Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter
Thirty-Five
Meg
I follow Beck into the bedroom. He moves slowly and
deliberately, but I’m well aware that carefulness has nothing to do with the
ale he imbibed and everything to do with the act he’s determined to perform.
“Beck,” I say quietly, tugging on his hand. “We can wait, if
you want. I’m happy with the relationship we have. I don’t have to do a mental
tour of your life if it makes you uncomfortable.”
Beck’s gray eyes are grave as he looks down at me. “I would
be seeing into your soul, too, wife. Do you only want to share yourself with
Cian?”
I roll my eyes. “Now you’re being deliberately obtuse. I
wasn’t trying to hold myself back because of my grand passion for Ci.”
“Hey,” Cian says, tossing his big body on the bed.
“Though I do love him passionately,” I declare.
“That’s better.” Cian pats the mattress beside him. “Stop
worrying about Beck. He’s nervous because he knows my half of our soul is
prettier than his.”
“I remember our teen years, brother,” Beck snorts. “I’m sure
our poor wife was assaulted by the sheer number of your sexual encounters.”
“It was an education,” I allow with a grin.
Cian shrugs, obviously unaffected by anything as ridiculous
as shame. “I was a curious lad.”
“You were a pervert,” Beck shoots back, but Cian’s mocking
has done its job. Beck seems more relaxed.
Cian sits up on the bed, crossing his legs as he did the day
we bonded. Beck takes the opposite position. They’re near-perfect twins, and
I’m going to be in the middle. I start to climb onto the bed.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Beck’s eyebrows arch in
arrogant surprise.
“What Cian told me to do,” I reply. “He said I had to sit in
the middle with my legs around your waist, since you’re the one I’m bonding
with. I’ll be in the circle, touching you both so it flows from you to me to
him.”
Cian explained how the formation of a permanent total bridge
between the three of us will work. I’ll fully bond with Beck, and then Cian
will open the connection between them. Once both brothers are connected to me,
they’ll be able to tap into each other’s strengths. I’m the intersection
connecting all our roads.
“All that’s fine, wife,” Beck says. “But I wanted to know
what you’re doing wearing clothes when we’re alone in our bedroom.”
I definitely created a monster. He isn’t hiding from his
nature anymore. He made that plain this evening. Beck was true to his word. He
kept me close to him all night, kissing me, touching me whenever it suited him
to do so.
When one of the village men requested a dance with his
queen, Beck sent him such a dark look I was surprised the poor man didn’t pee
himself. I was forced to content myself with dancing with Beck and Cian.
“You two are still dressed,” I point out, knowing it
wouldn’t do me any good.
“That can change,” Cian offers helpfully.
Beck simply stares and sends his will outward.
There’s no fighting it. He’ll want me naked as often as
possible. It’s his nature. He likes my vulnerability and softness. He wants me
naked and draped across his lap. I’m glad all my time with Cian got me
comfortable with my body. It made it simple to pull my clothes off without the
added weight of self-consciousness. I drape them over the small chair to the
side of our bed.
“That’s better,” Beck comments as I climb onto the bed
without a stitch of clothes.
Cian’s hands “slip” and tease my soft pink parts as I settle
onto Beck’s lap.
“Damn it, Ci,” Beck admonishes his twin. “This is a serious
ceremony.”
“I’m completely serious about fucking our wife again,” Cian
replies.
Beck pulls me onto his lap, and Cian leans close, completely
encircling me. “I swear, brother, I have no idea how they consider you to be
the intellectual half of us. Your brain is constantly full of sex.”
“I’m also calculating the approximate amount of rainfall
we’ll need in order to bring in the spinach crop within the month. If we don’t
get it, I have diagrams in my head for an even better irrigation system,” Cian
explains. “Another part of my brain is giving careful consideration to the
argument I got into with Flanna about the monarchial system of government and
its impact on the peasant class. I’m thinking about the fluctuations in the
vampire stock market when they realize we’ve bonded. Sue and Dante are going to
make a killing. But mostly, it’s just sex.”
“Are you sure you want to experience what it’s like to be
him?” Meg asks with a smile. “It’s crowded in that head of his.”
“I’ll take my chances, wife,” Beck replies and kisses me
hard before resting his forehead to mine. “Is tù mo ghrà.”
I hold his head in my hands and give him back his words.
“You are my love.”
I press my forehead against his, thankful for the strength
Cian is lending me. He holds my shoulders and lets me feel his devotion. I open
my mind and, in a second, I become Beckett Finn.
Such rage. The emotion floods me like it did the
first moment we connected. It’s different this time because he isn’t pushing it
through me. There’s no madness to this. This is merely a piece of Beck. I hear
Cian groan behind me and know he’s formed his connection. Cian pushes nothing
outward but helps me take in what Beck needs to give.
Need. The idea takes over as I fall into Beck’s mind. He
needs so much. He’s a lonely child. He misses his brother. They spent every
second connected from the moment they were conceived until they turned five
years old. That’s when his father decides it’s time for the warrior to learn to
be a king. He discounts the importance of Cian’s input. In their father’s mind,
the warrior is all that matters. Cian is an afterthought.
Beck often wishes he could trade places with his brother.
I’m suddenly staring out a palace window. In the background,
there are men droning on about something or other. They usually complain about
taxes or crop yield. Beck’s seven-year-old self doesn’t care. He gazes out the
window and watches Cian running after their cousin, Dante. Cian catches the
young vampire and screams something about him being “it.” Beck wants to run and
play, but his father explained that he’s different. He’s better. He can best
his brother at running and fighting. He can best anyone at those things. He
trains only with the greatest warriors. His physical skills are not things to
toy with.
