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October 10 - October 16, 2025
Scarlett replied, biting her lip not sounding sure at all. She walked to the bed, pausing as she reached for the blankets to climb in. She opened her mouth to say something, then shut it again. She snuggled in, pulling the blankets up to her chin. “Good night, Sorin.” “Good night, Princess,” he said as he strode to the door.
“Oh yes, I have picked up a few tricks of my own,” he purred with a cruel smile. “I cannot wait to show them all to you when you return.” His touching turned proprietary. “It is strange, isn’t it, how I can control you in your own dream?”
“Hurry home, Scarlett. We almost have these wards figured out, then we are coming for them all.”
Her eyes flew open, and she found golden ones staring steadily back at her. Her shadows were swarming him, and from the red lines raked down his bare arms and chest, they had not been the caressing shadows. He did not seem to care. Ice and fire swirled around them. He took her hand and brought it to his bare chest.
She felt him tense under her fingers, and she ran her tongue across his lips, but he wouldn’t let her in. “Please, Sorin,” she whispered onto his lips. He groaned as he pulled back to look into her eyes. “Scarlett, this… I will not have the self-control not to touch you if I sleep beside you.” “You don’t want to?” she rasped out. “Gods, Love, that is all I want to do, but not… I would be a bastard to take advantage of this, when you are so vulnerable.” She could hear the longing in his voice as he held her stare. Scarlett pushed herself up into a sitting position. “I want you to touch me,
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“Shh,” Sorin murmured, pulling her into his arms. “I hear what you are saying, Scarlett. I hear you.” “Please, Sorin,” she said through her tears. She didn’t care that she was begging. She didn’t care how desperate she sounded. She just wanted to feel someone touch her who understood her, all of her. “This will not fix things, Scarlett.” Sorin’s voice was low, strained.
She felt his fingers grip the hem of her nightgown, and he paused. “Where, Love?” “Everywhere,” she breathed. Then his hand was moving back up, dragging her nightgown with it, exposing bare skin to him. She lifted her head and arms and let him slide the black silk garment off, and she felt his hardness pressing into her.
He swore at the movement, but his fingers kept moving. “I don’t know how you can even want this, how you can be this wet for me or anyone after what you have been through, Love,” he rasped. “You are simply stunning.”
At this very moment, it was just her and Sorin. She wasn’t a secret princess, and he wasn’t the Fire Prince.
The taste of him, the smell of his ashes and cedar and lush smokiness had her whimpering as his hand came up to hold her head there.
“What are you going to do with all that gold anyway?” “I already spent it on chocolates and shoes,” Scarlett answered, finishing off her bread. “All of it?” Cyrus asked, his mouth falling open. “And books, of course,” Scarlett answered, motioning for another piece of bread.
“Are those pears?” Scarlett asked, leaning over Cyrus's plate and practically crawling on the table to reach for them. Rayner sighed, picked one up, and, on a swirl of smoke, passed it to Scarlett. She sat back on the table, her feet swinging once more. She seemed so comfortable around them, as if she had lived with them her whole life, not merely stayed here for the past several days.
“Is it even possible? To merge bloodlines with a…Fae?” “Of course it’s possible,” Eliza snapped. “We have the same parts you know.”
“But with Scarlett as their mother, they would likely be powerful for demi-Fae. They would rival full-blooded Fae in power.”
Sorin’s voice went soft and impossibly gentle for the dark prince that Callan knew him to be. “It’s real, Love. Not a dream. He is here. I know you need him right now.” Tears appeared on Scarlett’s cheeks as she practically fell off the table, Sorin catching her in his arms and setting her on her feet. Amaré flew to the back of a chair. “Thank you,” she whispered, and then she was running to Cassius’s waiting arms.
She didn’t regret one bit that she’d begged him to touch her.
He had slept beside her every night since, but nothing else had happened. He was there when she’d wake screaming from nightmares and would stroke her hair or back until she had calmed and fell back to sleep, usually with her hand on his chest to remind herself she wasn’t alone.
They believe that you enacted the wards with the use of Scarlett’s ring, locking Nuri away with the orphans. She does not leave the place where we have the orphans hidden for fear of being tracked down by the Assassin Lord. If he gets ahold of her, he can apparently force her to supply information. How he would do so, Nuri cannot or will not say.
She knows quite a bit apparently, but is bound by some type of magic that does not allow her to share much.
“You walked away from Callan because you could not be your entire self with him. You were exhausted from having to keep so much hidden from him. You welcomed the cage when it came because it let you breathe for the first time in a long time.”
She and Cassius had sat down, right in the center of the bridge, side-by-side. Her head was on his shoulder, his head resting on hers. Their fingers were intertwined. He kissed the top of her head as he laughed about something she said. “No, he is not a threat to me either,” Sorin said. “I may be her twin flame, but he is her soulmate.”
“Why can’t you just tell me how to do it?” she asked. She could hear the whine in her own voice. “I have told you, it is different for everyone.
“Shush, you wicked thing,” he murmured, and the way he said it made her still. It was lust and desire mixed with awe and wonder. His mouth was so close to her ear, his breath brushed her cheek, causing the few stray hairs that had escaped her braid to tickle her skin.
