Sneak Peek of Fae Crown
CHAPTER ONE: My Ferocious Little Tigress, Lead the Way
~ Elowyn ~
Although the sudden onslaught of pain had been unbearable—like it would sear the flesh from my bones before it would ever end—it passed quickly and then shock clung to me in its wake.
Why was a map , of all things, traced along my body in glowing crimson? Was it even a map at all? And if it was, where did it lead? What had caused it to so abruptly surge across my skin?
Rush’s fingertips trailed water tenderly over one of my shoulders, sliding gently along the faded scars of dragon claw slashes, one of several physical reminders of my time in Nightguard—before nearly every aspect of my life had revealed itself to be a carefully crafted deception. I had been a prisoner of Embermere mere weeks and yet I scarcely recognized the woman I’d been before, in the frigid mountains guarding what I’d then believed to be the last of all dragons in existence.
Another lie. One of so, so many.
For the majority of my life, I’d believed I was a servant excluded from the worthy destiny of the dragon protectors with whom I’d grown up.
But I was no servant.
Turned out, I was fucking royalty . I was the true heir to the Mirror World.
How, exactly, was I to wrap my mind around that upending revelation?
I was apparently destined to take down the all-powerful queen.
To banish her insidious darkness and return the balance of Faerie to these lands.
No biggie. It wasn’t like the queen had managed to all but kill me several times already.
How many times would I be able to claw myself back from actual death before there was no returning?
How would I be able to defeat the woman who’d terrorized and brutalized an entire kingdom? I was the outsider here, the one playing catch-up to the ways of her court—and her brutality.
After the night shared with Rush, my first back at the palace after the terrors of the Sorumbra, I was sensitive all over. My skin, my nipples, the tender flesh between my thighs … my heart, oh, most especially my heart. A barrage of emotions swirled through me relentlessly, like punishing waves crashing violently against a craggy, rocky shore, over and over again.
Indeed, I was much too sensitive. And definitely far too vulnerable when the sunrise beyond my bathing chamber had just delivered yet another day when the queen would do her best to kill me.
And her best had proven to be far too fucking good to gamble on my continued life expectancy. Her courtiers had been giving me shitty odds of survival since they’d begun betting on the time of my death. Not a single one of them bet on my survival. To them, my death was a foregone conclusion—within no more than a month, according to the longest stretch of their odds.
In their view, there was no defeating the queen. Every one of them bowed to her. Pawns in the game she insisted on playing.
Hot water lapped across my breasts, then the fresh puckered scar between them, soothing the permanent sign of where Rush had shoved a dagger through my heart. Absently, I hummed at the soothing gesture.
Rush sat behind me, his strong, muscled legs bent to either side of my hips as I leaned back against his torso, my entire body limp. His cock rested along the swell of my buttocks. Though it was spent from how many times he’d made love to me during the previous hours, I couldn’t help but be acutely aware of every time its satiny soft skin shifted against mine in the water.
Thanks to Zako’s fixation on my maidenhood, a deception that turned out not to be at all about my actual virtue, this level of intimacy was new for me. Even so, I already understood that the degree of closeness I shared with Rush, and so quickly, was uncommon.
A special, incredible gift in a world so very filled with shit.
“A kiss for your thoughts, mate ?”
Here, alone in my chambers, there was no need to specify to whom he directed his question. But since I’d admitted to also feeling the mate connection between us, he seemed to enjoy repeating the word, as if to convince himself the love that was so rapidly blooming between us was true. A force so powerful and pure that not even the long reach of the queen could steal it from us.
Languorously, I chuckled. “You’ll kiss me anyway. You should come up with better bargains.”
His torso vibrated beneath me with his responding mirth. “True.” He pressed his lips to the crook between my neck and shoulder, one of his favorite spots, I’d discovered. His lips dragged across my shoulder to kiss those same faint claw marks.
“Tell me what you’re thinking anyway?”
I appreciated how he omitted the reminder of how little time like this we had left together. If we had an hour before goblins arrived to prepare us for the Nuptialis Probatio, we’d be lucky.
“Why can’t I make moments like these last forever,” I murmured, “and shorten pretty much all the other ones?”
He grunted a brief, regretful laugh. “If I knew how to do that, I wouldn’t be so worried about how I’m going to protect you from … her .”
As I lazily wove a leg back and forth across the deep, long tub, I could sense his disgust.
Her .
The blasted woman followed us around even when she—or her gruesome, disembodied body parts that acted as her spies—weren’t present.
