by Ella Fields
I looked down at the babe in my arms when her eyes widened from the revelry, willing her to remain calm, letting her know all was okay.
All was just as it should be.
“Welcome to Inkerbine,” Eline called into the megaphone when Raiden moved to light the torches on either side of the stage. “Eat, drink, dance, and celebrate your neighbors—welcome your new friends and your brighter futures.”
Silver and gold sparks flew toward the sky. Cheering shook the earth beneath the podium we stood upon, and Rosemary squawked and threw her arms out to Zad, who gaped at her, some people on the grass below us laughing.
Smirking, I passed her over and watched as he held her tiny body in his huge arms against his chest, her long lashes beating as she gazed up at him.
Zad’s puzzled expression soon melted into gentle affection, and when he looked at me with a heat in his eyes that spelled trouble, I shot him a glare and directed him and Raiden’s spawn down the steps.
TEN SUMMERS LATER
“Who hit you?” I said, ready to throw them in the dungeon or string them up in the market square.
Pane giggled, uncaring that my tone hinted at someone meeting their end. At seven summers of age, he was already so much like his father that he never did. “Hali.”
With the hem of her nightgown between her teeth, Halina paused, the nightgown falling as she shrank to her knees on her bed. “I’m sorry, Mama, but he deserved it.” Her voice stayed firm, her eyes blue fire as she acted worried when we both knew she was not. “Truly, he did.”
Sighing, I kissed Pane’s forehead and tugged his bedding up to his chin. Then I rose and placed my hands before me, holding them and my daughter’s gaze as I waded over to her bed.
“Reason?” I demanded.
“He said I was as ugly as a pile of soiled snow.”
I refrained from rolling my eyes and shot a bland look at Pane over my shoulder. He’d wisely turned on his side, feigning sleep.
“So I did what you told me to do and stood up for myself.”
“You hit him,” I said. “With what?”
“With my hairbrush.” Our eyes stayed locked as I waited. “Twice.”
I waited some more.
“And I might have kicked him where the wind doesn’t blow.”
Darkness murder me or bring me wine.
“You do remember what I told you, do you not?” I arched an eyebrow. She might have only been four summers old, but she was more intelligent than anyone besides her father and I gave her credit for. With the exception of Mintale, who was notorious for stealing both younglings away to help him with special castle duties that always turned into tea parties, magic shows, and sparring matches with wooden swords.
“Because despite what your brother says, you are beautiful, but you are also smart.” With her russet-colored hair and those eyes, she was bound to give us and many a creature a world of heartache. I gave her a look that had her eyes bulging. “I expect you to remember that.”
“Yes, Mama,” she mumbled. “Then I shall only hit him once next time.”
I blinked. “You will come to your father or me before doing any such thing.”
“But you said...”
“That you should defend yourself? Most certainly, and with anyone else, you should.” Grumbling, I muttered, “Funny that you can remember that.”
“Huh?”
“Excuse me, pardon me,” I said, exasperated, then lowered to sit on her bed and tug her nightgown free of her teeth once more. “Hali, words, someone else’s opinion of you, only matter if you let them, remember that.”
“So,” she said, scrunching up her little nose as she grabbed my hand to toy with the onyx ring her father had slid onto my finger during our private ceremony over ten summers ago. “I can hurt people as long as they’re not Pane?”
“If necessary, then of course.”
Zad cursed from the doorway, and I heard him shift.
“How much?”
I gestured for her to lie down and stood. “It depends on what they do, I suppose.”
Zad coughed. “I think that’s enough for tonight.”
Biting back a laugh, I couldn’t kill my smile as he finally entered the room. “You can quit avoiding the responsibility of disciplining your offspring now.” I patted his chest. “Crisis solved.”
“Thank the fates,” Zad drawled with mock relief, and his spawn giggled, not seeing the way he reached down to quickly pinch my ass before moving to their beds.
“Come now, it’s time for rest.”
Hali ducked under his wing as soon as he lowered to her bed, pulling it out and over herself.
“Darkness,” Zad said with feigned confusion. “Wherever did she go?”
Pane laughed. “Don’t act silly when we know you’re not, Papa. We are too old.”
“Papa will always be silly,” Hali said, popping her head between Zad’s arm and his side, then giggling when he caught her.
Zad pulled her onto his lap, and his smile sobered. “Sleep time, little princess.”
She sighed, slinging her arms around his neck. “Kiss first.”
He gave her three, then rolled her onto the bed where he gave her another before tucking her in. “No more hitting.”
“But Mama says—”
Zad must have worn a look that silenced her, then turned to Pane.
