little half-blood queen.”
I couldn’t stop him, could only lose myself in his arms as my vision blackened before returning with so much color, I grew dizzy once more.
His laughter was wicked and low as he worked me slowly, taking his time to finish with me.
I was a liquified mess, and he made sure of it. My breathing labored, I wheezed when he picked up the pace. His hand moved to my breasts, squeezing, rubbing, then slapping.
I jolted at the sting, and he hummed. “Again.”
I’d already fallen to pieces over him, and I had no desire to give him anything else.
He pinched my nipple, and I squirmed, sweat gathering at my back from the heat of him. “Again,” he ordered, a guttural demand that forced my body to betray my mind. “Such a lovely, toxic royal brat.”
That hand tightened around my throat, oxygen leaving me in harsh pants. His hair hung in tendrils around his cheeks, his teeth gnashing when he grinned. But his eyes... those golden eyes were all I knew and nothing I recognized. They were everything he truly was.
A faerie prince. A creature of immense power.
A predator.
I was both entranced, coming undone at the seams, and petrified, my heart galloping.
Lowering his lips to mine, he snarled, “Come on my cock hard enough to deserve my seed, or I’ll find someone who does.”
“You wouldn’t—”
“You’ve no idea what I’m capable of, and you know it.”
I snarled in kind, but it only served to make his eyes widen with lust addled humor. He dove, lips snatching mine, teeth cutting as he tugged before plundering with his tongue.
It felt as if he were trying to invade every inch of me, and I was so stupidly obsessed with him that I felt myself soar and begin to fight back.
He growled approvingly and didn’t stop me from reaching up to hold his face to mine.
The sound of our skin meeting, his grunted curses and breaths as he filled me with his seed, and the taste of his velvet mint tongue had me crumbling.
Before I could completely finish, before I could unleash what he’d built, he removed himself from my body and released me.
With a shocked shout, I fell over the desk, shaking, my orgasm-clouded brain needing a moment to realize what he’d just done.
His clothes remained, but his naked form was gone.
Despite being left alone to finish, I woke feeling better than I had in months. Hours crawled by while I stared at the swelling night outside my bedchamber windows, listening to the water sail beneath the castle to throw itself off the cliff into the rocky depths below.
Creatures, beast and bird, called to one another, and I discovered that when I hummed a tune similar to that of the night birds, they paused and sang back.
Another lifelong bond I never once saw myself making.
Kash. Zad.
It didn’t take me long to realize th
e prince hadn’t come because he had to have me. He came to me because I’d needed him. I needed the release, to rid some of what I’d absorbed, and he’d hated it.
He’d hated it, but he’d still done it.
I took a shred of solace in that.
At dinner, I watched Zad as he ate faster than I’d ever seen before, then excused himself. His scent lingered long after he’d left the throne room, and I stared at his chair at the head of the long table. A place I wouldn’t dare sit. The original chair, the one Ryle had used—unnecessary and a reminder of all that’d transpired in this room—had been replaced.
“The dining room,” I said without removing my eyes from Zad’s almost finished meal. “Could we eat there next?”
Kash exchanged a glance with Dace, and one of the warriors on the wall shifted. “We could,” Kash said carefully. “Though Ryle has been the only one to use it since he took to the throne.”
“So?” I said, cutting into my bloodied slice of venison. “I used it with him once.” The memory should’ve filled me with that familiar sense of unease I’d only just recently begun to shake. Instead, I felt nothing but a minor twinge of sorrow for what could have been.
It wasn’t as though the king hadn’t been given chances to do better, to stop with the horror and fear-mongering.
I froze then, my fork bending in my hand when it dawned on me that Zad might also hold that against me. The death of his brother.
I’d saved his realm, and in doing so, I’d destroyed his heart.
Setting down my cutlery, I rose and excused myself, hurrying from the room and down the halls, racing past watching warriors and into the final hours of night.
The breeze rid the damp from my eyes, washed over my exposed arms, and danced through the sheer fabrics of my green and blue gown.
I took the same path I’d taken months ago. A different lifetime, it seemed, that Zad had stolen me from his brother and shown me the forest nestled alongside the castle.
I’d visited countless times since, each time finding it more vibrant. Life and color so rich it made my chest warm and called to the blood that rushed faster within my veins. Just like those times, I let my fingers glide over the moss shrouded rocks. Some rose higher than me, kissing their brethren, glowing brighter as I passed by.