Chapter 16 Thyra
Chapter Sixteen
Thyra
Ashiver runs the length of my spine, but I’m not certain if it’s anticipation or fear.
The Frost King…Stellen…balances perfectly at the water’s edge, his tall frame swathed in enviably dry clothing, but it’s the challenging curve of his lips that draws me in.
I lean forward, my body aching with treacherous heat.
The more I try to push away this need, the more intense it becomes.
The last few hours of my life were filled with blood, death, and grief. Until a short time ago, I didn’t believe I’d survive.
The melody Stellen sang to keep me alive, heated notes dripped into my ear, has become part of my limbs, my mind, my entire being.
I need to tell him about my blade visions, but doing that means asking for his protection when the visions strike.
He’s proven he’ll go to great lengths to keep me alive, so I’m certain he won’t allow my life to be threatened during the visions, but there’s a vast difference between keeping me from death and ensuring I remain unharmed.
After all, he warned me that in this kingdom, even a queen can suffer unbearable pain.
I need to know what he wants from me. Only then will I understand how safe—or unsafe—I am.
Antony needed me to break the curse. He wanted to end his stepmother’s grip on his life by freeing his kingdom from the darkness that floods their sky every night, bringing the threat of vampyrs. A threat, as it turns out, he was part of.
My failure to get even one step closer to breaking the curse burns as badly as the grief I’m resolutely pushing away.
I pushed my father’s death away because I had to.
I will push Antony’s death away because I have to.
As a mire of conflicted emotions churns within me, I have no choice but to become blank.
A void into which I allow physical need to pour, filling the gaps in my heart. Solace of a different kind.
Stellen told me to come out of the water, and he’ll show me what he wants from me.
To that, I issue my own challenge. “I’ll come out when you give me something warm to wear.”
The slump in his shoulders eases. He rises taller while a slow smile grows on his pale lips, his gaze falling across me where my nearly naked body must be clearly visible beneath the water.
“I will give you warm clothes,” he says. “But there may come a time when I will ask you to take them off.”
A flush of heat ripples through my core at how openly he speaks—as clearly as his gaze devours me.
He reaches for the nearest fur, a plush coat wrapped around the skeleton of a long-dead fae. He stopped trying to conceal the bodies from me a while ago. The old bones aren’t gruesome, but I avoid looking too hard at them all the same.
Among them, I don’t see any blades. I’m not sure what the Alak-Teah will have done with the weapons, but from my Oracle vision, I’m certain each fae who came here had one. Perhaps the blades are buried deep, where they can’t be unearthed.
Before his hand closes around the fur, Stellen pauses, then rises to his full height again, abandoning the coat.
He turns back to the cocoon, his eyes suddenly gleaming.
Crossing the short distance to the ovoid frame, he runs his hands through the air around its surface.
“I wonder,” he says, his lips pursing.
From my vantage point to the left of the structure, I can make out multiple strands winding from the back of the cocoon into the mist.
Tether points.
He doesn’t seem unaware of them, running his hand from the main body to the tethers, appearing to study the thick weave.
His arms drop to his sides, and his head tilts.
He’s now standing with his back to me, but he suddenly twists, casting me an otherworldly smile.
“Stand up,” he says.
I scowl at him. “Too cold.”
“Only for a short moment.”
He peers at me for a charged heartbeat, his unearthly smile unfading as I continue to defy him, staying exactly where I am.
“Stand up,” he whispers, but this time, his voice chimes across the space between us, an alluringly beautiful note.
My legs propel me upward, my eyes widening at how easily he used his power to command my body.
I gasp as the cold air hits my arms and chest. My upward movement catches the nearest silver flower, which unwinds at my touch, wrapping around my wrist before sliding up my arm, then down between my breasts.
Stellen’s gaze follows the flower’s path before his focus rakes from my head past my waist, where it meets the water and beneath the surface to my toes.
Taking only a short moment just as he promised, he turns away from me, tilting his head and tucking his hair behind his pointed ears as he studies the cocoon again.
I sink back into the warmth, but now I push toward the water’s edge, closer to him, unnerved by how casually he used his Lethian power on me.
I’m certain he wants me to know how easily he could control me. How blithely. And how sharply against my own will.
But I also suspect he wants me to understand how infrequently he has controlled me.
From what my father told me, the ancient Lethians were a peaceful race. Kind and gentle. Their blood ran free of hatred and malice.
After the False Queen’s curse tore the original Kingdom of Serulia into three, the Lethian people became feared for what they could do with a single melodic word.
So they were hunted.
Their tongues were cut out, and their children slaughtered.
With their pointed ears and pale eyes, they were easily identifiable. They couldn’t assimilate into the lowborn population like my father and I did.
I stop within the water, close to the edge, the silver flowers floating alongside me, never far from my side. Several more of them return to my body, slipping beneath the surface and reattaching themselves to the other threads.
As if he senses when the threads stop moving about my body—which, if I think about it, I’m certain he must—Stellen half-turns back to me, his hair falling across his face.
Again, a smile tugs on his lips.
He takes a quick, audible breath, and my eyes widen at the flush of power that sweeps over him, his eyes suddenly brighter than I’ve seen them, his hair gleaming and his pale cheeks luminous. A star that could shine more brightly than a Vividari’s light.
As he pins me with his gaze, he takes another breath.
Deeper this time. Completely silent, but it pulls and pulls and pulls, causing my back to arch under the water, my head to tip back, and heat to flood my core, ripples of pleasure spiraling through my stomach, thighs, and breasts, then into my head…
A moan rises to my lips.
