Renick
For one sickening heartbeat, my gaze holds Sera’s, watching her dark eyes well first with love—then go wide with fear.
I still at the kiss of cold steel against my throat. My lungs fail to pull a breath.
“Aldric…” Sera’s gasp barely reaches my ears through the roaring. “Please—”
The blade presses in, and I swallow against it. “Let her leave this chamber,” I manage, my voice unsteady. “Let her go, and you can have me.”
His chuckle is low and mocking at the back of my skull. “Why, when I plan to have you both? I see no sense in letting the night go to waste.”
He hauls me back onto my knees, my spine to his bare chest, where I feel the heat of him. Sera scrabbles up against the bedpost, her eyes darting between us, as if gauging a wild predator.
Aldric rubs his temple, his fingers coming away with red, and he studies them with mild interest. “Should’ve aimed better,” he taunts me. “Ah—but what does a fool know.” A pause I can feel him savoring. “Or are you really a fool, I wonder? Hm.”
He turns the dagger where I can see it—my dagger. The one I brought to the palace, tried to sneak into the throne room. The one I wanted to plunge into the king’s cruel, vain heart. It’s left a nick of blood on my throat, trailing down my chest.
“Rather dull.” Aldric thumbs the blade. “I considered tossing it, but you arrived with nothing else to your name, jester. I thought it might hold some value for you. So I kept it.”
I think of Kammy’s angel—its porcelain wings in a merchant’s fist, the last of her traded for this worthless iron—and my jaw locks hard.
“Dull, but still.” He tilts it, letting the candlelight crawl the blade. “It would do the deed. Gruesomely, I’d wager. A terrible mess, tearing through flesh.”
“What do you want,” Sera says. A demand, not a question.
Aldric tsks. “You’re getting ahead of yourself, love.
” His arctic eyes meet hers, calculating.
“Now, I can shout. Summon my guards. Or—” He slips his hand to the front of my trousers, pulling the drawstring undone.
My stomach trembles at the crass action, the feel of his rough, ringed fingers tugging at the waistband.
“Or, you can crawl over here, my lovely, adulteress wife, and take our fool into your sweet, lying mouth.”
And this is what he wants—turning this chamber into his very own wedding night of misrule.
“Do nothing he says,” I tell her, finding my voice. “He wants only to humiliate you before he kills me, Sera. He’s an evil, cruel bastard and—”
His hand collars my throat from behind, gripping tight. “Yes, I’m such a devil,” he seethes against my ear. “It could be said that I was made one by the worst offense, a terrible betrayal orchestrated by a fool and my own darling wife.”
“You were a devil well before.”
Aldric sighs. “You wound me, jester. Tell me who is more evil in this scenario? The king who was deceived on his wedding night? Or the king’s two most trusted people, who plotted to murder him and then fuck in his marital bed?”
“There was never any plot, My Lord—Aldric,” Sera speaks up, gathering some composure.
“Is that so.” His voice is deathly low. He strokes his thumb down my throat. “And yet, the damage is done. By week’s end, every realm will hear how the king of Kravenholt was made a cuckold and a target in his own marriage bed.”
“That doesn’t have to be the story,” she says, trying to sway him. “The jester was simply concerned for me. And it just happened. Unplanned.”
His mouth curls. “Well of course, then. All is forgiven.” He spreads his free arm wide.
Sera doesn’t lower her gaze, her features a mask. I remain still, waiting for an opportune time to strike.
“And yet,” Aldric continues, “an execution only gains me a scandal and loses me a queen, and a treaty.”
Sera’s eyebrow arches. “The story can be whatever you want,” she says.
“Whatever I want,” he repeats.
A tense moment of pause.
“Since it’s you who brought this debauchery into my wedding bed,” Aldric says, mock disdain bleeding through his voice. “I say it’s whatever you want, wife.”
Then, with a dramatic exhale, he tosses the dagger aside. It clatters across the stones, graceless, discarded. “We can carry on. Make the damned gods of debauchery blush, or—” he tightens his grip on me “—let the fates decide. Your choice. But choose wisely.”
Sera shakes her head. “Aldric, I will pay for what I’ve done. But I will not be a part of this…madness. Take your revenge on me, but only me.”
He laughs. “Revenge? No, my love, there’s no need for revenge. Your punishment on the other hand… I am a just king, after all. I think we could come to an understanding on how to punish you.”
A swallow dips along her throat. “Yes,” she says breathlessly.
