CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Myra
“I really fucking hate you, Yael Kristoris,” I said, stepping out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around me and the ‘dress’ he’d given me to wear.
“Using my surname now, are we, love?” he replied with a smug smile as he walked down the hall to meet me, buttoning his shirt with fancy silver cufflinks. “You must really be cross with me.”
“Put it this way: if I knew your middle name, I’d have weaponized it, too.”
“What you need to weaponize is that dress by owning it, or this whole plan is going to go to hell before we even step inside.”
Taking his words as a challenge, I took a deep breath and unhooked the towel.
In a grand display, I tossed it back into the bathroom and put my hands on my hips while I sashayed toward him.
He stopped dead in his tracks, wide eyes pinned on me in the scandalous outfit, but he recovered quickly before meeting me halfway.
He held up a short wool coat on the tip of his finger and gestured for me to put it on.
“For your virtue,” he said, helping me slip into it.
The silky lining was cool and slick, and it felt like water rolling over my skin as I cut through the ocean with ease.
As the temptation of the sea called to me, he spun me around in his arms to face him. “Better?”
I looked down at the oversized coat, thinking it somehow made my outfit even more ridiculous. “Better than naked, I guess.”
With a heavy gaze, he looked me over, his eyes lingering on my exposed legs for longer than necessary before they finally found my face again. “I’m not so sure about that.” His hand reached toward me slowly and brushed my hair back over one shoulder. “But we can discuss it on the way.”
We drove deep into the heart of fae territory before he parked his car and helped me out of the passenger’s side.
I received some interesting looks from the few beings we passed as we walked along, mainly implying that I was a piece of trash tainting their pristine neighborhood.
But Yael they still regarded with respect, despite having some Playground whore on his arm.
My nerves were already shot, knowing where we had to go and what we had to do, and their judgment was doing little to improve the situation.
Every side-eyed glance made me want to knuckle up and start swinging to let out some of my nervous energy, but before I had the chance, Yael took my arm in his and patted my hand.
“Not worth it,” he whispered in my ear. “Your outburst would only fuel them further.”
“Maybe,” I said, trying to shake off their judgment, “but they’d be fueled with fewer teeth.”
He laughed at my response, the deep, warm tenor of it wrapping around me like a blanket as it rang out through the night.
I looked at his profile, his features filled with genuine amusement, and I couldn’t help but smile in return despite my apprehension.
But that smile fell away the second we stopped along a narrow alley next to a nondescript limestone building.
Confusion pinched my brows as I stared at the broad side of it that was devoid of any doors.
“Did we make a wrong turn somewhere?” I asked as he leaned forward and pressed his palm against the stone.
A warm, red glow shone through the darkness beneath his hand, then spread like fire, traveling a rectangular perimeter—around the outline of a door.
He shot me an amused look. “As I said, it’s rather exclusive.”
“You must come here often,” I muttered as a strange anger bloomed in my chest—something that felt a lot like jealousy.
“Not for what you think, love. That was for the king’s business.” Sparkling green eyes full of mischief looked back at me. “I’ve been saving the rest for you.”
Warmth rushed through me as he reached for the door and opened it to usher me inside.
It was so dark it took a moment for my eyes to adjust, but when they did, they found a spectacle for which even my wildest imagination couldn’t have prepared me.
An eerie underlighting of red gave the vast space a haunting glow, casting a blood-like appearance on the exposed skin that was everywhere.
Unlike The Lion’s Den, there were no closed rooms that I could see, though the open staircase leading to the upper floors on the far side of the space made me wonder if they were just tucked away.
Chaises, sofas, and random flat surfaces filled the room, covered with bodies in various stages of sexual acts, while others danced and gyrated against the nearest person.
It was a feast for the voyeurist eye, to be sure.
In that moment, I realized that Yael really had been conservative in the dress he’d chosen. With his coat on, I looked like a damn nun.
Yael slipped it off my shoulders and handed it to someone walking by, then led the way through the tightly packed crowd.
It felt like eyes and hands were all over me as I passed by, overwhelming me.
I was out of my element, and I realized just how vulnerable I felt—and how much I hated that feeling.