He crossed to our son’s bed and crouched down beside it, sweeping his fingers across his forehead, shifting dark brown hair from his amber eyes. “Are you sorry?”
Pane nodded. “I told her so after the first time she blood—” He swallowed at the rising of Zad’s brows. “After she whacked me.”
Zad stared at him for a moment. “You said so to stop her from retaliating, but did you mean it?”
“Not then,” he admitted. “But she already knows she’s not ugly.”
Hali harrumphed. Zad shushed her and finished talking quietly with Pane.
“Papa,” Hali yawned when Zad pressed a kiss to Pane’s head before rising to his full, shadow scattering height. “When do we go back home? Temika promised she’d have some log cakes.”
Home.
We spent more time in Beldine than in the Moon Kingdom, though we did try to make sure we were in both places long enough to see to every matter that needed our attention before leaving.
I knew it would be tedious, some weeks busier than any we’d had before, but I’d never expected to love it. To enjoy dividing my time between the two places I’d come to love.
Zadicus had handed over the running of his estate to Emmiline, but we made sure to spend a few nights there each time we returned to Rosinthe.
“No, she promised me,” Pane said, his little gray wings rustling the blankets.
“Did not,” Hali snapped, who had no wings of her own—for which I was thankful. Darkness only knew what trouble she’d have found herself in otherwise.
“Enough,” I said in an iced tone, and they both stilled. “Sleep, or I shall force you to watch me eat every piece of cake when we return while you eat nothing but vegetables.”
Zad snorted, placing books back on their shelves and blowing out the few lit candles.
Both younglings, mercifully, promised they’d behave as Zad bid them both good night.
Their nursemaid, a friend of Berron’s, nodded to us out in the hall before he entered their room to watch over them.
Unnecessary, most probably, but with temperaments that saw them both squabbling more than they got along, and fledgling abilities making themselves known when their tempers got heated, I thought it best to take every precaution possible.
Not to mention the fact that running two kingdoms meant I needed some damned sleep. And time to unwind with my husband beforehand if I should be so lucky.
Tonight, it seemed, I would be, as Zad pushed me into the wall around the corner and pressed his mouth over mine. “You’re going to turn our daughter into a spitfire.”
“Darling,” I purred, dragging my lips over his jaw to nip
the lobe of his arched ear, “I hate to disappoint you, but a spitfire she already is.”
His hands squeezed my hips, roaming up to cup my breasts. “She could never disappoint me.”
I sought his lips, and he gave them to me. “She’s just like me.” Only, she’d been blessed with a loving, doting father. Not a cruel, unfeeling monster who would scare her into compliance like my own had with me.
Zad laughed. “This fact is not lost on anyone who has met her, and that”—he framed my face in his large, calloused hands—“is precisely why she could never be anything other than perfect.”
Releasing a sharp breath, I climbed him, and he caught me with an ease that spoke of many summers, many winters, many springs, many triumphs and downfalls—all of them together.
For there had been many an unexpected conflict with he and I, and within our two colliding worlds, but we never gave in to any of it.
We took a breath, we took our time, and we figured it out.
Wading up the stairs and down the hall to our rooms, he didn’t remove his mouth from mine, the doors opening silently and closing just the same.
He stripped me of my robe, and I tugged at his tunic until he tore it off, kicking his boots and pants aside as quick as lightning.
Upon the bed, he crawled over me, his fingers brushing over my legs. They parted more and more, the higher his touch climbed. He bypassed my mound to land on the faintest of scars from where our second child had been cut from my womb after perishing mere weeks before she was due.
A ritual of his I didn’t dare take from him. Instead, I quit breathing, as I always did, when his mouth lowered for his lips to worship the mark that soon wouldn’t be visible.
I hadn’t yet decided if I wanted it to leave, but I did know it didn’t matter—that he would forever know where it had been, and I would, too.
All our lives, we were taught to expect the death of a babe at some point, and therefore not to mourn what shouldn’t have been.
I couldn’t and didn’t accept that, and it’d taken years for the pain to lessen. Even after Halina had arrived screaming and darkness-bent on turning everyone’s worlds upside down, and years later, it still scorched me anew to think of the what-ifs.
And so I’d said I wouldn’t do it again. I’d vowed not to after losing our first daughter, and Zad, though I knew he’d rather we try again, had only wished me happiness and agreed.
Then we’d discovered I was expecting once more.
We’d fought, oh, how I’d screamed, begging him to tell me why he’d do such a thing when he’d known I could not bear it again. He’d insisted he hadn’t meant to, hadn’t known he’d spilled himself inside me intending to create life.
