6. Dungeon #3
The sharp scrape of an iron bar being dragged across the ground.
The hollow ring echoes. It hurts my ears.
You’re coming around again. They move so fast the bar whips through the air like a whistle, cracking like thunder as it makes contact with your—ugh!
I don’t know what. Okay? I always close my eyes here.
I don’t want to look. You’re covered in burn marks and bruises.
There’s blood all over your body, the ground.
It’s been going on like this for months. Lucais—
“Hmm.” He hummed into my mouth, tugging at my upper lip with his teeth, and I sensed that he was about to pull away.
My fingers tightened in his hair and yanked his mouth back to mine. Our profiles fit like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. We stood with our foreheads pressed together, panting into each other’s mouths.
Lucais, they’re going to kill you.
His voice entered my mind again, the sound a sensual caress without a hint of distress. No, little beast, they’re not. But you might if you don’t let go of me.
Like a rubber band snapping, my arms fell away from him, and the High King stumbled backwards until he hit the opposite wall with a sudden thud.
It knocked the breath out of him in a ragged sigh.
His lips were swollen, glistening with my kisses, and there was a wild look in his eyes as he stared at me, chest heaving.
I touched the place he’d bitten me with the tip of my tongue, tasting the tang of my own blood mixed with the honey-sweet remnants of his mouth, and then I tried to speak to him in my mind again.
I’m sorry.
With a sharp exhale of breath, he rested the back of his head against the wall and responded out loud. “For what?”
“For all of that.”
He laughed—softly, weakly, but it was real. “Little beast, don’t worry. That is not the kind of torture I am destined to suffer through at your hands. You don’t need to apologise for it.”
I gawked at him. “I would have tried to tell you sooner, but…”
“I’m glad you told me now,” he said, his tone full of composure and reassurance. It made me question his sanity. “I was growing concerned for you.”
Had he not seen what I’d seen?
Maybe I’d convinced myself it was Wrenlock back in the House because he was a nicer option than my snarky blond escort, but the visions were as clear as day in the dungeon. Lucais was being tortured in my mind, and I’d just given him a front-row seat.
“You were?” I arched an eyebrow because I was growing concerned for him .
Lucais’s shoulders moved with a sigh, and he slipped his hands into his pockets. “Aura,” he began with a stern look, “I’ve wanted to know about your nightmares since the very first time I learned you’d been having them.”
I blinked at him in a stupor. That was… months ago.
My mother had spilled the beans in front of him in our kitchen, after he saved her life during the caenim attack and sat upon our antique washing machine like it was a throne, talking about how the High King of Faerie was the most handsome and clever person we’d ever met—
Oh, isn’t hindsight a bitch?
I chewed on my lower lip. “Why didn’t you ever ask?”
The High King blew out a long breath, filling the chasm of space between us with the echoes of magic and a place to call home.
My stomach clenched with desire at the sight of him relaxed against the wall, his clothes and hair dishevelled by my hands, his mouth swollen and plump with the effects of what it had done with mine.
I felt a tug, like he was trying to call it back on his end, and so I slapped the feeling away.
Disowned it.
“I wanted you to come to me with them when you were ready,” he confessed, glancing up at me through long lashes.
“You made it quite clear that they were private, and you wanted me to have nothing to do with them in the first place. But I figured out that, at the very least, they involved me somehow.”
I frowned, and the corners of his mouth twitched.
“You woke up screaming my name in that cottage like you were dying,” he explained, and I remembered how he had come rushing in to comfort me when I woke up in a confused, petrified sweat, only to drop me onto the hard floor when I’d ordered him away.
“Based on that alone, I imagined that what you were dreaming about was pretty gruesome because that’s certainly not the way you scream my name when I make you come. ”
I pulled a face. “You haven’t—we haven’t had sex—”
“Yet,” he interrupted, inclining his head suggestively. “I was referring to when we do it in my head.”
My heart thudded, but I rolled my eyes. “That will absolutely never happen,” I vowed, trying to make my expression resemble a deeply rooted sense of disgust. “You’d die trying.”
The colour in his eyes flickered with heat. “I do love to prove you wrong, don’t I?”
“You’ll be waiting a while. A long while.”
“Will I?” he challenged. “Because you were halfway there with only my mouth on yours. Imagine what I could do when I put it elsewhere.”
I scoffed, but I felt my saliva thickening in my throat. “You’ve been misinformed.”
“You should close your legs then because that’s where my informant lives.” He paused, surveying me with a feline gaze. “Unless the scent of your arousal is lying to me, and you’re thinking about someone else when I’m kissing you.”
My thighs squeezed together as blood flooded to my cheeks, igniting them with a toxic concoction of shame and desire. I hadn’t been thinking of anyone else, but there was some merit to the argument that perhaps I should have been.
“I really thought you didn’t care about the dreams,” I admitted, offering up a different truth for the sake of changing the subject.
Lucais hesitated as if he didn’t want to speak the next thought that came into his mind. “Why didn’t you try to tell anyone else?” he wondered. “Like…Wrenlock?”
Is that jealousy in his eyes?
“It won’t let me,” I confided. “What happened then… It happens every time, and I didn’t trust any of you.
I still don’t trust you now, but when I first arrived here, I didn’t know who anyone was or what they wanted.
Thanks to you .” I glared at him, and he held his hands up, palms facing me in mock surrender.
“None of you were worth it. Not even…” I trailed off, unwilling to say the High Lady’s name.
He rolled his eyes, half-shrugging as he pushed away from the wall. “Fair call. Stupid, but fair.”
A sense of fury reared its head in my chest again, taking the place of the heat from his touch. “Don’t call me stupid!”
The High King gave me a scornful look. “Don’t act like it then.”
“Oh,” I groaned. “I hate you.”
“Mmm.” He stepped over to me, and I bristled as he brushed his thumb across my lip, wiping the last and final traces of his kiss away.
Then he rubbed it off on the hem of his shirt like he couldn’t stand to have any remnants of me left on his skin.
“I hate you, too, little beast,” Lucais murmured.
“In fact, I think we should start hating on each other more often, don’t you?
” He cracked his neck. “Ease some of that tension…” Arching a brow suggestively, his eyes roamed down my body.
“I’d certainly like to ease mine into you. ”
My eyes widened when I caught his meaning, thinking back to the way his stone-hard cock had throbbed against my belly and imagining how he’d feel if he was permitted to work all of that pent-up frustration out on me and inside of me—and I shoved him backwards. “No.”
His laughter was the most beautiful sound in the world, echoing through the chamber of his ultimate demise as he turned and led me further into it like a fate-stricken lamb to the slaughter.