Chapter Fifty-Three
The king shows me the parchment, the terms, with Benji’s name attached, and we stand, still clothed, before the streaming pool.
“Satisfied?” he asks as I read the words for the third time.
I cannot find a loophole. This note will ensure Benji’s autonomy for now, at least, so that he can build wealth and a future.
If the king revokes the boy’s legal protections, and a complaint is leveled against him, then perhaps the other Houses will uphold their promises and defend the faerie.
Perhaps not, but this letter grants time. Money. Savings.
So finally I nod, handing it back. Maxian snaps his fingers and the contract disappears.
“Your turn,” he says.
Nausea sways me once more, but I push it down. I push everything down, then conjure images of another bathing chamber, a silver one, and the silver fae who swims in its water.
I pull my tunic over my head. Rolling down the undergarments, I step out of the pile of clothes, and my nipples peak in the cold. Before me, the king is fully dressed, his attention dropping to my waist, my thighs.
Let’s play a game, let’s play a game, let’s play a game. I chant until my defiance and fear churn into something soft and acceptable: a coy challenge.
“Satisfied?” I ask.
“Get in the water.”
I touch my toes to the steaming, simmering pool. The heat sears my skin. I suck in a breath.
“Keep going,” he instructs from behind as his clothes smack against the floor. When I try to look back, he commands, “Forward.”
So tonight, he will direct and I will have to play along.
The burning rises to my knees, my skin red, my body clenching in anticipation.
“One more step,” he says.
I sink into the heat, the water singeing between my thighs.
I gasp as it slaps against my sex, painful and pleasurable, and although I beg my body not to—it reacts.
Shivers run up and over my skin, a betrayal my mind cannot comprehend.
As the king moves farther into the pool, the water laps against me, then retreats, the chilly air rushing against my sensitive clit.
No.
I do not want this. I know I do not want this. But I want my friends to be free, I want to walk away with that contract in hand and leverage from his back and his lineage even if nothing else in me is intact.
Maxian maneuvers past me so I cannot see his scars, lowering himself onto one of the submerged benches.
The water hits his chest, and he spreads his arms, leaning them against the ledge.
The practiced movement of someone with something to hide.
I try to relax my expression, keep out the twitching as something in me recoils in disgust. Please stop this. I don’t want to feel this.
He cocks his head and observes every inch of me.
Does he know my true thoughts? I wonder as I start to understand his.
It is like that night in his bed, the fight in the library: He wants me to enjoy it, against my will, as he was aroused by me against his.
The way he looked confused at his palm as I walked away.
Well, he does not look confused now, and I cannot walk away.
He blows on the water, a strong, strange wind. The heat once again envelops my clit, then drops away, the dance of warm and cold like a lover’s breath. My thighs press together.
“Avery,” he chides.
I close my eyes, breathing. I do not want to let go.
I must, I must give in, but still, a part of me claws against the rising tide of desire, the water kissing my sex over and over and over as he moves it with his mind.
A low moan builds in the back of my throat.
I fight it the entire way. The feeling of standing in a different bath, the vulnerable offer, the sting of rejection. My desire begins to ebb.
“Why are you denying what you want?” he drawls.
“I’m not,” I breathe.
“Prove it, then.”
Soumeter, soumeter, soumeter.
He will know if I fake it—I was his teacher in that lesson.
I dip my hands into the water, then, dripping, palm each breast. I work each nipple, pinching, twisting.
I am swaying, I am ascending, my breaths coming in ragged, the air thin and strange.
I am only sensations: the lapping water, the biting pain, the cold air, the weight of his gaze dragging down my figure.
“I—I can’t—”
“Yes, you can.”
What I said to Rose, and she to me. Reign magic tumbles around me, a rocky grip, fortifying my thighs. He holds me in place as the water slaps harder against my clit over and over and over.
“No.” But it’s a weak protest, a playful, breathy one—to him.
Inside, I am screaming, begging my body to shut down, but it does anything but—not as solid arms wrap around my hips, hands knead my ass, pointed teeth graze across my stomach, and I cannot stop my own fingers from pinching my nipples harder as the Reign magic has taken over, as he has taken over.
He is not betraying me; he is making me betray myself.
My hips buck, eyes burning with unfallen tears, as desire builds.
I thought it would be less painful this way.
“Are you almost there?”
“Yes.”
His teeth are sinking into my hip, biting, and I cry out in shock.
His hands are on my back, and he is lowering me, slipping a leg over one shoulder, then the other.
The warm water embraces my spine as he lays me across the top step, my hips lifted in the air, my fingers twisting painfully, ceaselessly, at my nipples, the Reign magic locking them in.
And what died, unspent, between Kassandra and me is once again resurrected against my will.
“Please,” I beg.
Maxian descends, dragging his tongue up my center. I cry out again, bucking, but he holds me in place. He sucks on my clit, fingers gripping my thighs painfully, as I work—as he works—my sore breasts.
No, but it’s too late, heat and humiliation warming my chest, my neck, my cheeks. He pulls back. “You’re throbbing.”
“Stop,” I gasp, and finally our gazes lock. His cheeks are flush with desire, his hair damp and ruffled, between my legs. How many fae crave this sight, to have the king on his knees before them? How many would do anything for it?
“We can stop. We can stop anytime.” His stubble grazes my thigh. “I’ll just need to call Carter back in with the contract so I can void it.”
“Wait—”
He cocks a brow, kissing my inner thigh, murmuring, “What will it be, then?”
My head falls back, and tears roll down my temples. I do not know the answer. I am too drunk on many things to be clever. His Reign magic drops away from my hands, but they move on their own volition now, my pussy pulsing, pelvis pushing closer. There is no answer, there is just the plan: survive.
“Please,” I manage.
“Please, what?”
My voice echoes throughout the chamber, sounding small.
“Finish me.”
“Good faerie.”
He takes me into his mouth, tugging, working. But the body is hollow, mind severed from this moment. He notices and bites me hard, and I cry out, for maybe I cannot survive this, here with him. So I do not stay with him, or find Kassandra or any of the other beautiful High Fae.
I think of confessing this later to Jeremee, hiccupping and crying in his arms as I did after so many other losses, and him stroking my hair, kissing me because Death was right.
I do not seek approval in males, only protection.
They will touch us anyway, so we may as well find the gentlest ones.
The one I would whisper to under the tables of the common room when we were kids, telling him all the things my father did.
The one who worried, who refused me when I wanted him the most, my friend, my first and original friend, the only safe harbor in an unsafe world.
Destroyed now. Jeremee a destination I can never return to even if I always long for it. Long for my home.
The king’s grip is painful, grabbing my breasts, and my body floods again with feeling, that building, that swelling, that filling until I am bursting with it, until I can take it no more.
Then Maxian plunges two fingers into me and rips the orgasm out.