Chapter 44
Ash
I smell like death and dirt and something that used to be a man I called father.
“I need a bath.” I say it to no one specific. Just anyone willing to listen. “Or I’m going to add to the body count and this time it won’t be personal.”
Nobody argues. Nobody asks if I’m okay. I’m clearly not okay. Halfway to numb and pushing my emotions into a bottomless pit.
“All right, come on,” Orion just starts walking. He doesn’t even look back to make sure we are all there. We are.
Kieran falls in behind us without a word. Shadows fanning out in a perimeter I didn’t ask for but won’t refuse.
Finnian walks beside me. Close enough that heat radiates off him, which is wrong. Finnian doesn’t run hot. He’s burning up. And he’s covered in blood that isn’t his.
I have so many question. Where was he? How did he end up with Tiana? What happened with her? And not in the did you fuck her way.
I’d know.
No, something else happened. And patience is not my strongest emotion.
“You’re staring,” Finnian says.
“You’re covered in blood.”
“Valid observation.”
“Whose?”
“People who deserved it.” A pause. “Mostly.”
“Mostly.” Kieran, from behind us. Dry enough to start a fire.
“I’m workshopping my moral flexibility. It’s a process.”
Orion snorts. “Scholar killed people and now he’s got jokes.”
“I’ve always had jokes. You simply lack the education to appreciate them.”
“Big words from a man who tripped over a root a month ago.”
“That root moved.”
“The root did not move.” Kieran.
“Roots move in this forest all the time.” Finnian.
“Not that one.” Kieran again.
The banter wraps around me like a blanket made of bickering. I let it. Their voices layering over each other the way they do when no one’s performing for an audience. Just the four of us in a Dark Forest and the sound of men who would die for each other pretending they wouldn’t.
Steam hits my face before I see the water. Sulfur and minerals and something floral that belongs to the Wild Court. The spring sits tucked into a rock formation, natural stone worn smooth by centuries of water. Big enough for a group.
Which is honestly absolutely perfect.
“Ladies first.” Orion grins.
I cross my arms. “You just want a strip tease.”
“I am but a Fae.” Orion holds up his hands with a crooked smirk. “A very horny Fae man, now turn around.”
I don’t move. Honestly I want to poke him a little. I want to get out this weird aggression still lingering inside of me. I want to fight him. And my god, I want him to chase me down and rip my clothes off. I don’t want to strip.
“Ash, I have literally carried you naked—”
I pinch the bridge of my nose because I have no patience to explain what I need right now. Now like it’s that hard.
I just want them to steal my name from my breath and make me see stars.
“Turn. Around.”
I turn away from them and strip.
As I touch a toes to the surface, watching it ripple, I see the reflection looking back at me. At the woman who is now me.
The Fae looking back at me has flowers growing out of her collarbones. Kind of. More like a living tattoo that can detach from my skin. Flowers that, twenty minutes ago, dissolved a man’s body into the earth. Very poisonous flowers.
“That’s fine,” I tell her. “That’s totally fine. Very normal.”
“I think she’s hot as fuck,” Orion says behind me but I’m not even surprised by that. I could cover myself in ketchup and it would excite him.
“I was talking to myself,” I snark.
“I know,” he says around a laugh.
Rolling my eyes, I slide into the water, letting the heat envelop me and ease the soreness from my muscles.
Heat swallows me to the collarbone. The sound I make is involuntary and undignified and I don’t care. My muscles unlock one by one, like they’ve been clenched since birth.
“That sounded pornographic.” Orion.
“Get in the water, Orion.” I swim out to the center, going under and letting the heat and water wash away the last few days.
When I surface I see all three men watching me swim. Three Fae males. All that attention on little ole me.
Orion strips first and I treat it as my own little show. My own strip tease. He peels the layers of sweaty clothing off. Bit by agonizing bit. Tattoos now spread across his entire body.
They’ve creep across his chest and up his neck and onto his jaw.
Dark ink mapping devotion and failure in a language I’m only beginning to read.
They hide the scars of the Cauldron the Dagda still holds.
The guardian marks that started as a band on his forearm now cover half his torso.
Still moving at the edges like they haven’t decided where to stop.
I wonder what they mean. I want to ask but a heat begins in my core that is the start of a different kind of demand. And when he frees his cock—proud, hard, throbbing—the heat intensifies inside of me.
He slides into the water across from me, hiding what I really want to put my tongue on.
Kieran moves next. His shirt comes off carefully, slowly, as his eyes watch me. The Spear scars are worse than I remembered. Layered on top of each other, a map of every time he bled alone.
He’s never been shirtless in front of all three of us. I register it the moment his jaw tightens. Kieran without armor. Without shadows. Without the cold prince architecture he built so carefully.
All of it stripped away.
He isn’t completely hard yet, the ridges of his cock just starting to smooth out.
He gets in front of me, going under, turning his inky hair into an oil slick.
But it’s not the steam I’m thinking about.
It’s Orion watching Kieran lower himself into the water. Finnian tracks the layered scars. It’s a shared secret among them. The Treasures. The life they lived before me. Holding a shared pain.
I don’t know why that’s the thing that makes my throat tight.
Finnian still hasn’t moved. His eyes heavy and his pupils blown.
Still standing at the edge. He remains clothed. Still covered in dried blood gone brown and stiff. The golden light from his chest is dimmer now. Banked. But it’s there.
The other two don’t push.
I hold out my hand.
Not a declaration. Just a wet hand extended over the edge of a hot spring by a woman who’s too tired to be anything other than honest.
He looks at my hand like he’s checking it for traps.