I’d believed him. He could not lie, after all, but even so, we’d walked on eggshells for months until Halina arrived, and for months after as we waited to see if she’d thrive or weaken.
She’d thrived all right.
In his grief, Zad had unknowingly impregnated me—the longing for what we could not get back, could not have, unable to be suppressed.
It no longer mattered. What mattered was that we’d survived and that we’d learned through every jagged, breaking piece of our hearts that we could go on to survive anything.
When his teeth grazed my nipple, I purred, my back arching and my hands reaching for the satin skin of his arms, feeling the bulging muscle beneath as he leaned over me to give me his mouth.
He could read my intention, yet he didn’t protest when I pushed at his chest and rolled to his back. With his wings kissing the nightstands, my work of art, my heart and soul, my demise and my future, laid his worshipping hands upon my hips, and awaited my next move.
I rose onto my knees, ready to impale myself on the twitching member beneath me, when a gleam lit those eyes, and I was lifted into the air.
My hands smacked against the wood of the headboard, my eyelids fluttering as my knees came to rest either side of his head and his eager tongue met my center.
A deep-throated groan accompanied the next swipe, and I mewled, desperate for more but shivering from the slow torture. Back and forth, he licked and sucked, his grip on my hips growing firmer as I came closer to erupting.
Then with a sudden swiftness that made my nails score into the wood, he flicked me apart, and I came with a silent scream. I was still unraveling when he lifted me down his body and slid me onto his waiting cock.
Shaking, I fell forward, and his fingers brushed the hair from my face before he tipped my chin to watch me with hooded eyes.
The fire crackled, the candles in the sconces guttering as a harsh wind shook the glass of the windows.
“I love you,” I declared to his chest and kissed his sweltering skin.
“Every time you say those words, it still feels like the first time.” Grabbing the back of my head, he said with silken roughness, “I’ll never tire of hearing them, nor take them for granted.”
I swallowed, knowing he spoke the truth. “Then you are as wise as you are handsome.”
He grinned, a creature of immense strength holding back as I rose and began to rock over him. “You say them more as each summer passes.” His nostrils widened when his eyes darted to where we’d joined, then back to mine. “Have you noticed?”
Stilling my hips, I held back a moan, feeling so deliciously full as I breathed into the crisp yet charged air between us, “You’ve changed me in ways I’m still getting to know, but”—my teeth scraped over my bottom lip—“my sneaky, heart-stealing king...” I heard his breathing slow as I said gently, “I find I do not mind.”
He sat up, sinking impossibly deeper inside me, so much of him pressing on every place I needed him that it stole my breath and quickened my heartbeat.
That wicked smile grew, and he smoothed my hair over my shoulders, wings tucking around us. His hand came to lay over my breast, over the thundering beat of my heart, and I swore it expanded, trying to reach his palm. “Because you’re mine.”
Total darkness encompassed us, soft feathers rubbing at my shoulders and arms. It was my favorite type of darkness, where nothing but us existed. The heady scent of him was everywhere, inescapable, and his eyes so bright I couldn’t look away.
My nail met his chin, lifting it for my nose to skim his. “For all eternity.”
With our breaths colliding, his hand drifting to roam up my back and into my hair, he whispered my favorite vow, “Eternally my queen.”
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Enjoy The Stray Prince? You might also enjoy Bloodstained Beauty...
Fresh out of college and headed straight for my dream job, I didn’t think things could get any better.
Then I met my dream man.
In an instant, my happy ever after had begun.
The life I’d stumbled into was beautiful, and the man I loved was perfect.
But perfection comes at a cost,
and I’d slumbered through all the alarms.
Then I met my nightmare.
The man whose bright eyes held untamed darkness.
The man who disarmed me with his peculiar behavior.
The man whose cold, merciless hands shook me awake.
In an instant, questions started to dismantle my happy ever after.
But whoever said the truth would set you free was wrong.
It wasn’t going to repair the cracks in my naive heart.
It wasn’t going to caress my face with comforting hands and reassure me it was all just a dream.
No, the truth shoved me down a rabbit hole, and I landed in the lair of a real-life monster.
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STANDALONES:
Bloodstained Beauty
Serenading Heartbreak
Frayed Silk
Cyanide
Evil Love
A King So Cold
MAGNOLIA COVE:
Kiss and Break Up
Forever and Never
Hearts and Thorns
GRAY SPRINGS UNIVERSITY:
Suddenly Forbidden
Bittersweet Always
Pretty Venom