6. Dungeon #2
My dreams had been warning me about it for months before my twenty-first birthday—before I met the High King and stepped through the gateway into Faerie.
It was the vision the Oracle had chosen to show me in the human world, a prophecy from fate, and I had allowed it to be decreed because I willingly watched it happening to him.
How shamefully I had longed for it every night.
Strength abandoned me, and I leaned into Lucais’s side, though I didn’t know what use it would be.
I couldn’t save him. I hadn’t figured out who was hurting him—although the Malum were the most obvious guess—or how they’d managed to entrap him.
I didn’t know why I was there with him in the first place, aside from the instantaneous and glaring idea that he’d brought me down to the dungeon to show me something and they’d ambushed him—
Light.
A flare of light split the room into a million pieces as an orb appeared at our side, dozens more following it, and Lucais moved with the speed of an apex predator, pinning me to the closest wall. I gasped. The damp stone was bitterly cold as it seeped through my clothes in search of skin.
“Little beast.” Lucais’s mouth was at my ear, his breath warm and sweet as it caressed my face, the scent of him intoxicating.
Tingles shot down the side of my neck, straight to my nipples, and then lower, causing a heated tension to wake up and stretch in my belly. “You’re starting to make me nervous.”
I gulped. “You should be,” I whispered thickly.
And for the very first time, I actually wished I could tell him.
Nose skating along my cheekbone, his lashes tickled the bridge of my nose, and his mouth was dangerously close to mine when he murmured, “ Why? ”
Because—
Something clutched my throat, cutting off the oxygen.
I haven’t even opened my mouth yet.
Fear nipped at my fingers and toes. At that moment, I realised I was going to die trying to tell him the truth.
I was going to die because there was an ancient and powerful magic willing to kill me to prevent the words from leaving my lips, and I suddenly could not stand the fact that he didn’t know what would happen to him down there.
Death was the better option.
God, I wished things were different. But Lucais needed to know, and I needed to be the one to tell him. I had been scared and silenced for far too long, and I wasn’t about to keep doing it.
My head bobbed, my throat working as I tried to force a breath of air inside my body, to swallow, to do anything —
Alarm flashed in my eyes, and Lucais’s head reared back, an incensed type of confusion marring his features.
“Auralie.” He scanned my face, catching the tension in my throat, the terror in my eyes. “ Auralie. ” His voice was strained, tighter than normal. “What is it?” he asked, palm slapping against the stonework beside my head. His eyes were frantic as they assessed me from head to toe. “ Where is it?”
My hand searched for his, snatching it and placing it flat against my rib cage, directly beneath my breasts, where my lungs had been disabled.
I couldn’t move them—couldn’t even feel them.
His forehead creased, mouth twisting as he made the connection, and then he moved his hand to my throat while I choked on magic.
He felt the muscles contracting, felt the absence of air, and put his hand over my mouth.
Oh, like that’s helpful—
Wedging his thumb and forefinger between my lips, he pried my mouth open, but even then, the air would not come in.
“You really can’t breathe,” he exclaimed, and my annoyance was dulled by my current predicament. “Fuck. How—”
Thank the High Mother, Lucais figured out that the question he was about to ask was an insensitive waste of my very limited time because he didn’t complete it.
As his voice broke off, the edges of my vision went black and blurry, and the orbs of light he had summoned into the dingy little room with us began to look more like stars.
He grabbed both of my hands in one of his, pinning them to the wall above my head and ignoring the withering look I tried to give him.
Then he took a deep breath, and his lips crashed against mine, searing with heat and bursting with oxygen.
Lucais’s mouth sent an entire lungful of air into my body, breaching the boundary line sewn between my lips by the magical entity working to subdue me forever.
My chest was heaving as I breathed him in hungrily, the feeling of his mouth on mine like breaking through the surface of a murderous ocean, and every time I gulped down one breath of fresh air, I found myself clawing at him for more so I could keep my head above the water.
Dazed, I thought I might have bitten him in my desperation—but he tasted like honey, not blood. I angled my head to allow his mouth to cover more of mine, to facilitate deeper access, begging him for more , more, more .
