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“That’s right,” I said. “A curtsy would have been good. Kneeling, too. Might want to use those legs before I break them all.”
My brother snickered. “She put a dagger through your gut, and you want to know how she is?” After his outburst, he rubbed a hand over his eyes and took a seat again. “So, how is she then?”
A sense of threat touched the back of my neck, but my magic didn’t stir in response. To her, it never would. For her, always.
“You should have prayed that I wasn’t. You should have prayed that my uncle had truly killed me.” I shook my head. “I would have chased after you. Every afterlife, heaven or hell, I would have searched it all.”
Nia snorted, but I gave the big mouthed red head a glare. “One day, carrot, I will feed you to a nice little, white rabbit.” Pen stopped all of a sudden and turned to me, tears pooling on her lashes and her adorable freckled face twisted in a cry. I cringed at the sight. There was something about people and their crying faces. “Calm, Pen. I was just fooling around.” Her lip wobbled and she sniffled between sobs. “It’s the first time you’ve spoken to me since that morning in Adriata.” Tears chased a stream down her face. “You sleep down in the dungeons, eat alone, bathe alone, dress alone,
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“Stay still, you brat.” He pulled up the trousers all the way to my hips and fastened them with the ties.
“What does my wife want to stay out of?” Kilian’s voice boomed against the glen where the training grounds stretched. And like a dark command, everything seemed to halt at its might.
“You look pretty up there,” he said, smiling, and I noted I was straddling his waist. My hand shot to wrap around his throat and his mouth pulled up to a massive grin. “Harder, love.”
Sliding under my arm, she clicked the balcony doors open and backed away towards its edge. Her eyes never left mine as she brought the dagger to her tongue and licked my blood away from the blade. After throwing me a wink, she bolted out of sight.
I had to rest a hand on the glass to steady myself. Hells. All damned hells. This woman was making me crave punishment like a man starved for pain.
She sneered at my smile. “Trust me, if I had slept a little less before I came to you, I’d have convinced you to join my cult.” “Already convinced. Been a follower for a long time.” A long, long time. I stood and kissed the crown of her head. “Goddess of my heart, it’s sunrise. You’re free from me.”
She turned to face me. “My ma is a star.” “Mine is a winter sky.”
“You’ve let her wait at the gates all night?” The soldier winced a bit. “We didn’t think much of it.” “What was she going to do to me? Take me down with her crutches?”
“Then why do it?” “Because she needs me to be this.” She needs a villain and I would gladly be it no matter the cost.
“Castemont,” I called at him, not taking my eyes off my gorgeously angry wife. “Her last name is Castemont.”
He pulled back and slapped my bottom enough to sting. The smack shook me to my senses, too. Palming and kneading the burn away he said, “Now get off my cock. My brother has enough trauma as it is.”
“It’s alright,” he sighed, fully missing most of his vowels. “I love us enough.”
“When that friend shares his room with his wife, and when that friend’s wife is curious to see if you’d bleed more if you were hung upward on a hook or pierced through with a stick like a little skewered chick.”
“Get out, Mal,” I said, standing. “Stay,” Snow said. My brother looked between the two of us, confused. “The power balance is totally throwing me off right now.”
“That the only woman I’ll ever touch is you. The only woman I love is you. And the only woman I want is you. And I’d rather not call you a whore.” Leaning in to get washed in her flowery perfume that I’d missed, I said, “Unless you want me to. And still, you wouldn’t be any whore, you would be mine.”
I grabbed her face, bringing it close to mine. “If I fuck you, no one else ever will. If I fuck you, love of mine, you will want to fuck no one else.”
“Love, what are you doing?” “Thinking.” I stood to fill a quarter of the tumbler. “And can I get you to engage in a less dangerous pastime?”
“Where is my missus?” he asked, looking around the room and I sat up a bit. “There she is. Scowling at me.” He grinned. “Perfect.”
“Ask, Snow. Say, Kilian, I want you to make me come.” I ran my finger over her pretty nose. “Say, Kilian, I want to come on your tongue. Say, Kilian, touch me. Touch my pretty cunt till it’s weeping.” Fuck, just ask. I am losing my mind just to have a bite of you.
“Ask. Just ask and I’ll be at your feet. Or do you want to hear me beg for a taste of you? Do you want me to beg for you to come on my tongue? I could bet you taste as sweet as heavens, my sweet villain.”
“Taste that?” he asked, tongue darting to lick my lips coated with my taste. “That's what’s mine tastes like.”
All of his scars taught me a lot about him. How good his memory was, how many he had, how much attention he paid to everyone and everything, how he never blamed anyone else for them but himself.
“Because I am twisted like that. And because I know once this is over, I will enjoy the look of hurt on you more than your death.” His grip around me tightened and I ground on him, feeling every inch of his body touch mine. “Gods, I love it when you speak murder to me.”