“Good girl.” Aldric tugs my trousers lower. “You’re a princess—sorry, were a princess of the Thorn Court, but you’re still a daughter of Threnmere. Sexual rites and its salacious practices are in your blood. To serve your goddess’s appetite, no?”
Sera lifts her chin, silent.
“Let us honor your goddess tonight, love.” I can feel the tremble of anticipation ripple through him. “Come here, wife,” he commands her. “Crawl.”
The thought of overpowering him surfaces. He’s unarmed. No one—not one guard or servant in this palace—knows of this yet.
My muscles gather in preparation, but the slightest shake of Sera’s head, the widening plea of her eyes, ends my fight immediately.
“Ren,” she breathes, so much said in just my name alone.
Defeat shatters through me.
She releases the bedpost and slowly lowers onto her hands and knees.
Her nightdress all but ruined, I watch her crawl across the bed, her eyes on me.
She moves forward, a reproduction of me at the feast crawling toward her, Aldric degrading her in the very same way.
She crawls closer, until she’s near enough her soft breath grazes my bare skin.
“Lift up,” Aldric orders her.
She does so, balancing on her knees, her eyes large and lashes heavy. Aldric reaches around and grasps the loose bodice of her gown, parting it open.
My breath struggles at the sight of her breasts, full and beautiful. His thumb glides across one rosy nipple, making her suck in a sharp breath, and I feel that touch in my groin. My cock jumps.
“Just look at her,” Aldric says, mouth close to my ear. “She’s more lovely than any goddess of Threnmere. More tempting, too. Don’t you want to touch her?” he goads me. “Don’t you want to take her for yourself, jester?”
I swallow thickly. “Not like this,” I say, but the conviction has been wrung from my voice at the sight of him caressing her, the way her eyes go half-mast at the sensation, her teeth sink into her bottom lip.
I shut my eyes. Angels above—fuck, have mercy.
Aldric groans, and his hips shift forward.
I feel him, hard, thick, against my backside.
“It’s what she wants,” he says, “to be touched by two men desperate for her, craving her till she’s driven them mad.
One willing to kill for her, and the other—her own king—driven to the brink by his relentless desire for her.
” He touches her chin reverently. “She should be punished for it. For how she’s made us both lose our gods-damned minds. ”
He presses his mouth to my ear. “Why can’t we share her, jester? Punish and please her in the same breath, let her feel how blessedly mad she’s made us. Besides, wouldn’t you take any morsel she’s willing to offer you?”
“Yes,” I confess. The truth of me flayed open.
“Mm,” he groans in approval. “I imagine you would.”
The loathing in Sera’s narrowed eyes spears him. “I hate you.”
“Yes, you’ve said as much. Yet your body claims otherwise, my love.” He grips her nightdress at the waist and yanks her closer. Then his hand vanishes beneath the hem, her gown bunched around his wrist as he moves higher.
“Fuck,” he mutters, his voice a guttural rasp. “Feel how wet your cunt already is. Just like the night of the feast. Don’t you remember, love? When you came so prettily for me on your own fingers?”
And there it is, rising between us in the guttering candlelight—the bruises I found on her, the bite she called merely flesh. I watch her weigh the mercy of another lie against the cost of it.
I take her face in my hands. “Tell me this isn’t what you want,” I say, not sure if I’m pleading for her or myself. “Tell me, Sera.”
She holds her mask in place. But it’s the slight part of her lips, her eyes glazed with desire, her breath catching and her hips shifting forward that answers. And gods, it’s torture. The most sinful kind.
She’s never looked more striking.
Aldric hums in amusement, touching her beneath her nightgown. “Yes, Seravyn—” he says her name deliberately “—you only have to say the word, and I’ll relent. Do tell us what you want.”
Sera leans close, her lips at my ear, and her whisper is only mine.
“You know this has to happen.” Her breath shakes.
“The draughts make him some base creature,” she whispers.
“I don’t understand as it’s never done so to another.
But I failed to recall the effect it had on him that night…
Goddess forgive me, but yes, I want this with you, Ren.
It’s the only way for us to be together. ”
“I’ll take it,” I say to her. “Anything you’re willing to give me. I told you that on my knees, delivered as my vow. I mean it still. Whatever you give me.”
“You have me,” she says.
Then her mouth crashes into mine, and I am lost to her.
“That’s a good wife,” Aldric says. He shifts away, sinking onto the bed behind her like a king taking his throne.
Sera breaks our kiss and looks back at him over her bare shoulder with the loathing and the wanting fused.
“Now, suck your jester’s cock while I finger this sweet cunt,” he commands her. “Show him how Threnmere girls like it, how they crave it. How well you can take it, love.”