At her court, there was no escaping her. I feared there might be no evading her anywhere in all of Embermere.
“I don’t need you to protect me,” I said softly, gingerly. I’d spent all my life training to be a warrior capable of my own defense. And yet, before such a formidable adversary, I wasn’t certain I’d survive without him.
His hand splayed over my stomach like it belonged there. “Concerning practically anyone else, I’d agree. You’ve defied my expectations at every turn, my love. But when it comes to her…”
I sighed, raising my toes to splash at the surface of the water. “Yeah, I know.”
“The magic of the trials might no longer allow her to kill you directly. But…”
When every one of her subjects inevitably bent to her will, I was far from safe.
“I know ,” I repeated. “We’re up a dragon’s tail with no easy way down.”
“She’s going to do her best to wedge distance between us. Now that she knows we’re mates?—”
“Seems like she always knew … somehow.”
At that reminder of her seeming omnipresence, Rush glanced toward the ceiling, where I’d told him her spies tended to float. His chin swept across the crown of my head with his movement.
“There’s nothing there. For now anyway. She never stays away for long enough though.”
A fact he understood all too well without my reminder.
“You’ll have to leave Saffron behind,” he said of the dragonling who still slept on a chaise in the neighboring room.
I groaned. “He won’t like that.” But it was so much worse than his preference for sticking to me like glue. He was young, only a few months old. Even so, he should have been at least twice his current size. His many traumas caused by the queen had stunted his development.
“He definitely won’t,” Rush agreed. “But you won’t want to remind her of his existence any more than necessary. She might be threatening him to keep us from freeing the other dragons, but you know she doesn’t need good reason to kill him if she wants.”
Before her father’s reign, the dragons had been revered in the Mirror World. Since then, his order remained in effect: kill any and all dragons on sight.
“Besides,” he added with a caress to my thigh that felt as though he’d been touching me like this all my life. I’d never experienced such marvelous adoration. “The Nuptialis Probatio’s no place for him. Those females…” He shook his head behind me, his long hair swirling through the water around our combined shoulders, then shuddered. “They’ll eat him alive.”
“I thought you didn’t know what the queen had planned for this trial?” I asked, rising to peer at him over my shoulder. Instantly, I missed all the points of contact with him I’d just lost, and nestled back against him. His arms wrapped around my waist, pulling me more tightly to his body, making his cock twitch with alertness.
I felt myself smile before realizing I had it in me. So this was what love felt like … to be in the middle of a veritable shitstorm and still find reason to smile.
“I don’t know any of the details,” he answered. “Not specifically. But when she warns it’ll be as brutal as the Gladius Probatio, you know she means it.”
My smile drooped. The Gladius Probatio had delivered literal beheadings.
“How can a matchmaking event even be lethal? The females don’t train with weapons.” A fact I’d been reminded of dozens of times since my abrupt arrival in Embermere. In so many ways, I was the odd one out.
“I get that they’re catty and vicious and conniving,” I added. “That they’ll stab a ‘friend’ in the back without a moment’s hesitation if it’ll serve them somehow. But short of them stabbing a mofo with an icicle again, I don’t see how it can be worse than anything we saw in the arena.”
“Regardless, I fear that it still will be. Her imagination for the darker aspects of existence seems to know no bounds.”
With a thumb, he drew circles beneath the water against my hip. My body, which had felt boneless just minutes before in the aftermath of the appearance of the possible map, stirred with interest.
The only thing better than having Rush inside me five—or was it six?—times in a matter of hours was to have him inside me at least once more.
“Remember, for the contestants, it’ll be about a lot more than wanting to marry me.” His statement was free of the usual confidence I’d earlier mistaken for arrogance. There was ever so much more to Rush than I had guessed when I had opened the door of my new fancy prison chambers to find him standing on the other side—so obviously strong, totally freaking adept, and so fucking beautiful I’d scarcely been able to look away from him since.
“Though they like to put on a show about throwing themselves at me,” he went on, “it’s not really about that. It’s about power and control. Not just for them, but for their families too. Winning the crown of Embermere is a political move, not one of the heart.”
Except for me .
I snorted. “Is that why all those bitches practically hump your leg every chance they get?”
“Yes.”
Once more, I turned in his hold to study his face. “You don’t seriously believe that. They practically pant when they see you. They want a good boning as much as they want the position.”