“I thought your knee hurt.” “There is this one prayer,” he said, kissing his way up my thigh. “That I’d like to leave at this altar.”
“If I remember correctly,” Kilian said, placing another buttered slice next to my bowl and leaning in to whisper the rest, “I didn’t actually fuck you on the bed.” I raised a brow. “Want me to call him back?” He gripped my jaw with a hand and licked the corner of my lip. “Perhaps I ought to just fuck you on the bed then.”
He made to say something to me, but shyly retracted back, a red flush creeping on his face. What in the heavens?
“You taste heavenly, my sweet sin,” he whispered over my mouth before crushing his lips to mine again. Kissing Kilian Castemont was like walking through fire on a rainy day. Kissing Kilian Castemont was agony—kissing him was the sweetest agony. It made me want to suffer.
“The last time I let you dress me I almost suffered a stroke. No, thank you.”
“Enough chatter.” He put my foot down before gathering me up and slinging me over his shoulder like a sack of soil. “You’ve dirtied me, you moronic piece of Adriatian flesh,” I shouted, wiggling like mad. He smacked my bottom, hard. “Reason for you to bathe with me.”
“I will kill you.” “Sure,” he said, throwing an arm over my shoulder. “Let me know when, I’ll wash my hair first.” I took a bite of my crescent cake. “Fear me, Mal.” He fashioned a bow. “Yes, Your Majesty.”
“I don’t know why or how or when it became so but it is so. I told her my darkest secret and she told me about hers. After that it became addicting, and I told her all of them. Thora Isa Skygard owns every and each of my darkest secrets. If someone can bring me down, it would be her.” My little sister had dark secrets—ones that she kept from me. “She can't keep secrets well, you know.” He smiled a little to himself. “She’s kept mine.”
Immediately, Mal ran after her and returned dragging her behind him. “I don’t want to go.” She writhed, trying to pull away from him, but he was much, much stronger than her. He grabbed her jaw with a hand and turned her face to me. “Say bye bye.” “Bye bye,” she mumbled between squished cheeks before the two faded away.
Mal chased after me, looking around my dungeons astounded. “I like the decor. It has personality. What paint is that? It’s given the wall a nice texture.” “Blood.”
“I will go with them,” Thora said and then turned to Lazarus with a cold bored gaze. “And you might sit down, feathered man, no one asked for you to defend anyone. Certainly not your queen from your king—her husband might I remind you.”
She shivered a little. “They terrify me. The other night I dreamed that one made a nest in my skull. Read it in a book once, they like hollow places and hide in large animal carcasses.” Mal huffed and gave me an incredulous look. “Let us all pray it is badgers that try to chase us away.” She shot him a glare while mounting an arrow on her bow. “It could be worse. I could be afraid of women that I don’t pay to fuck.”
We all looked around and saw the real damage she’d made to the forest. For miles and miles, you could only see ice and frost, even the murky black mist had turned an ashen grey almost resembling snow. Mal let out a low whistle. “The dire wolf indeed.”
At that moment everything felt right. He felt right. This was right. I lowered my lips to his and kissed him. He was still so cold—he was never this cold. I pulled back to stare at him, to stare at his beautiful face. And then I kissed him again. Senseless. Breathless. Utterly consumed. I kissed him like he was my lifeline. And he kissed me back like I was his. I was his and he was mine how it had always been. How it would always be. Always.
“I love you.” She recited the word in every language and then in Darsan. I pulled back a little. “You learned it in Darsan too? Now I can get it up for you in the bedroom.”
“Love,” I said carefully. “You told me you loved me, sucked me, my cock is still out for that matter, and now you want to take me dancing?” She shrugged and reached to put me in my britches before buttoning my fly. “Could have gone worse. I could have made you dance first.” She stood, brushed a hand over her hair and gave me a beaming smile. “How do I look?” “Magnificent.”
Even though the tarp of the moon goddess hung above us carrying one of her finest works, what stood before me was unmatched. I was born an adorer of night, but I’d forever live and die as her worshipper.
“My hellcat is so polite and quiet when I fill her cunt. Maybe I should stay buried in you all the time.”
“Of all the babies I’m going to put in you.” Oh. The thought made my toes curl. Would we ever be able to have a family of our own? With what we were? “Will you feed them to me?” He chuckled and leaned to whisper in my ear. “If you keep swallowing me, yes.”
I want you to fall in love with yourself, too. To love this person that you are as I do, as your family does. Terrible is a word I wish you would never use for the woman who is the most magnificent to me.”
“If Urinthia has disappeared,” Thora said, narrowing her eyes on the floor. “Why hasn’t Mal and Nia returned from Eldmoor?”
“You stink like a fisherman. I suppose old smells are hard to get rid of.” “I was no fisherman,” he snarled. Indeed, pride was so easy to injure. Men held onto it like those three hairs on their chin that refused to grow into a beard but were insistent that it would someday grow into one.