It isn’t one.
It’s the opposite of a trap. It’s a door left open.
He stares at the bond mark on my wrist. The gold thread glowing in the steam. At the thorn patterns that are new since the last time he saw me naked.
“I killed twelve people tonight.” Like a confession.
“So did I.” I don’t drop my hand. “We’ll start a club. Get in the water, Finnian.”
He doesn’t take my hand; instead he grips the hem of his shirt, slowly pulling it over his head. Showing the glowing light of the Summer Sword blazing through the Seelie mark. His pants come next.
He slides in beside Orion quickly. The water turns pink where the blood washes off his skin.
Four of us. One spring. Steam rising in the purple twilight.
Nobody says anything for a long time. We just float there for a moment, enjoying the peace settling over us. At least for right now.
Orion’s foot bumps mine underwater.
Kieran’s fingers find a strand of my hair floating on the surface. Rolls it between his fingers. Examining the color change, maybe. Or maybe just touching me because he can.
“So,” Orion breaks the stiffening silence. “How long before the next catastrophe? Ballpark.”
“Historically?” Kieran tilts his head. “Twelve hours.”
“I was hoping for more,” Orion grumbles.
“Hope is a beautiful thing.” Finnian’s eyes close as he rests his head on the bank. “Statistically unfounded. But beautiful.”
The laugh that comes out of me is small and tired and real.
Then Finnian opens one of his eyes, his lips smirking at me, those pouty kissable lips.
He reaches across the water, grabs my hand, and pulls me onto his lap in one motion. I didn’t even know he was sitting on a rock.
And suddenly I’m straddling him and the very specific hardness of him pressing against exactly where I’ve been slowly burning for them.
“Oh,” I say. I roll my pussy again him, letting my eyes roll to the back of my head as I slowly grind on him.
That is exactly what I want.
“Weeks.” He moans, his grip on my hip grows tighter as he slows me down. I don’t want slow. I want hard and fast and right the fuck now. “Weeks of thinking about this.”
“About pulling me into your lap without warning?”
“About proving I still could.” His hands unclench as he glides them up my sides, under my breasts in a way that makes me want to impale myself on him.
“That she didn’t take this from me. That I still know exactly—” His hips roll up once.
Deliberately sliding through my folds just so, as he watches my face for a specific response.
He finds it. I know because those damn kissable lips twitch.
“There you are,” he says softly against my lips.
“Finnian.” His name comes out different than I intend. Breathier, just not my voice.
“I know.” He pulls me closer. His mouth finds my jaw. My throat. That spot below my ear that makes my brain go offline, which he’s clearly already noted because he goes back to it twice, deliberate and unhurried.
“Still taking notes?” My voice sounds far away, my fingernails dig into his shoulders s I hold on.
“Comprehensive research.” His lips move against my skin. “Very thorough methodology.”
“I hate you.”
“Mm.” He doesn’t sound remotely concerned. “Your pulse says otherwise.”
Behind me, Orion makes a sound.
Just that. Just a low hm, like Finnian proved a theorem he’d had money on for a while.
Finnian’s hands slide up my spine. He touches me like he knows me inside and out. It’s exhilarating and terrifying all at once.
He knows how to glide his thumb under my breast to make my back arch. How to whisper my name in my ear at the right tenor to send my hips rolling forward. He knows me.
His mouth comes back to my ear. “I need you to do something for me.”
“What?”
“Stop thinking.” Two fingers slide beneath the water, find my core, and my whole body goes rigid with the effort of not making a sound when he slowly glides them through my lips. “I’ve been thinking for weeks. I don’t need you to think. I need you to feel.”
“That’s easy for you to—” He pushes those fingers inside me, then curls them to tease the bundle of nerves, and I lose the sentence entirely.
“Yes?”
“I hate you so much.”
“Noted.” His thumb finds my clit and he rubs slow circles around the bud. Between his finger massaging me inside, and my clit, I’m not going to last. I’m going to cum with his name on my lips and need in my body.
I grab his shoulders. My nails dig in as my eyes flutter closed.
“Eyes on me.” His voice is quiet, but with just the right tone that makes me squeeze those fingers.
I look at him.
His amber eyes have gone dark with the size of his pupils. His composure has shattered. What’s there instead is the man who wants the woman in front of him more than he needs his next breath.
That man has two fingers inside me and his thumb on my clit and is looking at me like I’m the only equation that ever mattered.
“You kept me sane.” His voice cracks. Just for a second. His truth spilling out in ways that make me attempt to focus. “The thought of coming back to this. To you.” His fingers move faster. “The feel of you around my fingers, on my tongue...” He moans and my god, it nearly sends me over the edge.
I’m climbing. Every word a step higher.
“Finnian—”
“Come for me,” he demands, his head still lazily thrown back as he destroys me from the inside out. “Right now. I want to feel it.”
I shatter.
The orgasm rips through without warning, my whole body clenching as I cry his name into the steam. Magic spirals outward, thorns erupting from the stones, flowers cracking through rock, and the bonds blaze at my wrist. Gold burning. Silver-blue answering. Orange flaring hot.
Then Kieran’s cold hand slides to my hip then to my waist as he presses against my back.
Finnian holds me through every aftershock, his fingers gentling but not leaving. He leans forward, his mouth pressing soft kisses to my jaw, my temple, the corner of my lips. When I can breathe again he pulls back enough to look at me.
“That’s one,” he says against my skin.
But now I’m ravenous. I want them. Altogether, right now, just like this. “Who’s going to make me cum next?” I ask, turning around to look at Orion and Kieran.