The mob of dancing bodies seemed to swallow me until a hand reached back and wrapped around mine.
Yael pulled me in tight behind him, the length of our arms touching as he navigated the masses, and every time my breasts brushed against his back, it sent a rush through me.
Surrounded by sex, the scent of it lingering in the air, I had to wonder if there was an incubus nearby, because it was beginning to cloud my mind; it was becoming consumed with visions of Yael peeling that fucking dress from my body, his hands and lips exploring every inch of my exposed skin.
I dug my nails into my palm to try to clear those heady thoughts so I could think clearly.
We were there for a purpose: to find his sister, then return me to the Deep.
With a shake of my head and a cleansing breath, I managed to pull myself together as we broke free of the crowd near the stairway, headed towards a floor to ceiling water feature that spanned half of the wall.
But then Yael stopped shy of it next to a counter draped with naked fae males and females, each one being serviced by multiple others, and whatever clarity of thought I’d just regained seemed to fly out the window in a blink.
“Are you rethinking the option to join in elsewhere?” Yael asked, pulling my attention from the display to my left.
“No!” I replied abruptly—too abruptly.
He smiled at my flustered state. “Well, then…” He advanced toward me with slow, measured steps until my back was pressed against the wall.
Fireworks went off in my chest as his palm flattened next to my head, caging me in.
My breath caught in my throat as his other hand brushed a stray hair from my face.
“We need to blend in,” he said, his lips grazing my ear as he spoke, “remember?”
Blend in. Right.
I mentally slapped myself and tried to emerge from the spell Loreleia’s little house of fetishes had put me under. “Do you see her?”
He glanced out of his periphery to scan the room. “Not yet.”
I swallowed hard as the pulsating energy in the room and Yael’s proximity slowly overwhelmed me. I was no stranger to sex, but in that moment, with Yael looming over me, staring down with those eyes like a forest, I felt like a fawn struggling to stand for the first time.
A hint of a smirk tugged at his mouth, as though he had read my thoughts. “Reach your hands over your head and grab that rope.” His breath tickled my skin, but his words awakened something inside me that roared to life and burned like fire in my belly, igniting every cell in my body.
“But I’m going to need my hands,” I argued, my voice too breathy to hold any real conviction because I wanted him to do it.
To tie me up and hold me hostage and do everything he’d promised after he rescued me from death.
My heart began to race as thoughts of his hands all over my body assaulted my mind while he watched me intently.
“You don’t right now.” When I didn’t move, too deep in the throes of anticipation to do anything, he slid his hands down my arms to my wrists and gently guided them above my head to the thick rope dangling from the ceiling above.
As I fisted it in my hands, that familiar darkness swirled through his hungry stare and his fingertips trailed back down, grazing the sides of my breasts, my hips, my thighs, stoking white-hot heat between my legs.
“Don’t let go, or I’ll have to tie you up.
” My lips parted at his casual threat, and I let my hold on the rope loosen.
His body pressed against mine, pinning me against the wall in the most welcome way.
“Tell me the plan again,” he demanded as his fingers flirted with the scandalous hem of my skirt.
One of them drifted higher than the others, skimming a path along the skin of my inner thigh that made me arch into his chest.
“We wait until she sees you and comes close enough for me to touch her.”
“And…?” he asked as that finger slipped away slowly, leaving a trail of need in its wake.
I swallowed hard, trying in vain to slow my breathing. “And I wait for you to give the sign.”
“Good,” he said, his voice low as his eyes raked over me. “She cannot see this coming, so you must stay in character, no matter what. Can you do that for me, love?” His palm pressed gently to my throat, his thumb stroking a line of heat along its hollow. “Can you pretend to want me?”
“Yes,” I breathed, looking up at him with hungry eyes. “Can you pretend to want me back?”
His gaze fell to my lips, and he inhaled hard. “That won’t be difficult…” When he looked up, the inky swirls in his eyes had nearly swallowed them whole. “But you must be convincing. It’s the only way this can work.”
My lips parted as I lifted my chin in challenge. “That won’t be difficult.”