Chapter
Twenty-Five
Elara
eventy-six. Seventy-seven.
We think we have her.S
Heritage. Original translation.
Curse.
Wax drips from the candlestick onto my thumb, hot and stinging.
Maybe Kael isn’t the golden-haired, pitiful hero he paints himself to be, still hunting an angle to break this curse while letting the crown mend him.
What does that mean for me?
I pause, leaning against the damp curve of the wall, the stone weeping old fog and last night’s rain. The flame judders against my ragged breath, and my mind goes back to how he found my boot near the door. How he looked at me…and said nothing.
Instead, he gave me a kiss that should’ve felt warm, but felt more like a warning… If he wasn’t suspicious before, he might be now. If I’m going to defeat this stupid fear of mine once and for all, it has to be now, before Kael posts someone to watch me more closely.
A cold sweat prickles my skin. How can these brothers be so different, yet alike in the worst of ways? Vale lies blatantly. And Kael? I’m starting to fear he might be lying beautifully.
I can’t tell which one is worse between the two. Vale is a scheming cunt, but apparently, so is his brother. Not that I can hold it against them. After all, I am one, too.
I push off the wall and lift my tired leg. Seventy-eight.
These stairs eat breath for breakfast. They wind up the eastern tower in a mean, narrow spiral, each step a shallow grave for ankles that I step into gladly. Getting distracted by whispers I wasn’t meant to hear won’t change my goal. Worrying about hidden agendas won’t bring it to fruition any faster.
I tilt my head back, looking up into the gloom where the stairs twist out of sight. My stomach twists right along with it, but I keep on climbing. I’m not here for the memory of his thumb bruising my lip…nor the heavy, dark heat of his breath. No, I’m here to take what he offered.
The rest of the map.
I reach the landing with a swallow that scratches on the way down, the corridor smelling faintly of dust and…yes, carnations. “Vale?”
I lower my candlestick onto a nearby chest and tap my knuckles on the scarred wood of the door. It eases open under the force of my hand, unlocked. Uncared for.
When I step inside, the room beyond is less a chamber and more a forgotten storage closet that found a bed. A place where the castle keeps its unwanted things—like a leftover prince who has no purpose.
Stacks of books teeter like drunken soldiers against the walls, climbing halfway to the ceiling, while an armoire leans crooked on three legs. In lieu of a proper hearth, a squat iron stove chugs in the center of the room, radiating a dry, fierce heat.
It shouldn’t, but the sight amplifies Vale’s insignificance so loudly it almost hurts to look at. To go from heir to…to this? I’d be angry, too.
“Well…” That word is a long drawl, coming from where Vale leans one shoulder against the window jamb, as if he’d been poured into the morning’s dim, a book in hand which he holds angled toward the sparse gray light. He closes the cover with a snap that sounds like thunder in the quiet room, turning to face me with a slow, predatory curl of his lips. “If it isn’t the little saint.”
Molars grinding together, I let the door click shut behind me. “I’m no saint.”
“You don’t say.” Book tossed onto a nearby table, he pushes off the wall, stalking toward me. The space is so small that two strides bring him into my personal orbit. He stops just shy of touching, looming over me, darker and larger than memory served. He tilts his head, eyes gleaming.
“Did the golden boy scare you?”
Heat crawls up my throat and doesn’t even have the decency to feed me a quick or convenient lie. “You know the answer to that.”
Vale hums, a sound of dark amusement. “And you think I won’t?”
That question only sharpens the scathe in my lungs. It sounds like a taunt, a challenge. And damn him for knowing full well that I would never shrink from that. Not when coming from him.
I lift my chin. “I’m counting on it.”
“Brave words.” He steps closer until his thighs bracket my own and trails his knuckles down the side of my neck—cold, like a blade. “Let’s see if you can back them up.”
He doesn’t hesitate. His mouth moves over mine with a drugging intensity, coaxing my lips apart. When I yield, his tongue sweeps inside, reclaiming the territory he marked days ago.
Heat returns to my lower belly with a vengeance that scares me. It makes no sense. I should be repulsed by the taste of him—sharp with arrogance and the bitter tang of his lies—but instead, my body melts under his roaming hands.
They slide down my back, heavy and sure, over the curve of my waist, cupping my rear through the thick fabric of my dress. He pulls me into him, grinding his arousal against my belly. How can he be this hard this fast?
