Oh goddess…
My eyes squeeze shut, prickles of tears crushed in the corners, left to leave me sodden and stuck. That horrible heat flushes across my skin again, and I groan, not in pleasure, but immeasurable dismay, because this can’t be happening. I can’t let this horrible drug make me feel lust toward him.
I would rather die.
“Shh, it’s okay, Precious. I’ll take care of you. With the dew, you’ll be so much more relaxed from now on.” Hands move, squeezing my tense shoulders, bunching the knotted muscle with his unwanted touch.
“No…”
He ignores me, stroking the curve of my arms, petting up and down, down and up. My body is in a riot, flooded with too much dew, magically drained and exhausted, adrenaline spiked with shock. It’s all too much, my senses a chaos of crisscrossed directions that leave me with nowhere to go.
Midas pulls me to him, hitting me with his scent that always carries a hint of metallic sharpness. The dew wants me to give in to him. I can feel its lecherous claws digging in, and he’s counting on me to fall under the weight of its inebriated delirium.
“This is going to make you all better, Auren,” he soothes in my ear. My stomach churns over the words, wanting to hurl them back up. “It’s been too long since I’ve felt you. You’re going to love it.”
Bile smashes up my throat, burning the back of my tongue.
Here.
Like this.
He’s drugged me, brought me to a beaten man’s bedside, and is going to try to take advantage right here, right now, like this.
Disgusted anger lashes through the haze of dew and comes hurtling upward. All my limbs and ribbons may be jellied and sluggish, but for a split second, I fight through it.
With a noise I didn’t even know I could make, I bring my ribbons up and slam them into him in a sudden burst of strength.
Midas goes crashing back into the wall and falls to the floor, but the move makes me fall too. My ribbons crumple as I land hard on my hands and my knees, yet the pain feels like bubbles popping against my skin, even that distorted.
A pained curse flies from his mouth, and my head whips up. “You will never touch me again!” I growl, not even recognizing the sound of my voice. “I hate you. I fucking HATE YOU!” I scream, my throat shredding, the room splitting.
Midas sits up, a hand lifting to swipe at the back of his head, fingertips coming back bloody. When he sees the red stain on his fingertips, his eyes flash up to mine with fury. “How dare you harm your king!”
I’m running off pure adrenaline, anger perched on my ribs and fueling my fire. “You’re not my king! You’re not my anything! I despise you,” I spit out, my voice like venom expelling out to blind him with my enmity. “I thought you loved me, but you only love yourself. I know what it feels like now to truly be cherished and respected, and those are two things you’ve never done,” I pant, each word as sharp as claws. “You’re nothing but a false king who uses and manipulates everyone in his life because you secretly loathe yourself.”
Something sinister coalesces in his eyes, gathers on his brow, settles in the depths of his darkened eyes. I kneel there shaking and raw, glaring at him through all the bits and pieces of me scraped open.
The energy I expelled has left me weakened, my ribbons flopping on the floor like beached fish. My vision flares as another wave of heat passes through me to instigate some forced thirst of desire that I refuse to have for this man.
I gasp and clutch my head, trying to fight past it, and that’s when Midas pounces.
One second, he’s across the room, and the next, his fist is in my hair and he’s slamming my front to the ground. Hard.
I cry out, my cheek cracking with the impact that I’m sure would be worse if it weren’t for the drug coursing through my veins.
“You know what it’s like to be cherished and respected?” he snarls in my ear, his body pressing me down. “So you did fuck that grotesque horned commander, didn’t you? You let that Fourth filth touch what’s mine.”
“I’m not yours!” Spittle and fury expels from my mouth as he holds me down. “And that Fourth filth is ten times the male you could ever be!”
With gritted teeth, I try to make my ribbons lurch up and shove him away again, but it’s like trying to move limbs that have had their circulation cut off for too long. They flop clumsily, too affected by the drug.
Midas snatches them up in his other hand and wraps them around his fist like a leash pulled tight.
“I tried to do this the easy way, Auren. But you’ve left me no choice.”