Chapter
Thirty-Four
Galantia Present Day, Deepmarsh Castle, Galantia’s chambers
stared out the window behind my desk, watching black clouds lined with silver slowly drift in front of the moon as I traced the scars on my breastbone beneath my nightshift, the bracelet on myI wrist jingling. Thunder rumbled far away, faint and nearly indistinguishable from the low hums of wind that cradled the sleeping castle.
Nothing but the last of autumn’s warmth colliding with winter, too weak to let even a single lightning strike illuminate the raven carved into my skin. To give me a reason to run in fear—and straight into the arms of the man who’d put it there. What would Malyr do if I fled across the corridor
and into his rooms?
Hurt me.
Because he needed to, didn’t he?
Needed to treat me like his enemy to justify that he would make me his wife. Needed to show me his hate to reconcile whatever affection he hid. How could it not be so after the ride across the meadow? The way he’d watched me? After all he’d said? All he still refused to say? After how he’d
kissed me… Gods, I wanted him to kiss me again.
I wrapped my arms around myself, warding off the chill this far away from my crackling hearth as my gaze wandered to my bed. My cold, lonely, empty bed. There was no Sebian to pull me onto his chest, stroke my hair, or caress me to sleep with gentle touches.
No Sebian to kiss me.
Never that.
An itch flared beneath my raven as if promising snow like Father had said his scars often did, making me think back on my childhood. A childhood that had cushioned me in layers of gentleness and caution as a substitute for love.
I longed for the latter with such soul-bending intensity, my gaze drifted over to the doors at the far end of my personal rooms, a nervous tingle rising in my belly. If gentle touches weren’t a surety for love, then what were the chances that pain and love weren’t as mutually exclusive as my sheltered
mind had thought them to be?
Could there be love in pain?
The creepy-crawly pinpricks on my scar intensified. How far would I go to find out? To feel loved?
Would I bruise for it? Hurt for it? Bleed for it?
Yes.
And who did it better than Malyr?
Heart pounding, I let my naked soles slap over the cool stone as I quietly slipped into the dark hallway. A single oil lamp flickered on a nearby wall, casting eerie shadows over the raven emblem that loomed on the doors across. Specks of orange gleamed in the empty sockets of the skull, causing my stomach to twinge.
I padded over and gave a knock, the sound all but drowning against the violent rush of blood in my ears. Excruciating seconds passed, but neither did the door open nor a voice command me to enter. Perhaps he was asleep.
My hand shook when I lifted it to the door a second time, only for me to drop it by my side and turn away. Gods, why was I such coward? So far, he hadn’t killed me y— Hinges groaned, making me look up to find Malyr leaning in the gap, shrouded by darkness, one arm lifted and braced against the wood while his thumb tapped lazily at his forehead. He had tied up his hair in a tousled topknot that only accentuated the sharpness of his cheekbones, wearing nothing but cotton trousers that sat low on his trim hips. His dark eyes took me in, each second he said nothing marked by nervous tingles beneath my skin.
With a gesture of his hand that carried all the noble graces of a prince, he beckoned me inside before he shut the door, sealing me in with my trepidation. That, and the herb-scented steam coming from a tub beside the hearth.
Back pressed against the door, I looked up at him, barely able to hold his intense stare as I scrambled for an explanation as to why I’d interrupted his bath. “I—”
“Took you long enough,” he growled.
His mouth claimed mine, making my pulse stall somewhere between fear and euphoria. Malyr suckled my lips between his, lapping at them, parting them with his tongue, stoking longing deep in my belly until my legs quivered. His hand settled on my hip, letting fingers curl possessively into the flesh while the other slammed against the door right beside my head, making me jump, caging me in.
He pulled his head back on a trembling exhale, his face veiled in shadows with how the dim light
of his hearth hit his back, as dark as the whisper that followed. “I am not Sebian.”
I couldn’t say if he’d meant it as a warning or an apology, but it had my body vibrate with dread and anticipation alike. “I know.”
His hand slipped from the door to my shoulder and to the ties on my shift from there, giving a harsh yank, opening the fabric some before he let a finger trace his mark on my chest. “I am not gentle.
I was once, I think, but not anymore.”
I knew that, too.
It was the reason why I’d come.
I stared into his eyes. “I do not want gentle.”
His gaze smoldered as he took me in for another moment. At the next, his mouth violently slammed onto mine again. Malyr kissed me, suckling my bottom lip between his teeth. Then he bit down.
When I gave a shocked little gasp at the sharp sting and the taste of metal, Malyr groaned into my mouth. His breaths came faster, fanning up the scent of blood that spread between our lips as his hands dropped to my thighs. He clawed at the train of my shift, gathering it up.
His mouth remained on mine as he lifted me up by my thighs and carried me across the room without a single stagger in his steps. Gravity shifted, and my back sank into the cushioned comfort of his nest of black pillows and quilts. His hips wedged between my thighs, allowing Malyr a single roll of his hard shaft against my cunt before he drew back, letting our kiss melt away as he sat on his haunches.
