15. Max
Max
Someone was kissing the back of my neck, and a shiver went straight down my spine.
I knew the mouth. Sensual, taking its time.
The low rumble behind it pooled heat between my thighs.
Caspian’s arm hooked around my waist and hauled me back against him, all of him, bare and burning, his massive cock hard against my ass, and he made a sound into my skin like he’d been starving for a year.
“There she is,” he murmured. “There’s my girl.”
I could smell him. Wolf and warm skin and the undernote that was only ever Caspian, all over me. On my throat. In my hair. Between my legs.
He set his palm on my belly and slid it down. Through the slickness. Two fingers spreading me open while his thumb found my clit and played with it.
Some part of me groped for the cold burn. Nothing. Only pleasure.
“You’re dripping for me, sweetheart.” He pushed in to the knuckle, and the sound it made was obscene.
“What are you going to do about it?” My hips rocked against his hand.
“Greedy.” His laugh buzzed against my back.
The bed was enormous. The room was dark. And I wasn’t alone with him.
Cool fingers found my jaw and turned my face.
Nikolai lay on the pillow beside me, crimson eyes half-lidded, fangs already down.
He studied my mouth a long moment, choosing where to start.
Then he kissed me, slow and filthy, tongue in my mouth like he had a claim filed on it, and his hand slid up my ribs and closed over my breast, rolling my nipple between his fingers until it hurt.
Shit, this was too delicious.
Cold in front. Heat behind.
The moan that went into his mouth didn’t sound like me.
“Listen to her.” Caspian’s teeth grazed my shoulder. His fingers didn’t stop fucking into my wet pussy. “She’s been holding that in for weeks.”
“She has.” Nikolai pinched, once, hard, and my every nerve lit up. “Haven’t you, Eirath?”
The mattress dipped.
I pushed up on my elbows. Aelindor knelt between my ankles, silver hair loose over his shoulders, winter-blue eyes gone silver at the center, and he took my leg and drew it open.
“Look at you.” He dragged his thumb through the mess Caspian had made of me and held it up to the light. “Look what the wolf has done to you. My turn.”
He lowered his head and put his mouth on my cunt.
I cried out. Couldn’t help it. Caspian’s arm clamped around my middle, Nikolai’s hand spread on my sternum, and they held me down while Aelindor feasted on me, hot and obscene.
He ate me the way he fenced. Reading, adjusting, finding what made me gasp, then doing it again.
Flat tongue, then the point of it, then two fingers curled up inside me while he sucked my clit, and every time I tried to close my legs, he pressed them wider and drove deeper.
“I’ve watched the wolf and the dragon fuck plenty of women,” Nikolai murmured against my ear, and I growled. “I’ve never watched the Fae work a woman over.” His thumb dragged across my nipple. “I want to see him make that tight cunt come for him.”
Heat rolled off the far side of the room before the footsteps came.
“Without me?” a rough voice called.
Drakken stepped into the light naked, his cock heavy and flushed against his stomach. He stopped at the edge of the bed, looked at the four of us, and swallowed.
“Come here,” I said.
“Want my dragon cock in you, Max?”
“Shut up and fuck me. I want a cock in me, and I don’t care whose.”
After that I lost the thread of it.
Caspian hauled me up and dragged me down onto his cock in one stroke. Thick, hot, so deep I couldn’t speak. Both hands spread wide on my ass, holding me open.
The bed shifted behind me. Warm oil poured down the base of my spine and lower, and Drakken’s hand followed it, working into my ass. One finger. Then two, patient and thorough, stretching me until I shoved back onto his hand and swore at him.
He pressed in.
Too much, and then not, and then both of them were in me at once, and I made a sound I’d never fucking made in my life.
They found a rhythm. One in as the other drew out, over and over, nothing left of me that wasn’t being used.
Nikolai rose on his knees beside my head, his cock in his fist, and turned my face.
I opened for him. He fed himself into my mouth, hand fisted in my hair, careful and then not careful at all, working his large cock into my throat until my eyes streamed.
His other hand braced on the headboard, and the wood cracked under it.
Then Aelindor’s fingers pushed into me alongside Caspian’s cock, stretching my cunt around all of it, and his mouth closed over my pulse.
“Love,” Aelindor said against my throat, “this is how it’s going to be with all of us.”
All four of them. In me, on me, everywhere at once, and every one of them taking what he wanted.
Full. Held. Fucked. Taken care of and taken, both at once.
Then Drakken’s heat turned wrong.
It ran up through my back and into my shoulders and kept climbing.