Hearing the words outside of myself, I scowled and turned back around, sinking into him with a jerk that set the water to sloshing a bit.
“No matter whom I have to … ‘bone’”—his distaste wrapped around that one word before he continued—“you have to remember, it will mean nothing. Less than nothing. It’ll be awful. So fucking awful. But at the end of it?—”
“Don’t you dare say it again.”
“—it’ll just be my body.”
I growled. “We’ve been over this. You aren’t going to bed the queen or any of her fucking little simpering ‘ladies’ just ‘cause she crooks her finger and tells you to. No. Damn her, Rush. No .”
“It will only be you in my heart. Always. Forever.”
“I don’t care.” I actually really did. “I forbid you from doing it.”
That was majorly fresh coming from me. I might be tempted to do something just because he—or anyone else, for that matter—forbade me from it.
Mate or not, I had no right to command him like this. I wouldn’t take it back though. I’d already tried the route of reason.
He nuzzled his face beside mine in clear affection, but his voice was resigned, sad. “I’ve told you before, my ferocious little tigress. I haven’t had a true choice for a very long time. I don’t usually get to do what I want. I don’t get to refuse her . Not if I want to protect you. If it takes me”—an audible gulp—“servicing her to keep you alive, then I’ll do it without complaint.”
When I only breathed heavily through my nostrils, he amended, “It’s what I agreed to when she allowed me to ‘kill’ you instead of her doing it. I gave up myself then … for you.”
My body went rigid in his embrace. “That was all a fucking ruse. You heard her, she knew we were mates all along.”
How? How had she known?
When Rush was silent, I pressed, “Don’t tell me you feel the need to honor your word when she never does.”
Still nothing.
“Rush…”
“No. No, I don’t. Since she isn’t honorable, honor means nothing with her.”
“Exactly. You don’t have to do a thing she says.”
But this time, when he didn’t answer, I knew he’d already decided. He’d do whatever he needed to in order to spare me. Whatever that was, whatever it took. Whatever he had to give up and allow her to destroy within himself.
“Rush,” I said again, this time gentle with empathy.
Eventually, he spoke. “You’d sacrifice yourself for those you care about. Fuck, you already did. You volunteered to let her kill you in the throne room to save your friends and mine, my sister. How’s this any different?”
I heaved a burdened exhale. It wasn’t.
“Just … if she … beckons, I’m coming with you.”
Now it was his body that stiffened. “No, El. I won’t do that to you.”
“It’s not your decision to make. If you have to submit yourself to that nastiness, then I’ll be right there at your side, doing whatever I can to make it more bearable.”
“You can’t. You heard what she said. Watching your mate … be with someone else … it’s a pain worse than death. I’ve heard that before too, from others.”
“Then we’ll fucking suffer together. I don’t know what else to tell ya. I’m not letting you endure that alone. And fuck her a thousand times over. Just, you know, not in the way she wants.”
Rush’s fingers trailed down my thigh. The vines tattooed along his skin glowed as bright as a full moon. The rosebuds I’d noticed once were absent. Sharp, biting thorns bloomed from the twining lines in their stead.
I traced the path of light up the back of his hand, then his forearm.
“You’ve never told me about these. They get brighter when you’re really upset or sometimes happy, right?”
I could feel his stare following the path of my touch across his skin. Again his cock twitched against me.
“Yes. When my emotions run high either way.” For several moments, he watched me caress him. “It’s an unfortunate tell I haven’t been able to master.”
In the arena I’d watched him closely. When fighting, he’d erased all hints that would reveal his upcoming moves. That was true adeptness.
“It gives me away too much,” he grunted.
I nodded knowingly. I didn’t think I was quite as good as him in otherwise disguising my thoughts.
“Where’d they come from?” I asked.
His chest rose and fell intently against my back. “Would you believe that I don’t really know? Many decades ago now, when I was a boy first coming into my power, they simply started appearing one day. At first, it was just one little vine.”
“Where?”
“Here, across my heart. About where … I stabbed you.”
His affirming aloud how he’d hurt me, something he’d already done many times since I first appeared yesterday in the throne room without explanation, was his way of penance, I suspected. A way for him to never forget.
Stabbing me in the heart hadn’t been the betrayal I’d first assumed it was.
Undeniably, it had been awful. Only since seeing him again could I be certain it had been as torturous for him as it had been for me.
I nodded to encourage him to move beyond our painful past.