As the panther neared, Scarlett reached out a hand towards it, and the panther’s silver eyes glowed as bright as starlight. She could swear the giant feline was smiling. Shirina stopped before her and bowed her head low. As the panther lifted it once more, Scarlett brought her fingers up, barely brushing its soft fur. Sorin’s breath brushed against her ear again. “Scarlett,” he whispered. “Look.” She opened her eyes, and all around her in the cavern, flames glowed. They lined the perimeter, running along the walls. Oranges and golds and reds danced amongst each other in rhythm with her own
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His eyes were wide when she came to stop over him, a feline grin on her face. With a finger, she drew a tendril of a shadow up to his face, stroking down his cheek, his jaw. She traced his lips with that shadow. Then she bent down close. His eyes were dancing with delighted amusement mixed with ravenous hunger. She stopped close enough to share breath with him. “You’re right,” she whispered. “I don’t want to kiss you again that badly.”
How did Sorin do it? That much concentration to control so little and his power was so mighty. “It gets easier,” he said quietly, as if he’d read her thoughts. “With practice, it gets easier to control until it becomes second nature.”
“See, Love, I feel like this is the problem. Either you are lying to me, or I need you so much more than you appear to need me.”
Sorin said softly, as his hand fisted gently in her hair and tilted her head back and up to him. “Sorin?” she whispered. “Yeah, Love?” His eyes were fixed on her mouth. His other hand was braced on the rock beside her hip. “I want you to kiss me again.” “Thank fuck,” he answered, his voice near guttural.
And when he gently began guiding her onto her back on that rock, she let him. He held her head in his hand, not letting it touch the hard stone
All she wanted was to feel him. She slipped her hands under his tunic, and when she lightly dragged her fingers up his spine, he shuddered against her. “Gods,” he swore, breaking their kiss. “You are…” “What?” Scarlett whispered. She kissed one corner of his mouth, then the other. “There are not words, Love. I do not think there are words to adequately describe you,” he answered, his hand sliding down her hip to her thigh once more.
Sorin answered, obliging her silent request and sliding those lips down to her throat.
She might not believe in the Fates or Samhain legends, but she certainly believed in the thoughts and nightmares that would plague her were she left alone for an entire evening.
“Do not worry, my pet. Soon enough you shall be back where you belong, and we will move forward with our plans.” “Who is we?” she asked, trying to hide her shortness of breath. He leaned down and whispered into her ear as that hand slid along her throat, down the front of the plunging neckline of her dress. “When you learn who had your mother killed, then you will know the answer to that.” Then he was gone.
Callan?
She came to a stop beside Rayner who was in black pants and a black tunic. On anyone else, they would have been considered plain, but on Rayner, they looked regal. His black mask covered his eyes and nose. Eliza grabbed his hand, dragging him to the dance floor. She laughed as Rayner grumbled something to her. Callan watched with no small amount of shock as the two began to twirl around the dance floor.
“It is almost as if I never knew her at all.”
“This is only a glimpse of who I am, Callan, and you can hardly stand to face it. The light is easy to love, isn’t it? But what of the darkness? What would you do with all of me?”
“That you are darkness incarnate and blessed by Saylah herself,” he said with a shrug.
Her eyes went back to his, where she found him looking at her like she was the only person in the room. She felt her cheeks flush and was suddenly glad for the mask, but she held his gaze. They said nothing for the rest of the dance, and their eyes did not leave each other. The world melted away, as though it were just them. The only two stars in the sky.
she went onto her tiptoes to whisper in his ear. “When you are done with your princely duties this evening, come find me.” She let her shadows curl around his ear as she stepped from him,
“Show me your darkness, and I’ll show you mine, Darling.”
Cyrus stepped farther into her shadows, flames wreathing his own wrists and winding through his hair, swirling with her shadows. “Darling, my darkness was left in a clearing, exacting revenge for my love, who was slaughtered in front of me. I can certainly dredge it back up if that’s what you desire, but I find it much more fitting to unleash it on my actual enemies.”
Scarlett held his eyes. “What was her name?” she asked softly. “Thia.” The pain that flashed across his face was heart-wrenching.
“Time. It’s hard to see a way out,” he said softly. “Most do not understand that the darkness can be beautiful, but you don’t learn that until you’ve come to understand that the darkness is not something to defeat but something to befriend. All stars are born in the dark, Scarlett. The darkness allows us to see them. You decide if they are worth fighting for.”
She held his gaze as she said quietly, tears glimmering in her eyes, “My mother was slaughtered in front of me when I was nine. Slowly. I hear her screams of pain in my sleep, but they get overshadowed by the constant replaying of when I was forced to kill my sister by plunging a dagger into her heart to save a little girl after I was raped in exchange for the freedom of my family.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret, Darling. The stars are always worth fighting for.”
A beautiful female seemed to step from the very night right in between the wolves. She had flowing mahogany hair with white flowers woven into it that seemed to float on a gentle phantom breeze. She wore a cobalt blue dress that grazed the ground and had a bracelet around her wrist along with twin swords strapped to her back.
“With who?” Callan countered. “The female who bears my sister ring,” she replied, holding up her right hand. The ring that glittered in the moonlight looked exactly like the ring he had often seen on Scarlett’s finger. The ring she had said her mother had given her.
“Surely you know the Fae are immortal, do you not? Prince Sorin himself is centuries old. She will have a Staying in a few years, and her body will age no more,” the Queen said with a wave of her hand. “And your children? Will they inherit their mother’s immortality, or shall they too waste away while she remains young, seeing her grandchildren and their children and their children’s children die as well?”
“Unless you believe she would bind her immortal life to your own? To die when you die?” “I would never ask that of her,” Callan spat. “Good,” she replied coolly,
After nearly an hour, Sorin silently got up and walked to his bookshelf, came back to the bed, ignited a soft flame, and read to her. She had no idea how long he had read, likely an hour or two, before she’d finally fallen asleep.
