Fucking me wasn’t about sex. It wasn’t about my body or any sort of desire. It was about violating me, about having the part of me his brother hadn’t successfully taken.
“That didn’t work out so well the last time,” I snarled, leveling him with a glare.
His eyes were hard as he stared back at me, his mouth twisting into a cruel smile.
“This is a formal event. He won’t be attempting to achieve that in the same manner his brother did. All you need to do is say yes, and he’ll make it feel good for you. He’ll lay you out upon the table, and your pleasure will become our dessert,” Mab said as Malachi slid his hand higher on my leg.
His fingers brushed against the highest part of my thigh, making me reach down to still his hand with a tight squeeze. I dug my nails into his hand, relishing the feeling of his blood beneath them as I broke skin.
“And if I say no?” I asked, pursing my lips. Saying yes would never be an option, not when the thought of anyone but my mate touching me made me both murderous and sick to my stomach.
Mab shrugged. “Then he’ll hurt you. Dinner requires entertainment, wouldn’t you say? As the new Fae to join our table, it is only natural that you should provide it tonight.”
She stared back at me, her will pressing down on me. She wanted to command me to allow myself to be violated, and I suspected it had even less to do with me than I’d originally expected. Allowing myself to be violated would punish Caldris. It would hurt him and break him.
Silence passed between us as she waited for my answer, as the table of Fae I didn’t know watched and waited for the answer I would give.
“I will never willingly allow anyone to touch me who is not Caldris. You know that,” I said, raising my chin to her in defiance.
Malachi sighed, lifting his hand from my thigh. He pulled a dagger from his sheath, cutting the fabric of my dress sleeve and tearing it off my body as the shimmering feeling of magic coated the air.
The last time I’d felt something similar, Caldris had revealed himself at the battle in Calfalls, dropping his glamour for the first time. I glanced around the room, looking away from Malachi as he pressed the tip of his blade into my wrist. As I watched, Mab waved a hand toward a male on her other side. The glamour faded off him, disappearing into wisps of shadows that floated away. My mate’s eyes stared back at me; the other Fae male having vanished as the glamour melted away to reveal him.
“You two are dreadfully boring, always choosing loyalty,” Mab said, the faintest hint of a pout in her voice.
“Then perhaps you should move on from this tedious game,” I said, wincing as Malachi slid his blade beneath my skin.
He cut through it carefully, making a circle around my entire wrist as I bled onto the white plate beneath me.
“Perhaps we should cut the bond from your skin. Will you still be Fae Marked if we do?” Malachi asked.
He slid the flat edge of the blade into the gash he’d cut in my skin, slowly fileting it off my wrist. Nausea swirled in my gut. The bright, searing pain of his blade sent a ripple of fire straight to my head. My arm felt as if it were on fire, the agony so intense that my vision went white.
I gritted my teeth, swallowing against the pain and refusing to scream as my skin was folded over itself and he made quick work of taking it in a layer back toward my elbow.
“It will grow back,” I said, my voice hitching with a pained moan.
Caldris remained silent on the other side of the table, his hands gripping it tightly. He would have fought Malachi had Mab allowed him to move. I could feel the fight in him, his interest in defying that command and the bond that kept him still.
I forced myself to smile at him through my pain, though I was certain it was more of a grimace. My eyes rolled back into my head as the knife carved closer to my elbow.
The vision that burst through my mind was of the night sky surrounding me, that void where I’d seen the golden eyed man. But it wasn’t him who waited for me in the flash of that moment. My mate’s face stared back at me in shock as he spun through the darkness.
I slammed back into my own body a moment later, Malachi’s voice hitting me over the ringing in my ears. He was oblivious to the shocked stare I turned to Caldris, to the open-mouthed expression he gave back to me as the pain returned in a single breath and tore it from my lungs.
“A shame. You look prettier without it,” Malachi said, cutting the loose piece of skin free from my arm.
He dropped it to the plate before me. The wet sound of my skin slapped against the plate on impact as he wiped the knife on my upper arm. I howled in pain, staring at the revealed flesh and trying not to vomit. Sweat slicked my brow, cold rushing up my spine as I hung my head forward and sobbed.
A scream tore itself from my lungs once more. In the moment when I thought I couldn’t take any more, when I would pass out from the pain, the wound pulsed with a golden chill, and my skin healed over my flesh once again, my Fae mark untainted.
I smiled in relief as Malachi glared at it, my features drooping with exhaustion.
16
Caldris
I strode down the stairs, passing the doorway to the dungeons that had housed Estrella and me for a week. Pushing on the hidden spot on the wall, I watched as the single panel of limestone retracted into the wall. The wall groaned as it slid against the floor; the part hidden beneath the alcove of the stairs retreating and sliding to the side to reveal the passageway to the dungeons of the forgotten.
I grabbed a torch off the wall as the door slid back into place behind me, sealing me into the depths and darkness of Tar Mesa. I stepped out of the entryway and into the place that rivaled Helheim itself.
The ceilings in this part of the palace were high, carved beneath the ground of the rolling hills of Faerie itself. My father’s statue emerged from the wall at my right, half his face revealing the skeletal form of his true nature. This was the place where the Court of Shadows imprisoned humans, where they went to waste away until they died, and he and Mab had modeled it after the entrance to Helheim.
It was a mockery for his statue to be here, for the woman who had slain him to put it in the one place in Alfheimr that mimicked the place of his true dominion.
The skeletal form cut a line down the center of his nose; the other half of the stone carved into a smooth, polished surface of his skin. The skin he so often wore when ruling over his court, before his wife had taken over. Before she’d been furious to find her husband had a mate, and that she was the Queen of the Winter Court.
The two of them together would have proven unstoppable at the time, and Mab would have been forced to return to her brother in the Summer Court. She had no claim over my father’s court outside of their marriage, and the moment that dissolved, she stood to lose everything.
Everything she had fought to achieve. Everything she had killed for.
In one of my father’s hands, he held the exact replica of the sword that was normally strapped across my back. The one remaining part of him I was allowed to carry. Mab had stripped it from me when I returned to court to save Estrella in that throne room.
I hadn’t seen my favored weapon since. I doubted I would until the moment she needed to send me away from her court on whatever mundane mission suited her fancy.
In my father’s other hand, he clutched the head of a cyclops by the hair. The enormity of it always stole the breath from my lungs, grateful that the remaining of their kind had long ago been locked within the confines of Tartarus. Its eye was still open, centered in his massive forehead, even though Sephtis had severed his head from his shoulders. The skin around that eye it was folded, creased with wrinkles that seemed to follow a path from his enormous pointed ears. The rest of his mouth was occupied by a massive mouth, his rotting lips peeled back to reveal a wide line of jagged teeth. His mouth was twisted into a hysterical smile to accompany the fact that the cyclops were always laughing.