Chapter Thirty
A sense of calm comes over me as I walk into the faery baths. Arcus is wrong. I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere, for I do not exist. I am a means to an end, a tool to be used. An advantage.
I have never been a person, with a fate of my own, and the only destiny I could claim has been taken.
I stand on the ledge that overlooks the pools, and eye the carved steps that lead to the ones in towers above. I don’t wish to jump. But I don’t know which to choose.
I’m mulling it over when footsteps echo in the cave entrance, and someone says, “Cenere.”
Of course, it would be Kathras. If anyone were to find me, it would be Arcus’s equally repugnant son. I turn to him and give a faint smile. “Which, do you think, would be deepest?”
His brows draw together. “Deepest?”
“I wouldn’t want to sit in something up to my waist and try to drown,” I explain with a hysterical laugh. “I need something deep. So, I can be dragged down.”
Kathras takes a step toward me. “You’ve been drinking.”
“I have.” That didn’t cross my mind when I was running. Or when I made this choice. It was the only way I could endure the party.
“Come back to the palace,” he urges me. “We can talk there.”
I laugh again. “No, we can’t! Do you know what he subjected me to when you left?”
His eyes darken. “I do.”
My breath leaves me.
“He did it once to someone I loved very much.” He holds out his hand. “Please. Come with me to the palace.”
I shake my head. “I can’t go back. I can’t. He…”
“I know.” Kathras’s eyes plead with me. “I believe you. I’ll listen to you.”
I crumple to my knees, covering my eyes. I thought I calmed after my race through the forest. I thought I cried all my tears out there. But now, the painful sobs return, shaking my entire body.
Luthian kneels beside me, leans over my back as if shielding me from some battering force. But the pain is in my chest, bursting through my ribs, ripping me apart from inside, and even the screams that echo through the cavern don’t release enough of my sorrow to heal me.
Kathras pulls me into his lap and cradles my head against his chest. “Tell me.”
Lying in his arms, I tell him about my mother. About Cadwyn Thrace’s treachery. About the revenge I wanted to take against him. I tell him how Luthian trained me, brought me to the palace in the hopes that I could climb my way through the court and exact my revenge. I don’t reveal Luthian’s plan to kill him and his father. While the penalty for treason doesn’t matter to me now, I would die before I endangered Luthian.
The whole time I talk, Kathras holds me and listens. He doesn’t ask questions or pass judgment. He listens, sympathetically stroking my hair or brushing away my tears.
“It was terrible,” I tell him, my limbs shaking at the memory of those tentacles restraining me, entering me. “I didn’t want to like it. I think he enjoys that, the most. The humiliation. I understand that pleasure and torment can entwine, and I did find pleasure in what the cephalopire subjected me to. But then… he crushed my hands. That wasn’t about dark pleasures. It was about hurting me, for no reason other than to exert his control. And now, I’m going to be mated to him.”
For the first time as I told my story, Kathras speaks. He tucks his fingers beneath my chin and lifts my gaze to his. “Cenere, I vow that you will never face that punishment again.”
“You can’t promise that,” I whisper. “No one can.”
“I can. He will never punish you with that creature again.”
I want to believe him, to feel relief at his promise. But I don’t have the strength to believe promises, anymore, and Arcus will almost certainly find worse torments. I take a breath, look away, and continue. “But the worst of it was tonight. The worst by far. He told me he had a present. It was Thrace’s head.”
Kathras stiffens. “He stole your revenge.”
His words are a lightning bolt striking my heart. He understands. Without a single word of explanation or justification, he knows exactly why this hurts me, far more than being fed to a monster.
“Oh, Cenere. I’m so sorry,” he whispers against the top of my head, tightening his arms around me.
Fresh tears spring to my eyes, but I’m beyond sobbing now. I cling to him, taking comfort in the most unlikely source. He understands.
Something changes as he holds me. His pulse quickens beneath my ear. I lift my tear-stained face and search his stricken expression. He doesn’t just understand. He grieves the loss beside me. I’m drawn into the sympathetic depths of his crystalline green eyes and reach up to touch the sharp plane of his jaw.
There is no question in his eyes, but I answer him in a whisper. “Yes.”
His mouth descends on mine and when I yield to him, he groans as if he’s lost some battle with himself. There is no fight for me. I don’t grapple with my conscience or consider the consequences. I don’t care if Arcus finds out.
There is a restrained strength in Kathras’s body that makes me want to force him to unleash it, as he did in the maze. I whimper at the memory of the hot, thick slide of him in my cunt, the euphoric fear of being chased.
But it’s different now, and somehow more frightening. He kisses me deeply, again and again, leaves me panting for air when he moves on to my throat, and then I pant for another reason. His hand slides up and down the tight silk bodice of my gown, over the tops of my breasts, to the necklace I wear.
“Who gave this to you?” he murmurs against my neck.
I swallow. “Your father.”
With a jerk of his fist, the necklace breaks and falls to the ground. I gasp, and he kisses me again, fiercely, and brings me to my feet.
He doesn’t vanish my clothes, but asks, “May I see you?”
My blood burns at the request. I reach for the laces at the front of my gown, but he passes a hand over the silk and only then does it disappear, leaving me exposed to him. He gazes at me for a long time, as if memorizing every part of me. The hand he extends toward me trembles.