Finally, he said, “It happened over many years. They kept spreading, showing up everywhere. Now there isn’t a single part of my body where they can’t manifest. Now they’re even more reactive to my emotions than before. Just when I need to control myself the most.” The admission was bitter.
“Did you try to find out about them?”
“Of course. But we fae are as unique and varied as our powers. I found nothing that could inform me about my specific situation. My parents didn’t know anything.”
I started. I’d never considered his parents.
“Are they still alive?”
“They are. Though they’ve retired from the positions of drake and drakess and their attendant duties. They leave all of that to me now.”
As well as the responsibility of protecting his sisters, that I knew. He viewed Ramana’s death as one of the most significant and condemning failures of his life.
Seconds slunk past without either of us speaking before urgency took hold of me again, forcing me from my ease. We were on borrowed time already.
“You really think it’s a map?” I didn’t have to elaborate. He wasn’t likely to soon forget his mate glowing with her own set of tattoos.
For now, mine had vanished without a trace. But Rush had sketched their trajectory while they still blazed their mysterious trail across my skin, hiding the drawing within a bound journal he’d fetched from the antechamber where the queen had once ordered him to sleep—back when she still pretended to care about my safety.
What a fucking bad joke that had been—entirely on me.
“It’s a hypothesis, obviously,” he replied, “but yes. Mostly because I don’t know what else it could be. It looked like a map.”
Once I’d regained enough of my strength to focus, I’d studied the drawing intently, for so long that I eventually gave up and allowed Rush to lead me to the bath. He’d insisted that I needed the time to recover before the start of the next stage of the Fae Heir Trials—and how right he’d been.
“I’ve been wondering why the lines showed up when they did,” I said.
“Me too.”
“I think … you know how my magic was bound when I was a baby?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And how after we had sex the first time?—”
“We made love , El. Even that first time, it was already love.”
“Yeah, we did.” A smug grin snuck up on me. “After we began bonding or whatever you’d call it, it was like the spell that bound my magic loosened its hold on me.”
“I imagine something as powerful as mate magic would do that.”
“And then when I was in the Sorumbra, and I linked with the land, even my ears grew pointy, like nothing was holding me back from my true fae self anymore.”
“You connected to the land in the Gladius Probatio too. It probably all added up to break the binding. Even though it must’ve been a very powerful one to keep you concealed from her for twenty-two years .”
“Well, I was in Nightguard. You can’t even get there without a portal. No one’s even supposed to know where the last stronghold of the dragons is. It’s a secret we practically swear an oath to die guarding.”
“Still.”
I gulped at the unwelcome reminder that the queen was a fucking badass of wicked efficiency and evil cunning.
When I got stuck examining how unfair the playing field was, Rush prompted, “And you think that your verbal confirmation that I’m your mate while we made love is what caused the map to surge across your beautiful, gorgeous, fucking amazing and incredible body—which is entirely mine to please now, by the way?”
“You’ll get no complaints from me there, drake . And yeah, that’s what I was thinking. You’d already said it to me.”
“I couldn’t help myself.”
“But you were waiting for me to say it back.”
“Was I that pathetically obvious?”
“Yup,” I chirped delightedly. The most stunning man in all of Embermere, probably the entire Mirror World, was somehow in love with me. With me . I still could scarcely believe it sometimes.
“So you think that could be why the map appeared all of a sudden?” I pressed. “I mean, with you inside me and all right then, it’s about as connected as we get.”
His responding growl was part animal, part man. My core tightened until I recalled the map once more.
The eerie red lines diverged and meandered all over the damn place, over my torso, all my bits, up and down my every appendage, but never looped over themselves. As if they were perhaps roads or trails.
Like the branches on a tree, most eventually tapered to finer lines, then pointed tips. But several of the thicker branches ended in a distinguishable, solid circle—as if it marked a spot of importance.
The image was identical on my front as on my back—only mirrored.
This next question I barely dared whisper, even when none of the queen’s spies eavesdropped: “You think it could really be an answer to how to defeat her?”
“Yes.”
“And are you saying that just ‘cause you hope that’s the case as much as I do?”
“Absolutely.”
“Great.”
He squeezed me closer. “You’re great, mate .”
I rolled my eyes but secretly loved his constant displays of affection. “You’re such a doofus.”
“Sure, but I’m your doofus.”
“And don’t you ever forget it.”
“There isn’t a chance in all the Etherlands and even in the Igneuslands that I ever will.”
“Promise?”
“I do, my love. I do.”
~ Read Fae Crown now! ~