Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Moth Chamber, Blood Kingdom
Freya, Omega Shadow Wolf Shifter Queen
“This is not how I imagined the morning of our wedding, love.” Daire snuggles his wing around me, as we lie tangled together naked in the gilded bed with white linen.
“Chained to that altar last night, however, the thing that scared me most was thinking I’d never get to touch you again, smell your scent of sweet roses, or kiss you a final time goodbye. ”
“On the moon, don’t talk like that.” My throat is tight.
It is a struggle not to touch the golden dragon scale bracelet around my wrist, which Aurelius gave to me.
I crave to reach out through the bond to my Alpha and sense the golden threads, which rest like a collar around my neck.
Was Aurelius able to feel my distressed emotions through the bond? Daire’s terror?
I force myself not to sense Aurelius’ emotions. If he is suffering because he is not able to fly here and save us like the white knight he likes to pretend he is, I would rather not know.
Exhausted, my eyes are painted with deep shadows.
Neither of us has slept in this tiny, windowless room, which is blindingly white; it is like being held inside fragile moths’ wings.
The gossamer drapes that hang around the bed are velvet but flutter, as if they are alive.
I squint at them.
Could they be…?
I shake my head. I must be too tired. After what that raven starver, Heka, did to Daire at the ball, I must be imagining things. My nerves are still shredded.
I almost lost my soulmate only hours ago.
I suck on Daire’s feathers to comfort myself.
Despite the horror of Daire’s identity being revealed in this enemy court, I can’t help loving that his feathers are black again. I adore running my fingers through his silver curls.
He looks once again like the stunning fae whose beauty and lavender eyes entranced me years ago, as I watched him from the boundary of my own Fang Kingdom, as he trained his army.
He appeared wild, dangerous, and everything I desired.
He still does.
Daire’s pheromones become thicker in the air with desire, and he gives a shaky laugh. “I should face near certain death more often.”
I glare at him through my eyelashes, spitting his plumage out of my mouth in punishment. “Every other day isn’t enough for you?”
“Pfft, when I was with the featherglass, we thought that it’d been a slow week if it wasn’t daily.”
“Did you laugh in the face of death too?”
“Winked.” Daire smirks. “Sometimes, I kissed Death, the fae of the Mound. She’s a scary arsehole but beautiful enough to lure you to the afterlife.”
“Are you making her up?” I narrow my eyes. “Also, no more kissing fae who will take you away from me.”
“No more kissing anyone but you, love. But sometimes…” I don’t like how Daire’s gaze slides from me.
It becomes far away like I have already lost him.
Panic shoots through me. I wind my legs around Daire, as if I can hold onto him forever.
“…We don’t get to choose when it’s our time.
I’ll fight to stay with you as long as I can, I promise.
I thought that I could see the whole board, however, and it turns out that I’m not as in control as I thought I was. ”
“Like this?” I lick at the cut on Daire’s neck, using my saliva to help heal it, as Omegas in the Moon Court have been taught to help their Alphas.
“Heka surprised me. But then, you surprised him when you savaged his wrist. I hope that the bastard can’t do any more of his shady experiments.” Daire stretches. “Keep licking me, love. It makes almost being decapitated worth it.”
“I can still bite you.” I nip his collarbone.
Daire’s cock thickens. “Hmm, again.”
Instead, I raise the snowflake bond mark to my mouth and kiss it.
Daire’s eyes widen, and he smiles.
He raises his own wrist to his mouth, and I am fixated by the scorched skin from the iron chains.
He is still wearing the bands of black velvet, which are decorated with the House of Sin scarab beetle emblem and hieroglyphs that Heka designed to protect him from the burn of the delicate dragon iron bracelets.
Yet now it’s clear that Heka used the excuse of studying the bracelets to study Daire.
Under the guise of helping his king’s nestmates, Heka was investigating them to destroy him.
I suspected that Heka had conditioned Lanlin, seeing him as an experiment in how to train a monster, rather than being a friend to him.
I didn’t tell Lanlin because I didn’t want to steal the only good memory from his childhood that he had.
What a fucking mistake.
It would have been better if I had let Lanlin rip out Heka’s throat.
Daire presses his soft lips to the mark, and pleasure washes over me, as I feel his kiss through the mark.
I start to purr.
“You have no idea how much I bloody wanted to do that all the time I was chained down.” Daire feathers kisses over the mark, while I shiver. “Bondage is fun normally, but not when it separates me from you. I was desperate for you to know that I was thinking of you.”