This time, he doesn’t give a command.
He simply exhales, breathing out a single note as, without taking his eyes off me, he brushes a single fingertip across the cocoon’s surface.
My hands close around the rock ledge in front of me, my fingers clawing its surface as my body thrums, my head spinning with an ache I can’t ease.
As he presses his thumb to the cocoon, a thread of web attaches to his finger, pulling smoothly from the others, but only an inch before the entire cocoon collapses inward, releasing itself into his arms.
Softly, calmly, he sings, his hands working the thick wadding, reshaping it as it remains airborne, the bulk of it swaying in time to his song.
So does my need, rippling and building as I fight the urge to rise up out of the water and close the distance between him and me.
Somehow, as he works, only a single tether remains extending from the mist, swaying with every note Stellen sings. He doesn’t attempt to cut it, nor does he break the webbing.
He weaves and molds until he releases a fully formed garment into the air opposite him, silently assessing it.
My size. My shape. A full body suit made of long pants and a fitted tunic with long sleeves. A hooded cape is attached at the shoulders; the cloak is large enough to wrap around me and provide another layer of warmth.
It’s a thoughtful garment. A protective garment.
I can barely pay it any mind.
I’m transfixed by the movement of Stellen’s mouth as he gently blows on the tether, singing another quiet note, at which the rope retracts, allowing the cloak to float into his arms.
The end of the loose tether winds in on itself, curling into the shape of a white rose before it withdraws into the mist.
Stellen turns to me, his gaze dark, his smile soft. “Come here.”
I’m up and out of the water, running across the stones before I know what I’m doing.
A trail of silver ripples behind me as the Lethian flowers catch on to each other, a cascade of movement pouring after me, rushing up the backs of my legs, sloughing the liquid off me as they storm around my body, covering me again.
The sensations are more than I can bear.
All I know is that Stellen is offering me the cloak he made for me, and his lips call me to him.
I crash into him.
He sweeps the garment around me, trapping the evaporating warmth within it as he catches me and deftly lifts me up against him, wrenching my legs around his hips before he drives me backward.
Back and back toward the rock wall where the stone stretches out beside the pond. The only section of visible rock where water doesn’t flow.
The cloak cushions my back, and his hand cushions my head as he presses me against the solid surface.
The material between us is too much—his pants, my armor. I ache for the barriers between us to be gone as I rock against him, needing release.
I expect him to kiss me, to claim my mouth, but his lips brush across my cheek, moving to my ear. I expect him to hum to me, but instead, his mouth closes around my earlobe, the softest tug, and his tongue swirls against the sensitive skin captured in his mouth.
The pressure of his torso against mine pins me to the wall, the hardness of his cock presses between my legs, and his left hand slides between us, grazing the side of my breast.
His thumb glides across my suddenly bare skin when the Lethian armor parts for his hand.
Skin on skin.
Ice burning through heat.
Flick goes his tongue against my earlobe.
An orgasm crashes through me, dragging a cry to my throat, wrenching at my heart.
Waves of pleasure ripple from my core. Long, satisfying, earth-shattering waves.
He holds me through them, his silence wrapping around me, pulling my pieces back together until my breathing evens out and my cries become soft sighs.
I meet his pale eyes as I seek the beat of his heart beneath my palm. Pounding quietly.
Again, I wait for the crush of his kiss. For the slow undressing that must surely come because he’s hard between my legs and I’m acutely aware that the orgasm was all mine.
He doesn’t move.
My heart feels like it’s cracking apart, and I’m not sure why.
As if, through his silence, he can break apart the pieces of my soul as easily as he wrapped them together.
“What do you want from me?”
My question is barely a whisper. Barely a movement of air between us.
When he stays silent, I prompt, “I came out of the water like you asked. You owe me an answer.”
His voice is a knife, soft and sharp, as he speaks without intonation. “I want my family back.”
A short, brutal wish, absent of music, bare of power, but I feel his wish like blades.
“I will never have that,” he says. “So I will settle for this: I want my enemies dead. All of them. I want to sleep through the night without listening for assassins. You will make that happen.”
I’ve already begun.
I told him to come for me when the stars go out. He did, and in following my command, he had the chance to kill Antony.
I should have anticipated this. The three kings are mortal enemies. They want nothing more than to end each other.
From as early as I can remember, my father warned me that I was the kings’ greatest weapon against each other.
Worse, I am a danger to anyone who loves me.
My heart hurts and now…damn…hydration has allowed tears to burn behind my eyes.
Tears I fight against shedding.
I fail.
Again, I fail.
Stellen’s gaze follows the tracks down my cheeks.
“Everything good is crushed in my kingdom,” he says, his voice hollow. “That is the way of Frost. My people don’t hide their malice behind painted faces and duplicitous smiles like the Iron Fae do. The dangers in my kingdom are as clear as they are deadly.
“You should expect that everything and anything you say and do will be used against you. Anything you care for will be shattered. It will never be any different in Frost.”
As he speaks, his Voice betrays him. Instead of words, I hear pain and grief and the soul-destroying crunch of knees hitting snow.
His hands tangle in my hair, and his lips brush my cheek. A slow contact while his thumb strokes the side of my breast, where the Lethian armor continues, treacherously, to give him access.
“To survive in this kingdom, you must understand cruelty. And be capable of delivering it. Or you will surely break.”