“I knew,” he whispers. “In the labyrinth, I knew who you were.”
He brushes my aching nipple with the back of his fingers. “I saw you when you arrived. I wanted you then. But I knew my father would have you. I couldn’t bear to see you exploited as a show of his power. When he did it at the ritual, when he took you in front of me, I knew that it wouldn’t stop.”
“You can have me,” I say. “Not to spite your father. You can have me because I want you.”
And to spite his father, a more honest voice in my mind says. I don’t want him to take me out of spite, but I do offer myself up for the satisfaction of defying Arcus.
When I return to the palace, I’ll fuck him with his son’s cum still inside me.
I take Kathras’s hand and move it down my body, the curls that cover my sex. “Please. Take me. Erase the feeling of him in me.”
In an instant, Kathras’s clothes are gone, and he stands beautiful and naked before me. I’ve seen the lean, muscular lines of his body in the firelight at the ritual, as he’d been barely clothed then. I’d felt but never seen his cock, however, and in the light, I’m stunned at the size of it. It’s long enough that it brushes his navel, as thick as the vampire member that Luthian used on me. My cunt aches with emptiness at the sight of it.
He takes me in his arms and flies to one of the nearby pools, but I tell him, “No. That one.”
I want him to fuck me in the same pool where his father had me. I want nothing about me to belong to Arcus alone. Not even my memories.
We slip into the pool and Kathras stands me beneath one of the rushing waterfalls. It makes me laugh, but his teeth on my nipple cuts off that laughter with a sigh. The hot water cascading over me eases a tension I didn’t feel before, while Kathras’s mouth on me raises another kind. His knee parts my leg, and he brings his thigh up to fit tight against my mound.
“Make yourself come,” he murmurs against my ear. “Grind your pussy on me until you come.”
The silky water makes it easy to glide back and forth over him, as do my own juices. He sucks and teases my nipples while I ride his thigh, using my hands on his shoulders for leverage. The ring through my hood flips back and forth on each slide of my hips, and every pull of his mouth on my breasts sends sensation straight to that most sensitive part.
But it’s his voice that pushes me close to the precipice every time he lifts his head to look me in the eye and encourage me along. “That’s it. Use me for your pleasure. You deserve to come.”
I gasp and tip my head back.
“I’m going to fuck you, Cenere,” he says, a hand closing gently around my throat. “So deep and so hard that whenever you’re with anyone else, all you can think of is me. All you can feel is me. Every time you fuck my father, you’ll be fucking me in your mind. Remembering how I feel inside your tight little cunt.”
I cry out, my legs shaking with the force of the climax that takes me. This is exactly what I want. An escape from what’s to be, from the inevitable. A fantasy to replace the one that I lost when Arcus presented me with Thrace’s head.
This will do , I think, as my body bucks in his arms. This will do .
He slides me smoothly from his thigh to lift my leg around his waist. I follow with the other, feel his cock against my opening.
“Hang onto me,” he orders, and I cross my ankles behind his back, wrap my arms around his shoulders.
He unfurls his wings and we rise into the air, up and up, until the top of his head brushes the ceiling of the cavern. My stomach drops and the bottoms of my feet tingle. I shudder in fear and grip him tighter.
“Do you remember what I said?” he whispers in my ear. “How I’m going to fuck you?”
“Deep,” I moan, my body parting around the slow advance of his cock. “And hard.”
“Why?”
“So I never feel anyone but you.” I wriggle, desperate to be filled despite my precarious position. “So that I am yours.”
“You are mine,” he says, releasing my waist to grip my chin and hold his gaze to mine. “And I want to look into your eyes when you feel this.”
Kathras drops us suddenly, and I shriek in terror, until he pulls up short and uses the force of the stop to thrust the whole, enormous length of him into me. The thickness of his shaft stretches my cunt and I wail in relief. He lifts me up, so that just the tip of him rests inside me and does it again. Another short drop, another deep thrust. He grips the hair at the nape of my neck, never takes his eyes from mine as we fall together over and over, until his toes touch the surface of the pool.
We rise again, up and up, all the way to the ceiling once more, and I brace myself for another exhilarating drop.
Instead, he pries my arms from around his neck and lifts me over his head, pressing my shoulders to the rough stone. His wings beat steadily, lifting him closer, and he tilts us back until I am splayed atop him, the ceiling at my back, his knees against the stone, his body the only thing stopping me from plummeting to my death.
A death which only moments before wouldn’t have frightened me quite so much. And that fear, just as Luthian promised, makes the pleasure so much better as Kathras strokes into me, hard and fast, his wide shaft tugging at my clit. It’s terrifying. It’s ecstatic. The fear and pleasure spike higher and higher, and I wonder if, when I come, I will fall, spasm out of Kathras’s grasp and plunge down, a scream of release my last words. I’m so close, I don’t care. I chase my climax, meeting his thrusts, moaning with his own strained shouts. I come screaming, wetness bursting over us both, raining down to the cavern floor.
He grabs me in his arms and we spiral back down to the pool, splashing into the water before the final waves of my orgasm have a chance to subside, while I’m still moaning and gasping.
“I hope you don’t think we’re finished,” he groans against my ear.