He grabs my wrists, his fingers wrapping around them like iron manacles, and drags my hands to the hem of his tunic—an invitation, a request, and a demand all at once.
My fingers tremble as they curl into the rough fabric. I pull the garment up to the lift of his arms, the motion clumsy and hasty. The moment his head clears the neckline, he tosses the tunic aside, leaving nothing but skin
and air between us.
God, he is beautiful.
In a severe, ruinous way.
I’ve seen men before—laborers in the fields, builders on rooftops—but this…this is different. Vale is carved from smooth skin laid over lean muscle, a trail of hair leading down his stomach, disappearing into the waistband of his trousers.
He catches my hands again, pressing my palms flat against his chest.
His heart thuds hard and heavy beneath my fingertips, a rhythmic drum of war. “I need your hands on me.”
He drags them down, making them trace the hard planes of his pectorals, the taut ridges of his abdomen, along the dark dusting of hair.
Every inch I descend, the tension in him ratchets tighter, stomach muscles clenching under my touch, his hips twitching forward. Seeking. Wanting.
Then my nails brush the cold metal of his belt.
My fingers lock up. The heat radiating from below bites into my skin.
What if Kael finds me like this? Did anybody see me climb the tower?
What will— “Shh…” Vale releases my hands to capture my jaw instead, forcing my gaze to the green burn of his. “Watch.”
His eyes never leave mine as his hands go to his belt. The heavy buckle comes undone with a dull clank. Then the laces, the leather snapping loud enough to make me flinch. But when he shoves the trousers and linen down his hips in one sharp, ruthless motion?
I squeeze my eyes shut as cold fear floods me. I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I’m going to choke on this.
“Look at me, Elara.” Vale’s voice drops, a command wrapped in silk.
His warm palm frames my face, thumb digging into my cheekbone hard enough to bruise. “Open your eyes.”
When his hand retreats, I force my lids to part, bracing to find him looming over me. But he hasn’t moved closer.
He has stepped away.
He stands naked in the center of the room, unashamed, a fallen prince illuminated by the hellish glow of the iron stove. Veins wind like blue rivers
along his forearms, pulsing beneath fair skin. He is terrifyingly substantial, from the powerful sweep of his thighs to the calves that look carved from rock. And there, at the junction of those powerful legs, a thicket of black curls frames the heavy, swollen reality of his desire.
He turns his profile to me, unbothered, bending to pick up a piece of firewood. With a rusted squeal of hinges, he opens the stove door and feeds
the fire. Slowly.
Giving me time to observe… Breath shaking, I do just that, drinking in the threat. The muscles in his shoulders ripple and bunch as he moves. The firelight licks at his skin, gilding the hard muscle of his ass and the long, powerful lines of his legs.
He straightens and turns back to the window, casually leaning against the stone wall, ankles crossed, arms loose. He looks bored, as if we were discussing cloud patterns and not standing on the precipice of my ruin. But his body betrays the lie. His cock stands out from his body in a thick, angry curve, obscenely hard, jerking upward with a heartbeat of its own. A single, clear bead of fluid wells at the dark slit of the head, glistening there.
Vale slowly lifts his arm, palm up.
Then, three curls of his fingers.
Come here.
I swallow hard, the sound loud in the quiet room. My instinct screams at me to bolt, to run back down those stairs until my lungs burn, like prey
fleeing the trap.
But he doesn’t move.
He doesn’t stalk.
He doesn’t use his strength to pin me against the wall or force my knees apart. He’s letting me walk into the fire myself in a twisted sort of kindness —like a predator leaving the door to the cage open—but it gives me enough
air to breathe.
This is what I came for.
I force the air into my chest and unlock my knees. One step, then another. The floorboards creak beneath my shoes, ticking off the seconds of my surrender until I stop in front of him.
“Touch me,” he rasps. “Explore me.”
My hands lift. They shake, just a little. I place my fingertips on his shoulders. The skin is scorching, the muscle beneath hard as iron. I trace the lines of his collarbone, pulse hammering violently in the hollow of his
throat. Down the plane of his chest, over the clenching muscles on his stomach…until my hands hover over his navel.
Vale watches me, his eyes dark pools of starving patience. He doesn’t push. He doesn’t grab. He just burns.
With trembling breath, I lower my hand. My fingers brush the dense hair, the heavy weight of his sac, the granite length of him until I reach the weeping, velvet head.