“I know.” I shove Daire onto his back and straddle him. My purr deepens. He lets his wings fall wide; they’re long enough to jostle the drapes either side of the bed that flutter. He looks like a beautiful sacrifice underneath me, although a willing one. “You are always thinking of me.”
“I am, my Omega.” He is beneath me, but he looks fucking dangerous, as he bares his sharp canines. “And you were bloody glorious in your shifter form. We’d be dangerous together in a battle, aye? You shifted to protect your Alpha.”
“I do stupid things like that.”
By the Shadow Gods, seeing Daire bound on the altar as the blood sacrifice chilled my soul worse than anything in my life.
My transformation was spontaneous and unexpected, ripping through me.
I’d never felt so powerful and so hopeless at the same time.
I’m glad that we’re not lying in the Royal Nest with Lanlin. He may have ultimately saved Daire from Isis and the rest of his court, but I can’t shake the sensation of Lanlin’s sticky shadows pinning me to the wall, while he veiled my soulmate from me for excruciating minutes.
I glance at the golden wolf mask, which I’d worn at the ball. I hurled it furiously at the wall earlier, when the Beta Bloods ushered Daire and me into this room.
The mask lies in two pieces, staring back at me with hollow eyes.
I had been fucking happy when Lanlin gifted the mask to me.
Well, that’s what happens when you trust vampires.
Shouldn’t I have learned that when they slaughtered my entire court? My royal parents?
I clench my jaw.
Yet guilt churns in my guts. I remember the pain in Lanlin’s eyes, when he looked at me and realized that I’d known about the deception.
Does he think that our love is also a lie?
I need to explain everything to him.
Scheming sucks.
“What did our darkness whisper to you?” I demand. “Can we trust Lanlin to still go through with everything tonight? Or is he intending to kill us, rather than marry us?”
Daire’s lips quirk. “He’s a psycho. I’m always expecting our bat-winged King’s fangs in my neck. But he won’t hurt you.”
“Not reassuring.” I frown. “I won’t let him hurt you either. I’ll slice off the knot of anyone who tries to attack you again.”
Daire squirms out from underneath me with a fighter’s skill that shows me he could have done it any time he wanted, and I’d never truly had control.
He crawls with a slink of his hips to the end of the bed, grabbing up a handful of the clothes there, which I have been deliberately not looking at.
He feels over them.
“I have brilliant deductive skills, aye? If he’s left our bridal outfits here, then I’d say he’s not planning to murder us during the ceremony.” Daire throws the white sheath dress at me, and I catch it. The material is spun out of some material, which is so fine that it is almost transparent.
There is an edge to Daire’s tone that I don’t understand, as if there is something that he isn’t telling me.
Daire is good at telling the truth, while hiding it.
When I stare down at the bright orange carnelian design that is embroidered on the front of the dress in gemstones, my heart beats painfully.
I am suddenly frightened that the same bat design won’t be worked in onyx circling the sun in worship, as in the first dress that Lanlin gave me.
It marks me as being part of the royal nest.
A smile tugs at my mouth, however, when I spot the onyx bat. I trace over it.
I didn’t realize before how addicted I had become to Lanlin’s devotion.
Am I just as hungry for that devotion as Lanlin is for Daire’s blood, and Daire is for the other Alpha’s attention?
We need each other.
The draw feels more than the Golden Threads that hold us together by fate.
I slip the dress over my head. “Is this us deciding not to run like cowards?”
I smooth down my dress and place my hand over the gemstone sun like I will be able to feel its warmth.
“We can’t abandon Aurelius, despite him being a buggering idiot,” Daire replies.
“And I refuse to use this cursed mask from Maximinus to capture Sin. We love them both, despite them being too blind to see it. But love is strange like that. They can hate me, and it won’t change how I feel.
As long as they want you, Spark. They’re both pack, aye? ”
I give a firm nod. “They’re pack, but how do we make this work?
Fuck a troll, this whole plan has gone wrong.
Even if Lanlin forgives our betrayal, we’re bonding fully with him tonight, through both ceremony and rut.
If we don’t take him back to the Shadow Court, then we’re fucking Aurelius just as hard. ”
Daire fumbles with the kilt, which has been laid out for him. The kilt is made of stiff, pleated linen. He draws it around his waist.
My mouth dries at how the kilt leaves his chest and lean legs bare.