Hands to my hips, he flipped me onto my stomach, only for his hand to collar my throat and pull me back and onto my knees by it until my back slammed into the frame of his chest. “Take this off,” he rasped by my ear as his other hand lifted my shift. “Don’t make me wait because my patience for the moment you finally come to me started wearing thin long ago.”
You came to me.
The resonance of the words Malyr had breathed in the night I’d negotiated our betrothal echoed in my skull as my shaky fingers clawed the cotton of my shift, fervently pulling it up and over my head, forcing him to release my throat. He had waited for me? But… why?
“Since when?” I asked.
His hand gripped my throat once more, tilting my head just enough to expose the side where he nipped along a tendon strung tight. “Longer than you can imagine, little white dove.”
My eyes fluttered shut at the overwhelming spasms each nip roused between my legs, the scene in the forest the day I’d been captured shaping before the blackness of my eyes. I have half a mind to take her to my chambers.
“The day you first s—ah!” I winced at the way Malyr’s other hand dug its fingers into my breast, torturing the flesh in his painfully tight grip until my nipples hardened. “Since the day Sebian brought me to that forest, when you first saw—”
His hand closed around my throat, suffocating my words, robbing me of air until a black veil spread across my vision and my thoughts blurred, then he growled against my ear, “Longer.”
I thrashed, writhed, clawed at his arm, faster the more my head ached and my muscles tingled.
Only when my arms collapsed by my sides and my back arched, the room before me nearly cast into blackness, did the strangling assault ease away.
I sucked in a lungful of air that seemed to whirl straight into my head before it cascaded down my entire body in a thrilling wave of prickles. “That makes no sen—”
Malyr’s fingers snapped shut again, squeezing to each side of my esophagus. Black and white
floaters around the edges of my vision followed, along with the circling motion of his fingers on my cunt.
“You didn’t see me, but I saw you.” He placed one finger to each side of my clit, rubbing it, pinching it, pulling on it until it turned into a hard, swollen knot of pleasure and panic while I thrashed once more. “Come to me, just one more step, I begged that day where I hid in the underbrush along the cliffs, with my fingers so stiff, ready to choke the life out of you.” He released me, allowing me no more than a single gasp of air before he choked me again. His fingers circled my entrance, lubricating themselves before they stroked the wetness over my clit, drumming and teasing, orbiting with perfect pressure until the edges of release shimmered within the world that darkened around me.
“Now I finally have my fingers wrapped around your little neck, yet I cannot seem to close them tightly enough to end you. You should have died a dozen times at my hands. Why haven’t you, hmm?”
A rush of air barreled into my lungs just as he pressed down on my clit. It pushed me off the edge and straight into the twitching spasms of my release. My muscles contracted, my cunt squeezed. I coughed a ragged, hoarse whimper that once more cast me into blackness before, at my next full inhale, the room returned before my eyes brighter, more vibrant. Gods, nothing had ever felt this intense before… “I will tell you why,” Malyr heaved by my ear as if he, too, had been suffocating alongside me, clasping my chin and turning my gaze back to meet his. “Because you’re my little dove, astonishingly beautiful, so fucking perfect with how I can strangle you to within inches of fainting and make you come all the harder for it.”
His hand shifted on my cheek, two fingers stroking into my mouth, wetting themselves. Slow and languid, Malyr reached them into his own mouth, lapping at them before his lips sealed over mine.
The taste of him submerged my senses, letting everything fade away except for the sensual glide of lips and the passion roaring in the heated breaths between us.
Until his other hand landed on my neck, letting our kiss die on a wet smack before Malyr pushed my face down into an ocean of black velvet and sable mink. “Don’t you dare fucking move.”
Coldness wrapped around my arms, tugging them out from underneath me, sending a flutter of unease through my chest. It could only be his shadows that coiled around me with their icy tendrils, forcing my arms behind my back. There they kept them, tying me up, disabling me.
When Malyr reached around my hips and lifted my ass in the air, I nervously glanced over my shoulder, shifting around to see. What was happening? What was he about to do? Would he take my
asshole again like he did the last— Slap.
Heat radiated over my rear to Malyr’s yank on my hair, on which he pulled my head up, only to straighten my body before he shoved my face back into the fibers. “I said… do… not… move.”
My panting breaths broke against the fine hairs of mink, fanning heat straight into my face. There was the harsh hrrk of strings pulling through grommets, the scrooping of cotton brushing over cotton, the crunching of fur beneath Malyr’s knees. And a spitting sound. Warm wetness hitting the very end of my tailbone before it slowly ran over my asshole, tensing my muscles.
“I can tell you want my cock up your ass again; why else would that little hole clench like that?”
Malyr’s chuckle came with the sensation of his fingers swiping over the wet blob of saliva, spreading it lower, lubricating my entrance. “No, I know where you want me. And you will take me there without making a fuss, and you let me rut you like a good little slut. That’s what you are when nobody is looking past the silk and shadowcloth I provide you. My little whore wife, so fucking perfect with how she begs me to hurt her, the way you whimper and moan will make fate itself blush.”