Vale groans, a low rumble that vibrates fear through my bones, making me pull my hand back. But his hand shoots out, catching my wrist. He doesn’t hurt me, but his grip is a shackle as he guides my hand back, closing my fingers around the thick, pulsing shaft.
“Grab me like this,” he commands hoarsely, his hips bucking disjointedly into my grip. “Don’t stop.”
His hand covers mine, his palm rough and warm, forcing the rhythm.
Gently up. Down again, tighter. It isn’t a frantic motion, but a deliberate, milking drag that pulls a hissed breath through his clenched teeth.
“That’s it,” he grinds out, his hips snapping forward to meet my stroke.
“Just like that.”
With each of his broken noises, my terror melts into a heady, intoxicating sense of power. This man is unraveling at the mercy of my hand, clear fluid slicking the head of his cock, spreading down the shaft as I squeeze tighter, mapping the veins that throb beneath his skin.
He releases my hand and nods.
Keep going.
I do, boldly so. I watch the way his head falls back against the stone wall, his throat corded and exposed, his eyes sliding shut as I work him faster, the sound of wet friction filling the silence.
“Fuck,” he breathes, the word a prayer and a curse.
His hands reach for me. They’re deft, impatient fingers that make short work of my laces. There’s no fumble, no hesitation. Only a peel of cotton, the chill from the window biting my skin for a second before his hot palms replace it. He shoves the dress and my shift down over my hips, bunching the fabric until it falls in a puddle around my ankles.
I step out of it without stopping my rhythm. Naked now, exposed in the gray light, and for the first time in my life, unable to hide.
And I don’t think I want to.
Vale opens his eyes. They’re dilated, swallowed by black lust, devouring me whole. He reaches out, cupping my breasts, his thumbs rough over nipples that ache for attention. He leans down, kissing the sensitive slope of my shoulder.
“You are so…” His murmur fades against my neck, the vibration going straight to my core. “You walk like the world owes you nothing.”
He kisses his way down my sternum, over my stomach. As he descends, the angle becomes impossible, and his cock slips from my slick grip. I make a sound of protest at the loss of heat, but he ignores it, dropping to his knees before me.
He grips my hip with one hand, and with the other, he lifts my foot, placing it squarely on his broad shoulder.
My breath hitches. The position leaves me entirely open, ruinously
displayed.
“Vale—”
“Easy…” His breath ghosts over my clit. “Let me try this.”
My knees buckle when his tongue swipes hot and wet against me. If he wasn’t holding me up, anchoring me with his iron grip, I would collapse.
He doesn’t tease. No, he feasts, his tongue broad and skilled, finding the sensitive nub and swirling around it with relentless, maddening pressure.
I throw my head back, a ragged moan tearing from my throat. My fingers tangle in his black curls, not to push him away, but to hold him there. To drown him in it. It’s too much sensation—the wet slap of his tongue, the suction of his mouth, the finger he slides inside me to curl and pump in time with his licking.
Pressure builds in my belly, a tightening coil of dark energy. It climbs, higher and higher, the air thinning. So close… “Please,” I gasp, my hips bucking against his face. “Vale, please.”
He stops.
The loss is sudden, violent. I whimper, opening my eyes to find him looking up at me, his chin slick with my arousal, his expression feral.
“Not like this,” he growls. “You’ll come apart on my cock, with me, or not at all.”
Before I can curse him, he stands, sweeping me into his arms effortlessly. He carries me the three steps to the narrow bed, lowers me onto the mattress, and positions himself between my spread legs.
I reach for him, desperate, needing the friction back, but he catches my hands and pins them above my head with one hand. He looms over me, his chest heaving.
“Look at me, Elara.” When I do, he uses his other hand to position the tip of his cock at my entrance. It is swollen, weeping fluid, lewdly spread.
“If there is pain, you will say. Yes?”
I lock eyes with him. There’s no deception here, only concern carved between his brows with a sincerity that stalls by the next inhale.
I nod.
He leans forward, a shift of weight so subtle it’s barely a movement.
Pressure builds against my entrance, stretching the sensitive skin, demanding space where there is none. I suck in a breath, my body tightening instinctively against the invasion, bracing for a pain I’m sure is
coming.
He stills instantly.
“Don’t close up,” he roughs out, his voice deeper than ever before. “I’ll go slow. I promise.”