I surfaced into fucking agony.
A rough blanket covered me. The smell of woodsmoke and old cooking grease and antiseptic hit my nostrils, and everything in my body hurt in a different key.
My ribs ached when I breathed. My shoulder throbbed hot. Every limb lay packed with wet sand. And threaded under all of it ran a burnt-wire ache I’d never felt before. The Dark Grace’s bill, come due. Even my heartbeat felt borrowed.
And there was another kind of ache—the need for the four heirs.
I lay there with my heart slamming, my thighs slick, my cunt clenching on nothing, my tongue still remembering the taste of Nikolai, of Caspian, and I wanted it back so badly that for a second, I tried to sink under again to chase it.
That dream was beyond my reach now.
Yet the ache between my legs was real. So was the wetness.
I turned my head, and the room spun once before it agreed to hold still.
Yes, Max wakes! the Coldiron on my armguard chirped and settled like a soothed flock. We fucked them up, Max! We destroyed the walls!
Caspian stood at the far wall.
All the way back against it, which he hadn’t been when I blacked out. Some part of me had been tracking him even unconscious. He’d gotten up and put the whole room between us.
His fists were white at the knuckles. His eyes had gone wolf all the way through, silver swallowing the green, blown so wide there was almost nothing left of the man in them, and he breathed through his mouth in short pulls, like he was trying not to taste the air.
He knew. Best nose on the continent, and I’d just spent hours soaking a mattress in exactly what I’d been dreaming about.
“Caspian.”
“Don’t.” Shredded. He got his jaw under control and tried again. “Don’t talk yet. Give me a second, sweetheart.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Don’t apologize.” His voice cracked down the middle. “Don’t you fucking dare apologize for that. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I can’t give you what you need.”
Nikolai was on my other side. He hadn’t moved at all, and that was worse.
He sat in a wooden chair pulled up to the bed, forearm braced on his knee, and he was absolutely still. Not calm. Still. As if he’d decided that any movement was a risk. He pressed his lips hard together so his fangs wouldn’t show.
His crimson eyes stayed on the beam above my head, as if he couldn’t afford to look at me.
I had to say something to defuse the tension and get us back to normal.
I took in the room. Bare brick, one shuttered window, a Stormglass lamp turned low.
“Where am I?” My voice came out raw and husky.
“We’re in a safe house, sweetheart,” Caspian said to the wall.
“Eirath, you’re safe now.” Nikolai swallowed, trying to compose himself. “We got away because of you.”
“You nearly died.” Caspian let out a rough breath. “Don’t ever do that to us again. I’ve got nowhere to put it.”
I tried to answer. Nothing came out.
“Six hours,” Nikolai said. “That’s how long you’ve been out. He hasn’t sat down once.”
“You’ve been in that chair the whole time?”
“Yes.”
“Nikolai—”
“Eirath.” Barely audible. “Please give me a second.”
I lay still, between two men who would have died for me on that bridge and had nearly managed it, and neither of them could cross four feet of floor to hold my hand.
My fingers twitched, and I reached for the two of them.
They flinched.
“Sweetheart, I’m so sorry.” A wince, then rage, crossed Caspian’s face. “Neither of us can touch you. Both of us burned trying to carry you off that bridge. We had to hand you to Enna. The burn never touched her, since she’s a woman.”
Xander’s voice slid up out of my memory like oil on a blade. From this moment, no one lays a hand on my betrothed with desire in his heart. The contract is active. She is mine. Mine alone.
Cold sank into my marrow.
It hadn’t stopped me wanting. It had never been interested in that. Six hours of proof soaked into the sheets under me, and the curse hadn’t so much as stirred.
In the dream, it couldn’t do a thing.
Caspian turned around and put his forehead against the wall.
He said it to the brick. “Six hours I stood there listening to you not die. And then you make that sound in your sleep and say my name, and I have to stand in a corner like a fucking dog.” His shoulders went up and down once.
“Sorry. Sweetheart. I’m sorry. I’m glad you’re awake. I’m so fucking glad you’re awake.”
“Come sit down,” I said.
“Can’t.”
“I’m not asking you to touch me.”
“Max.” His laugh scraped. “I can smell you.”
“We’ll find a way past it,” Nikolai said. “I swear to you, we’ll break this fucking curse.”
“Hi, I’m Jennifer.” A young blonde woman, a few years older than me, stepped into the room.
“I’m a healer. I think what you’ve got is a geas.
It’s a binding—someone’s put a rule in you and your body enforces it.