His cock nudged at my entrance. With one lurching shove, he thrust inside me on a groan, the sharpness of the intrusion, of his thick cock, barely eased by how soaked I was. The searing pain ripped a whimper from me, interrupted by a hand that seized my throat.
Malyr pulled me up by it until my bound arms pressed into his heated chest and nipped a path from my chin to my ear. “Are you gripping Sebian’s cock this tightly as well? Because that would explain why you have him this cunt-strapped.” He drew back his hips, only to thrust upward again as he pulled me back onto his hard cock by my throat. “Goddess help me, I won’t get ten thrusts with how good you feel.”
His next few pumps came harder, faster. He snapped his hips with an urgency that bordered on an obsessed frenzy as he bit at my jawline between panting breaths. His fingers eased and tightened on my throat in erratic intervals, choking my mind into a dream-like spin. Each time he allowed me a morsel of breath, a rush of oxygen flooded my system, sending a tingle into every cell and a
relentless, needy throb into my clit.
Nothing about this felt gentle.
Not the violent surges of his hips slamming into me, not the way his teeth clamped down on my skin with bruising strength, not the way my locked shoulders ached in the bound of shadows. And yet my belly clenched with need, making me writhe, making me arch my back.
Because it felt like love.
Terrible, star-crossed, painful love.
Malyr’s hips locked and his entire body stilled with his jerking cock deep inside me, giving me a fraction of a warning before his flat palm slapped my clit with a noisy whack. “I should redden your hide for making me desire you the way I do. For robbing my sleep. For making my cock twitch, overly eager to come like a fucking untried youth.” Whack. Another slap to my cunt as his fingers tightened on my throat. “Apologize.”
I sucked in a little gasp of air, struggling the words through my trachea. “I’m… sorry.”
His thumb pressed against the corner of my jaws, making me turn my face toward his, making me see the shadows that writhed beneath his skin. His tongue lapped at the corner of my mouth, swiped over my bottom lip, then teased my lips apart for a lustful kiss.
“Not nearly enough,” he growled. “Not yet.”
His hand slipped from my throat to my neck faster than I could register before he pushed my face back into the furs. Weight pressed down between my burning shoulder blades, colliding with the cold of the surrounding shadows, letting a chill spread across my entire body.
Malyr’s cock slammed into me, ruthlessly hammering in and out with such force, each thrust shoved my cheek across the furs as he groaned and grunted. His other hand dug into my hip like a vise, bracing me against the violent power of his body.
“Fucking hard, choking you, biting you, bleeding you, hurting you. I cannot help it, little dove; it is what I like,” Malyr grunted behind me as ice-cold tendrils spread from my arms down along the sway of my ribs. “You cannot imagine how many women I had beneath me, forcing their cries into sad, pathetic moans. Lorn was the exception, if for the wrong reasons. But you…?” His hips stalled.
His hand fisted my hair, yanking me up by it. “How can the man who made me like this have a daughter who takes all of me so perfectly, hmm? You nearly made me come again.” Another whack at my clit. And gods, it sent a heat into my belly that made my cunt twitch with need. “Apologize.”
I rolled my hips, hating how he wasn’t moving. “I’m sorry.”
“I am not,” he whispered against my mouth, peppering my lips with gentle kisses here and there.
“See, little dove, the only way I can possibly reconcile how much I want you, long for you, find
myself annoyingly drawn to you like to no woman before in my life… a Brisden, no less,” fingernails dug into the scar tissue on my chest, straining the puckered skin until it ached, “is by hurting you just a little bit more.”
My face fell into the cushions right in time for me to moan my pleasure into the fibers as I arched my back. I wanted the hurt and the pain, wanted the sense of love it brought even more!
Malyr fucked into me hard, rolling his hips at each thrust. Shadows wandered along my belly and between my legs from there, slithering through my folds, whipping at my clit, playing around my asshole, working me toward the glistening height of bliss.
“Look at me.” Shifting his hips behind me, Malyr gripped my throat tightly, forcing me to look at his pitch-black eyes and the shadows that flickered behind him, around him, seemingly rising from the veins beneath his skin in smoke-like plumes. “Eyes on me, Galantia. Don’t you dare fucking move those hazel eyes from mine when I make you come on my cock while my shadows feast on your cunt.”
They tangled around my clit with the same force Malyr choked my throat, letting pressure build behind the organ as my vision speckled. It grew dark, darker still. Until, with a deep inhale and a rush of air, the intensity of it all made me burst. For the fraction of a second, my skin no longer fit me, and my entire body went up in flames.
Malyr grunted as he released my throat and grabbed my hip instead, just as my arms plopped down by my sides. With a final thrust, he buried his cock deep inside me, hips jerking uncontrollably with every twitch of his body. Spurt after spurt, his hard shaft throbbed against my clenched muscles as he filled me with his seed.
When the bliss and the shadows ebbed away, so did Malyr. He withdrew from me and rose, padding over to his tub, leaving me behind in cold silence.
