Chapter Thirty-Five #2
She shook what she concluded to be an annoying effect of their shared Markings off as Malachi produced a pair of jewel-handled daggers, whose onyx gems and flat silver blades gleamed under the moonlight.
Malachi had told her the blades were a customary part of Apollyon royal weddings.
However, he hadn’t shown them to her beforehand and she hadn’t been prepared for how stunning the weapons were.
Their blades were double-edged and the phases of Nyaxia’s moon—from crescent to full orb and back to crescent—were etched into the silver with delicate swirls surrounding them.
The daggers were a hauntingly beautiful display of bladesmithing, and Kadeesha couldn’t sever the thought that they had much in common with the male who held them—they were deadly, pitiless things that she was certain could carve an individual to pieces with only the slightest force applied, yet alongside the violence they could deliver, the weapons were breathtaking, almost too extraordinary for this world and all the more dangerous for it.
The cleric launched into another hymn. This one wasn’t a carefully crafted homage to the Celestials and their whims. Instead, it was about entwined fates and soul-deep tethers between a wedded pair.
Kadeesha bit the inside of her cheek. The hymn’s focus made her wholly uncomfortable, especially given the vision her Marking had dumped on her.
She bit her cheek harder, using the swift sting to chase away recalling the sense of rightness that had stolen over her during the vision.
As Malachi held the daggers in one hand, his right hand reached out and closed around her left.
He lifted it in the air, his fingers strong and calloused and warm and unrelenting.
Every spot where their skin made contact thrummed, and it made it impossible for her to clear her mind of confusing thoughts.
Impossible to recall that she and Malachi weren’t truly anything meaningful to one another, that there were no real bonds between them.
Malachi turned her hand so her palm faced the cavern’s ceiling and the moonlit sky that shimmered with billions of stars beyond it.
He held out the daggers and told her, “Take one.”
She did, clutching it so tightly that pain shot through her fingers.
Suddenly she was nervous, anxious, even though she had no reason for such undiluted terror to flood her.
This isn’t a real marriage. It holds no meaning.
It is only a political ploy. Despite the reminder, her hands still trembled as she held the ceremonial blade.
His forehead creased, because this male missed nothing.
“Are you all right?” he murmured in a velvety voice that shouldn’t have slid along every inch of her skin the way it did.
“Yes,” she assured Malachi. Next, she dragged in a breath and pushed the odd nerves aside so she didn’t make a fool of herself or betray any weakness.
The other monarchs and Malachi needed to perceive her as their equal—in some cases, their better—someone who’d seized her own fate, who was taking advantage of this marriage as a shrewd political move, and who stood squarely rooted in her own autonomy and power throughout the ceremony.
And she’d undermine that aim if she displayed even a fraction of the powerless woman who’d stood beside Rishaud during her first wedding ceremony.
Great Celestials, that seems like eons ago. I was nothing beyond a princess and pawn then, letting males be the puppeteers of my life. Now, I hold and weave and manipulate the tapestry of not just my fate, but that of others.
A heady buzz washed over her as a result of that truth.
She supposed that she’d suffer a crisis of conscience over feeling so empowered by this new reality of hers later.
Right now, she used it to smother any nervousness for good.
Malachi had already informed her of the purpose of the blades.
Acting before he did, she slipped her hand that was holding the dagger out of his grip, seized his free hand, and sliced across his palm, spilling his blood generously.
Something as dark and eternal and voracious as the black Void itself yawned awake in his eyes as she did it, and it only deepened as he grabbed her hand and dragged his blade across her palm.
The cuts done, Trystin silently stepped forward.
He collected their blades and handed Malachi a silver-and-obsidian crown that was the perfect mirror to his.
Trystin passed his cousin a sly look and then retreated to where he’d stood beside Nychelle.
Never taking his intense, darkened gaze from hers, Malachi placed the crown that every queen of the Apollyon Court had worn atop Kadeesha’s head.
Then, his bleeding hand closed around her hand that spilled forth her life force too.
Technically, they’d exchanged blood twice before.