But Beck wants to play.
He’s only twelve the first time he kills a man. It’s the
first time someone tries to assassinate him. He can still remember the feel of
the bright sun on his face as he follows after his father. There’s an Unseelie
ambassador in town, and it almost caused a riot in the square. His father is
trying to normalize relations with the Unseelie, but there’s a faction of sidhe
who will never accept it. They hate the Unseelie tribe. Many lost relatives in
the wars.
Beck shadows his father through town. His father is arrogant
and sure of his peoples’ love for him. He only brings one guard with them. His
name is Carlin, and he is the one who taught Beck how to play cards. Carlin is
sympathetic to Beck, sometimes slipping him a candied fig. He has two sons of
his own, after all.
The arrow hits the guard squarely in the chest, knocking him
back and off his feet. He’s dead before he hits the ground. I feel the anger
that suffuses young Beck’s being. His father tries to pull him to safety, but
Beck unsheathes his sword and opens his senses for the first time. It’s
instinctive. His eye follows the logical track of the arrow. He rolls out of
the way of the next one to come after him. I feel a charge of excitement as he
shoots to his feet and pursues the assassin and hears his father’s anxious
cries.
I see the blood on his hands when he catches the assassin.
He ignores the man’s pleas for mercy. Beck’s beast is loose, and he has no
mercy. The large man took something Beck valued. He took from Beck, and he will
never do so again.
It’s the first time Beck realizes his father is afraid of
him.
I groan as the scene in his head changes. Sex. This is
Beck’s outlet.
A woman named Sorcha, one of his mother’s ladies, takes it
on herself to teach him. She gives him permission to do what he wants, and he
takes her at her word. He dominates her. He owns and possesses her. He fucks
her when and where he wants, and she obeys. It takes the edge off his rage
knowing someone soft trusts him. Only Cian ever trusts him. Even Bronwyn looks
at him with fear sometimes. Sorcha begs him to fuck her. She cuddles in his
arms afterward. That time is sweet, too. He enjoys taking care of her after.
I gasped at the pain I feel. His father hits him with the
flat of his sword. He does it in front of fifty of his strongest soldiers. He
humiliates his son for his perversity.
Beck swears to never give in to those urges again. Shame
becomes a mantle to wear as he does armor.
Then all is blood and carnage.
Acrid smoke fills my nostrils, and Beck’s heart pumps with
rage as he realizes his father is dead. There’s a tiny part of him that revels
in the old man’s death. He’s king now. He’s in his rightful place. No one will
tell him what to do or how to act again. If they do, he’ll take care of it. He
will be king not by right of ascension, but because he can kill anyone who
questions his place. Torin gave him this gift.
A wave of disgust flows through me, and I know this is
Beck’s real torment. He’s torn by his own nature. His father abused and
humiliated him, but Beck loved him anyway.
The sword Beck holds as he surveys the decimation of Torin’s
guard is the sword of the rightful King of the Seelie Fae. He uses it to kill a
hundred of Torin’s advance guard. He slices through them with an easy
efficiency. His body hums with anticipation of more. He enjoys it. He likes the
blood and the feel of his sword penetrating flesh. He loves the dance of
battle.
Through the smoke he sees Torin. His uncle is surrounded by
guards. It’s easy to kill them, too. More are coming. Beck can hear them.
They’re making their way through the chaos toward their leader. It won’t
matter. Beck circles his uncle. Torin will be dead as they walk into the great
hall, and then they will join their brethren.
Torin isn’t willing to go down easy. He holds his sword, and
his eyes are no longer arrogant. “Even now, my soldiers are hunting your
brother. They will cut him down where he stands.”
Beck’s blood is up. “It will not kill me.”
Torin looks disturbed by that statement. “It will,
eventually. He is your brother.”
Beck smiles. He knows it’s a ghastly thing. He nods to the
throne where his father’s body lays, still and cooling. “There lies your
brother. Perhaps we are more alike than you think, Uncle.”
Torin, who was always a pale imitation of Beck’s father,
twists his unhandsome face into a mask of jealousy. “The crown should have been
mine. My father always favored Seamus. It should have been mine.”
Beck points to his father’s crown. It lays on the palace
floor, covered in his father’s blood. “There it is, uncle. Take it if you can.”
Torin looks between his nephew and the bloody crown he slew
his kin for.
Then I feel it. I feel Cian cry out in Beck’s brain. His
panic and anguish wash over me. Cian reaches out for the only person he has
left, and Beck feels the call in his soul.
It goes against everything in Beck Finn’s nature. His
instincts cry out to kill the pretender. His prey stands before him, quaking in
his boots. There’s no question about the outcome of this fight, even as Torin’s
backup storms through the doors. He can kill them all.
And then he will lose Cian.
Deep in his heart, Beck knows that he won’t care once Cian
is dead. Cian’s death will free him in some ways. He can be the predator he
always knew himself to be. He can kill and kill and kill until someone is
strong enough to take him out.
But Cian isn’t dead. He’s alive, and he waits for his
brother to save him.
Beck can avenge his father. He can save his kingdom and all
of its people, or he can save the only person in the world to ever trust him,
the person who carries all the good parts of his soul.
“I will return one day, Torin,” Beck promises. “I will
return, and I will kill you. Never doubt it.”
The years speed by, each more desperate. Beck is alone. He’s
alone even as he takes lovers. He’s alone even as he and his brother try to
build a life. He is alone until he walks into a marketplace and finds his heart
waiting for him.
I sob as I come out of the bond. I throw my arms around
Beck’s neck and clutch him. “I love you. I love you so much.” I look into his
deep gray eyes. They’re still filled with uncertainty. “I would have no other.”