Tabitha
The night before we march on the Palace, I need to feel like myself again, all the way, because in the morning I’m going to walk up to a throne and bet everything I am that I know who that is.
Tabeitha nearly kept me. I felt it, the drowning, the three seconds where I nearly stopped existing, and even clawed back with Luka’s help I’ve felt scraped thin ever since, like she left fingerprints all over the inside of me.
I want them gone. I want to be so thoroughly, completely mine that when I claim that throne tomorrow there’s not a scrap of her left to argue.
So I go to my men, all four of them, in the warm dark of the Fortress, and I don’t have to say a word. They feel it. They always feel it.
“Come here, little kitty,” Valerian says, and there’s no cleverness in it, just love, and I go to him.
They take me apart slowly, and put me back together, and it’s not like the frantic pre-battle nights or the hungry reunions.
It’s tender, all of it, deliberate, four men reminding me inch by inch whose body this is.
Luka’s mouth on my throat, murmuring mine, mate, whose are you.
Azaan’s hands mapping me like he’s got the rest of eternity.
Gavriel’s careful reverence, huge and gentle, treating me like the treasure he’d die to guard.
And Valerian, watching, then not watching, sliding into me slow while the others touch and kiss and praise, filling me up until there’s no room for anything but them.
“This is yours,” Valerian says against my ear, moving in me, deep and slow. “This body. This pleasure. This bond. Not hers. She never had this. Feel it, little kitty. Feel how much is yours.”
I do. I feel every part of it, every place they touch, every wave they pull out of me, and I feel the truth of it settle into the scraped-thin places she left, filling them, sealing them, making me whole.
I come apart between the four of them again and again, and each time it’s more mine.
By the time we’re a tangled, wrecked, glowing heap in the furs, there’s not a fingerprint of hers left anywhere in me.
“Better?” Azaan murmurs, reading me the way he does.
“Better,” I say, and I mean it all the way down. “Mine. All of it. Me.”
“You,” Luka agrees, pressing a kiss to my hair.
I lie in the middle of them, warm and safe and thoroughly, completely myself, and I think about the throne waiting for me at the end of tomorrow’s road. For the first time I’m not frightened of it.
Because I finally know who’s going to sit in it.
Me. Just me. And that, it turns out, is the most powerful thing in any realm.