Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100363 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 502(@200wpm)___ 401(@250wpm)___ 335(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100363 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 502(@200wpm)___ 401(@250wpm)___ 335(@300wpm)
“You can’t promise that,” I whisper. “No one can.”
“I can. He will never punish you with that creature again.”
I want to believe him, to feel relief at his promise. But I don’t have the strength to believe promises, anymore, and Arcus will almost certainly find worse torments. I take a breath, look away, and continue. “But the worst of it was tonight. The worst by far. He told me he had a present. It was Thrace’s head.”
Kathras stiffens. “He stole your revenge.”
His words are a lightning bolt striking my heart. He understands. Without a single word of explanation or justification, he knows exactly why this hurts me, far more than being fed to a monster.
“Oh, Cenere. I’m so sorry,” he whispers against the top of my head, tightening his arms around me.
Fresh tears spring to my eyes, but I’m beyond sobbing now. I cling to him, taking comfort in the most unlikely source. He understands.
Something changes as he holds me. His pulse quickens beneath my ear. I lift my tear-stained face and search his stricken expression. He doesn’t just understand. He grieves the loss beside me. I’m drawn into the sympathetic depths of his crystalline green eyes and reach up to touch the sharp plane of his jaw.
There is no question in his eyes, but I answer him in a whisper. “Yes.”
His mouth descends on mine and when I yield to him, he groans as if he’s lost some battle with himself. There is no fight for me. I don’t grapple with my conscience or consider the consequences. I don’t care if Arcus finds out.
There is a restrained strength in Kathras’s body that makes me want to force him to unleash it, as he did in the maze. I whimper at the memory of the hot, thick slide of him in my cunt, the euphoric fear of being chased.
But it’s different now, and somehow more frightening. He kisses me deeply, again and again, leaves me panting for air when he moves on to my throat, and then I pant for another reason. His hand slides up and down the tight silk bodice of my gown, over the tops of my breasts, to the necklace I wear.
“Who gave this to you?” he murmurs against my neck.
I swallow. “Your father.”
With a jerk of his fist, the necklace breaks and falls to the ground. I gasp, and he kisses me again, fiercely, and brings me to my feet.
He doesn’t vanish my clothes, but asks, “May I see you?”
My blood burns at the request. I reach for the laces at the front of my gown, but he passes a hand over the silk and only then does it disappear, leaving me exposed to him. He gazes at me for a long time, as if memorizing every part of me. The hand he extends toward me trembles.
“I knew,” he whispers. “In the labyrinth, I knew who you were.”
He brushes my aching nipple with the back of his fingers. “I saw you when you arrived. I wanted you then. But I knew my father would have you. I couldn’t bear to see you exploited as a show of his power. When he did it at the ritual, when he took you in front of me, I knew that it wouldn’t stop.”
“You can have me,” I say. “Not to spite your father. You can have me because I want you.”
And to spite his father, a more honest voice in my mind says. I don’t want him to take me out of spite, but I do offer myself up for the satisfaction of defying Arcus.
When I return to the palace, I’ll fuck him with his son’s cum still inside me.
I take Kathras’s hand and move it down my body, the curls that cover my sex. “Please. Take me. Erase the feeling of him in me.”
In an instant, Kathras’s clothes are gone, and he stands beautiful and naked before me. I’ve seen the lean, muscular lines of his body in the firelight at the ritual, as he’d been barely clothed then. I’d felt but never seen his cock, however, and in the light, I’m stunned at the size of it. It’s long enough that it brushes his navel, as thick as the vampire member that Luthian used on me. My cunt aches with emptiness at the sight of it.
He takes me in his arms and flies to one of the nearby pools, but I tell him, “No. That one.”
I want him to fuck me in the same pool where his father had me. I want nothing about me to belong to Arcus alone. Not even my memories.
We slip into the pool and Kathras stands me beneath one of the rushing waterfalls. It makes me laugh, but his teeth on my nipple cuts off that laughter with a sigh. The hot water cascading over me eases a tension I didn’t feel before, while Kathras’s mouth on me raises another kind. His knee parts my leg, and he brings his thigh up to fit tight against my mound.