This one says no man touches you. And if he pushes through the burn anyway, it climbs. ” She swallowed. “Until it kills him.”
Nikolai frowned. “You know how to break it?”
“Kill the one who placed it,” Jennifer said, biting her nail, her eyes flicking between Nikolai and Caspian. She was nervous around them. Most women were. These two were ridiculously hot. “That’s the only clean way. The geas dies with him.”
“It won’t work,” Caspian said.
Kill Xander, and I’d die with him. I didn’t know whether it ran in reverse, but I’d bet Xander hadn’t bound himself in any way that inconvenienced him. A one-way leash, buckled onto me.
“Drink, Max.” Caspian snatched a cup of water from Jennifer’s hand, tilted it with the care of a man defusing a bomb, and dripped water into my mouth.
At least he’d left the wall and come to me, but he fed me the water from as far back as his arm would reach, and he didn’t look at my face while he did.
The cool water slid down my scorched throat. I still felt like I was burning, heat pulsing behind my eyes. Burnout. The price of letting the Dark Grace off its chain.
I waited for my demon to lecture me.
Nothing. No sarcasm. No taunting purr. The presence that had shared my skull since I was a child was gone. I’d fought to be rid of it, certain I was possessed, sure I was one bad day from losing myself for good.
Now I had the silence I’d wanted all my life, and it gutted me.
Not gone, I told myself. It had turned into Dark Grace. My inheritance. My innate magic.
But it would never speak again.
The silence had been in the dream too. That was the part I didn’t say out loud to anyone in that room. It always pulled back for me, every single time, gave me that much privacy, and I’d never thanked it for that either.
“Are you feeling better, Max?” Jennifer asked when I’d finished the water.
“Yes. Thank you, Jennifer,” I said.
I struggled to sit up, and Caspian helped me, all pillow and blanket and no touch.
“Your wounds were mostly sealed by the time they carried you in,” Jennifer continued. “You regenerate faster than anyone I’ve ever treated. If we could draw a little of your blood to study, the benefit to our medical—”
“No one draws her blood if they want to draw their next breath.” Nikolai’s voice could have frozen the room.
“And don’t ever fucking mention it again.” That one had a snarling wolf in it.
“I didn’t mean—” Jennifer’s hands flew up, tears in her brown eyes. “I’m sorry, Your Highnesses.”
The heirs were good to their soldiers. But one mention of taking my blood, and both princes had gone to teeth.
Jennifer probably had no idea what I was to them. Stationed out here, she’d likely taken me for a fling. The heirs had quite a reputation with women, at least before they met me. Her wary eyes said she was recalculating fast.
“Dismissed,” Caspian said. “Don’t come back unless we call for you.”
“Yes, Your Highnesses,” she said, and started to back away.
“Wait,” I called before she could flee. She turned. I gestured at Nikolai. “Why isn’t he healed?”
His arm hadn’t grown back. The stump ended at the elbow, wrapped in a bandage, and the rest of him was no better. Gray under the white, dark circles carved under his crimson eyes that I’d never seen on him before.
Nikolai looked startled at the fierceness in my voice, then warmth brimmed up in his eyes.
“Don’t worry about me, Eirath,” he said.
My gaze stayed on Nikolai. I wasn’t letting him off the hook that easily. “You should’ve healed by now, Nikolai.”
Jennifer blinked when I addressed the vampire prince by his first name. I wouldn’t do it in a formal setting, but right now I didn’t give a fuck about hierarchy.
“Don’t fuss.” Nikolai smiled. “I’ll be good as new in a day. The wolf’s been bleeding into a cup for me. It’s surprisingly potent.”
“Why is that surprising?” Caspian rolled his eyes. “I’m the most powerful shifter on the continent. A—”
“If you say you’re a ten again,” I said, “I’ll get off this bed and strangle you.”
Caspian blinked. Then he laughed, the first laugh I’d heard since the bridge.
“And I’d give everything to have your hands on—” He stopped. He’d just remembered that was the one thing we couldn’t do.
We might never be able to touch each other again.
Nikolai frowned at Caspian. “The taste almost killed me, though.”
It was common knowledge that vampires rarely drank from shifters.
“Fuck you, bloodsucker,” Caspian growled.
I was glad to see the heirs were themselves again.
Nikolai needed my blood, the blood of the most potent bloodline from two Zodiac Houses. I cut a glance at Jennifer, and both princes registered that the healer was still in the room.
Nikolai turned to her. “You can go.”
Jennifer fled.