Once, when they’d given each other the Markings and when they’d bitten each other again during the throes of sex.
Each of those former times, it was an affair awash in mind-shattering, blinding lust and possessive need.
But their blood mingling together in an ancient binding ceremony as old as the faefolk themselves was an altogether different experience.
A jolt rocked through Kadeesha that had nothing to do with desire.
It was born of something more momentous.
Primitive. Primordial. She couldn’t quite identify its precise nature because it was an entirely foreign sensation—one that her very soul, the essence of who she was and all she’d become, and the deepest pools of her magic reacted to.
The world and everyone around them fell away.
It was only her and Malachi and the storm of aether and void magic that had detonated from each of them.
A hurricane of violet flames and writhing shadows raged around them, encircling them in the eye of a howling purple-and-black storm.
“Do you feel it as intensely too?” she asked Malachi, barely able to catch her breath. The stiletto points of her nails dug into the back of his hand.
“Yes.” He rasped the single word, as if even uttering that much was an effort.
“What is it? Should this be happening?” she frantically asked.
A blood exchange hadn’t been a part of Six Kingdom weddings for centuries.
Malachi had warned her that both of their senses would be overwhelmed when they performed one, but she hadn’t fully understood what that meant and she had no frame of reference for normalcy now that it was happening.
Malachi laced his fingers through hers keeping their bleeding palms smashed together.
His other hand moved to cup her hip, his fingers splayed along its length, a possessive brand that was searing.
He stepped closer to her, crushing her chest against his.
“I have no idea; I’ve never married before.
” His eyes … Great Celestials, his eyes no longer held a trace of brown or gold.
They had turned a luminescent black, and he looked at her like he meant to devour her whole.
She swallowed, though not from fear. Seeing him gaze upon her in such a manner made a similar response erupt from her.
Liquid heat burgeoned in her core and she threatened to combust with the raw, raging need to be closer to him.
To crawl inside of his skin if she could manage.
Her arm that had been loose at her side now cupped the nape of his neck.
She somehow crammed them even closer together.
A growl was the only warning she got before his mouth crashed down on hers.
She moaned, the sensation of his tongue plunging inside her mouth and his hard length pressing against her becoming too much.
She wasn’t sure who broke the kiss or which of them initiated what came next—they may have acted at the same time, moving in perfect unity.
Regardless, her incisors sank into his neck where his Marking rested as his incisors shredded the skin covering her Marking and plunged deep into the vein beneath.
She clung to him for dear life and he did the same, banding his arm around her in an iron hold.
Mine! A voice rang inside her head, roared in her blood during the act.
Under clear-minded conditions, she would’ve balked at the claiming.
But she wasn’t within her right mind and thus that single word—Mine!
—became a furious refrain inside her head.
It wasn’t until she heard it snarled against the tender skin of her throat that she realized it wasn’t entirely emanating from her fogged mind.
She pathetically whimpered when Malachi’s incisors fully retreated from her vein.
Then, she shivered when he licked the wound before sealing a kiss to the spot.
“I want to strip you bare, spread you out like a feast, taste every delectable inch of you, and then bury my cock inside you until you’re screaming my name.
And I want to do it all right here, an audience be damned.
I’m barely holding myself back,” he rumbled into her ear.
“If you object to that, you should say so this instance.”
Every cogent thought eddied out of her brain. She had been reduced to a being driven purely by need and desire and a rabid, feral demand that she continue claiming the male before her. “Is the ceremony finished?” she managed to ask.
“As finished as it needs to be,” he growled, palming her ass. Everywhere his hands touched left a scalding brand behind. And she wanted none of their offending garments between them.
“Transport … take us away.” She wanted what he wanted, but not in front of anyone else.
No—he was hers, and she didn’t want to share even the tiniest bit of him right now.
Malachi didn’t give her time to sputter the entire sentence out before he’d hoisted her into the air and locked her legs around his waist.
“As you command, wife.” His response was a dark promise, an all-consuming rumble of thunder as he transported them away.