He gave it to me, his hand forming a tight manacle around my wrists as he took my breath as his own and replaced it with everything I’d ever been missing.At last, my violent gasps softened into something less destructive and more desirable, and it was then that his tongue flicked out to taste me.
The movement was quick—so quick I wondered if he’d even meant to do it at all, but then he groaned and pushed his body onto me, crushing me against the wall, his chest flush against mine, his hips digging into me.
His hand fell from its place around my wrists and moved to cradle my face as his tongue pushed inside my mouth, the other hand gripping my side with enough force to bruise in the exact shape and design of his fingerprints as I met each stroke of his tongue with one of my own.
The sound of my panting morphed into a moan as a feeling of desire swelled in my chest and reached for him.
I was begging him. My body was begging him, desperate to make up for a thousand years of lost memories, like nothing he gave me would ever be enough to cover the eternity for which we were destined.
Lucais responded as if he knew that and would never stop trying.
My whole body was alert and alive, my heart pounding wildly in my chest. My lungs felt so full of oxygen that I might never need to break my mouth away from Lucais’s again.
As my hands fell from the wall, any resolve to steer clear of him crumbling away like that sandcastle underneath waves of perseverance, I tangled my fingers in his hair, whimpering with ecstasy as his teeth nipped my lower lip.
His hair was as soft as silk. My fingertips felt like they were being coated in pure, molten gold as they combed through the messy strands, pressing into his scalp like they’d find somewhere permanent to land.
I gripped a handful and tugged gently and—
You better fucking stop that.
His voice was in my mind. And his tone… He wasn’t annoyed that I had pulled on his hair. He was turned on .
I writhed against him, a small groan escaping from my throat that Lucais swallowed into his own, and he slowed the kiss, pulling my tongue into his mouth and sucking.
He explored me so deeply that the back of my head scraped against the wall, the stonework grinding into my hair and scalp with the intensity of his touch.
Then he moved, the hand digging into my hip relaxing so he could wrap his arm around my waist, pulling me flush against him.
I felt his erection pressing into me, thick and hard and pulsating above the place in my body where it belonged.
My chest heaved, but as my tongue tangled with his and I explored the edge of his top teeth, a thought occurred to me. A very dangerous yet necessary idea.
I have to show you something.
I waited to see if it had worked, if he could hear me through the bond the same way I’d heard him.
He nipped at my mouth and nodded his head, still half lost in the kiss.
As he licked over the spot his teeth had caught, I wrapped my arms around the back of his neck so tightly it would have been a stranglehold on anyone else.
And then I showed him.
While I did, Lucais kissed me, indulgently turning his head from one side to the other to ensure he was taking advantage of every possible angle into my mouth. His movements were slow and gentle, the pleasure inflicted upon me by his tongue, teeth, and lips both unrelenting and maddening.
Even as I showed him memories of the nightmares in which he was tortured, he sent pulses of ecstasy and heat rippling through me, his mouth never leaving mine.
The dungeon. A cold, damp floor. Thinning bed of straw in the corner, an overturned bucket plated with iron at its side, and a threadbare blanket crumpled on the ground. Your shoulders trembling beneath the grip of two dark figures. I can’t make them out. I don’t know who they are. I’m trying…
Lucais’s hand slid down from my lower back, cupping my ass and squeezing. He hitched one of my legs around his waist, securing my body against his, and smoothed his hand beneath my thigh, leaving a trail of warmth behind.
Your tattoos. They shove your head into a bucket.
Repeatedly. Hold you there. I see the mist from their breath clouding above your head.
It’s so cold and damp. Your body falls still.
Limp. They pull you out, your head lolls to the side, and they drop you on the stonework.
The sound is gutting. I can’t move. I can’t reach you. I never reach you.
Lucais’s tongue swiped my lower lip as he murmured, “ More. ”
And I knew that, while the evidence of his enjoyment was still straining against his pants and wedged up against my body, he was not talking about the kiss.