When my muscles ease, he enters me not by the inch, but by smaller fractions. He presses forward until the ring of muscle stretches, until I feel the absolute limit of what I can take—and then he stops. He squeezes his eyes shut, a hiss escaping through his teeth as his arms tremble violently, fighting the strain of holding his massive weight in check.
“Fuck…” The word is wrecked, stripped of all arrogance.
“Vale?”
He opens his eyes, pupils blown so wide they swallow the green.
“You…” he grinds out, looking down at me with something bordering on accusation. “You’re gripping me like a vise.”
It sounds like he’s blaming me for his lack of control, but the flush staining his neck betrays him. He waits for my body to accept the width of him. Waits for the tightness to slacken, for my hips to lift in a silent, unconscious plea for more. Only then does he move: a careful, shaking slide forward that parts me. Parts me more.
He buries inside me, filling me with a tingling pressure that borders on pleasure and pain. Instinct takes over and I lift my hips, rocking them to the rhythm of his in a slow, gentle glide that synchronizes so perfectly.
Time loses its meaning.
Retreats feels like hours.
Thrusts feel like seconds.
Until his hand snaps down to my hip, pinning me to the mattress with
bruising force. “Stop. Don’t move.”
“Why?” I gasp, dazed.
“Because if you grind into me one more time, this ends right now.” He glares down at me, looking furious at his body’s betrayal. “And I refuse to spill myself on the threshold after all this waiting. Be so still, Elara.”
Power, sudden and intoxicating, floods my veins. He isn’t just holding
back for my sake, isn’t he?
He’s hanging on by a thread.
One I desperately want to undo. I slide my heel up the back of his thigh, the friction of skin against skin deliberate and slow, hooking my calf around his waist. Like that, I pull, urging him deeper inside me.
He groans, fighting the leverage. He tries to hold back, his hips locking, but the lure is too strong. He gives in with a guttural groan, sliding another inch deeper, the thickest part of him stretching me wide.
“Fuck, Elara… I can’t…”
He stops dead again. His head drops to my shoulder, his breathing ragged, sounding like a man drowning. And then I feel it—the rhythmic throb of his cock deep inside me, the pulsing of his flesh against mine.
That sensation undoes me.
The feeling of him twitching inside me sparks a fire that runs straight through my core, making me pulse my hips in time with it, faster, harder. It pushes me right to the very edge, where I teeter.
Crying out in frustration, I dig my heel into the small of his back and pull with everything I have, forcing his hips down, pulling him deep into me. “Move!”
The sensation of him bottoming out, hitting the deepest, most secret part of me, shocks a gasp from my lips. Vale tosses his head back and unleashes an animalistic growl that shakes the walls.
His control snaps.
There’s no more patience, no more gentle siege. He withdraws almost fully and slams back into me with a wet, heavy smack of skin against skin, burying himself to the hilt.
“Saints,” he snarls against my ear, thrusting so hard the bed hits the wall
with a crack. “I can’t hold back.”
Neither can I.
The force of that thrust, the sudden, violent claiming, shatters me. My climax hits instantly, a white-hot explosion that clamps my body down around him in tight, rhythmic spasms.
Vale roars, burying his face in the crook of my neck as he, too, erupts inside me. I feel every pulse of his release, hot and torrential, flooding me, coating me deep inside where no one else has ever been.
Then he collapses, his weight pressing down on me for a second before he shifts it to the side. Like that, we lie tangled in the cooling aftermath, the silence of the room crashing down on me louder than any scream.
Slowly, the golden haze begins to lift from my mind, replaced by the sharp, cold edges of reality. The ceiling comes back into focus. The smell of
dust and carnations return.
It’s done. This was it.
I should feel triumphant.
Instead, I just feel…empty.
The intimacy—stripped of the driving madness of lust—suffocates my lungs. The stickiness between my thighs, the sweat drying on my skin, the sheer proximity of his heart beating against my ribs…I don’t know what to do with that.
I look beside me, where his hard breaths into his pillow return to something more even. I should go. I should gather my clothes and my scattered wits before I do something foolish.
Like trail my fingers through his damp curls… I wiggle, trying to shift his bulk off me. He grumbles low in his chest, a sleepy, satisfied sound, but he rolls onto his side, releasing me from the cage of his limbs. But before I can sit up, his warm palm settles down on the back of my hand.
He squeezes it ever so slightly before he rasps, “Stay.”
