Seravyn #2
His hand shifts to my throat, his thumb settling over my pulse. “Beg, love. Tell me how badly you need me.”
“Please,” I rasp out between moans. “Please, fuck me…harder. I do need you.”
Satisfaction curls his mouth into a beautifully smug smile, and then he’s giving me exactly what I need. His muscles flex in his forearms, his jaw tightens, and he keeps those blue flames on me as he thrusts up into me in a frantic, unforgiving pace.
My spine arches, his chest rubbing against my breasts each time he slams into me, setting off a riot of sparks beneath my flesh. Then his thumb is stroking my clit, getting me closer with each brutal thrust, hitting the ache inside me so deep—
“That’s it, love. Fuck, that’s it, come for me. I want to feel you break.”
His command reaches deep, and my body obeys. I shatter around him, his name on my lips like a prayer, my body rolling in rippling waves, chasing the unbearable pleasure over the cliff until I’m spent.
Aldric drops his mouth to the curve of my neck, his fingers digging into my thighs as he drags me harder against him, his cock spearing impossibly deeper as he grows harder, until he growls against my skin, his teeth puncturing my flesh, and he’s pulsing deep inside me with his release.
Our motions slow, even as he’s still working my hips, his own jerking beneath—the last of his pleasure wrung from him in flinching shivers. I feel him, hot and wet, slipping against my inner thighs.
Our breathing is heavy between us. We stay like this a moment more, our pulses slowing, our bodies slackening. When he pulls back a measure to meet my eyes, something guarded is held there in his gaze. There for a flash before his smug smile tips into place.
“I still loathe you,” I say.
He chuckles, and I feel it deep between my hips. “Loathe me like that every day,” he says. “At least a few times more today, and I will let you spit in my mouth and call me your whore, my love.”
Furious, I tug my bodice up and demand he free me, and he does, pushing the chair back and allowing me to escape.
I move through the rest of the day in a daze, feeling as though I’ve slipped into a different realm entirely.
I mask my features as best I can. It’s the only thing my mother’s training was ever truly for—the art of wearing a serene face over a body at war with itself.
I receive the court’s congratulations. I accept the Threnmere delegation’s formal well-wishes, my father’s men who will carry word home that the princess is wed and the alliance sealed, debt paid. I let the seamstresses fuss. I let the chamberlain prattle on.
And all the while, beneath the mask, I feel raw.
Because I crave a cruel king’s touch as much as a fool’s gentle one.
And everywhere I turn, Ren is there to remind me.
He performs at the midday meal, capering in his motley, and not once does he look at me longer than a jester should look at his queen—but every glance that meets my eyes is a live coal.
Loaded. Charged. Dangerous.
I feel each one in the marrow of my bones, and I know he feels mine the same way, and the knowledge sits between us in that crowded hall like a blade balanced on its point.
We crossed a line last night that cannot be uncrossed.
He gave me a vow and I gave him my body, and somewhere in the wreckage of a wedding night we became something that the whole weight of this kingdom would see us dead for.
Any small piece of you, he told me. However small.
I’ll make it enough. And I believe him. I believe he would burn the world down to the foundations for the smallest scrap of me, and the terror of being loved like that—of loving back just as recklessly—is a poisonous thing growing thorns in my chest.
The stakes have changed. We are not a careful, doomed flirtation anymore. We are treason with a heartbeat.
And the cruel king himself is the puppet master pulling our strings.
There is only one way out of this before it goes horribly, terribly wrong. Only one way any of us will survive. Because I know, once Aldric has had his crude fill, and has tired of us, grown bored with this entertainment, he will have Ren at the gallows.
And me? What happens to queens who are guilty of adultery in Kravenholt? I shudder to find out just what Aldric has planned as my punishment when he grows disenchanted with his Threnmere girl.
So when the sun sets and night calls to the darkness within me, I go alone to my chambers.
I take down the small, locked box from the false bottom of my traveling trunk. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, is what my mother sent me here to use.
The preparation awaiting the combination of the wolfsbane from my growing garden.
This was always the true bargain. Not peace. Not an alliance. My father wept and signed his name and sold his daughter to a tyrant, yes—but my mother pressed her lips to my forehead in that courtyard and called me a blade.
And a blade is sent into a body for one purpose.
King Aldric Vaelstrom bought a bride, a toy trinket he wants to wind until it breaks—but he brought the very instrument of his own unmaking into his palace.
I measure the first dose by candlelight.
A tincture, near-colorless, near-tasteless—designed to be taken slowly, over weeks, building in the blood the way my own tolerance was built.
Except where mine made me strong, this will make him weak.
A failing here, a tremor there. A heart that begins, by slow degrees, to lose its rhythm.
By the time anyone thinks to call it poison, it will look like nothing but a young king’s mysterious wasting, some humour of the blood, not a curse.
This is what I came here to do. This is what Ren came here to do—to end the king’s cruel reign.
We are the same in this, he and I. Two blades sent into the same dark for the same throat. We have to do this. It’s the only road that ends with us free, with Ren alive, with this kingdom unshackled from a man who bleeds his people to gild his halls.
So why does the guilt settle in my chest like a stone as I stopper the vial?
I press my palm flat against my sternum, as if I can push the feeling out.
It isn’t mercy for Aldric—I have none. It’s something else, something I can’t name, a wrongness that has nothing to do with whether he deserves it and everything to do with the cold certainty that I’m about to start something I can’t stop.
But that’s a horror for another night.
Tonight, I use a blade to slice my palm. Let the drop of my poisoned blood drip into the brewing, as I chant my will.
My mother’s timeline might be patient, but mine can no longer afford to be. If I wait, there may be nothing left of my divided heart. I feel it opening, day by day, toward a man I loathe.
And I refuse—because my heart can only belong to one.
So I prepare the working, casting the curse.