And better still, they were playing into my hands by closing that rift to the Shadow Realm.
Lavinia had complained of the weakness it had brought on in her and that was something I was most pleased about. Because she could not control me as easily now, and she had spent much of her time alone and plotting some hateful vengeance against them, which equalled her staying out of my way.
I still needed her, but I needed her on a leash, one I could yank tight whenever it suited me. But let them weaken her for all I cared, then when she was malleable again, she would be easier to control.
I’d have to keep an eye on the situation though. I couldn’t have them taking the Shadow Princess from me entirely, but for now I would let them believe they had gained an advantage over me while in fact they had just made my weapon easier to wield.
A knock came at the door, the light knuckled rapping familiar enough to let me know it was my butler Jenkins.
“Yes?” I barked.
“My King, Stella Orion is here to see you,” he replied and a weary sigh left me.
I considered turning her away as I had been doing for some time now, but then again…Lavinia wasn’t as easy to force beneath me and fuck as she had been when Clara had inhabited her.
I growled low in my throat, wanting to exert my power. I’d have liked to have women brought to the palace in droves, the most beautiful in Solaria. I was the king, after all. I should be burying my cock in whoever I liked, but the first time I’d had some brought here, all five women had been found mutilated in the entrance hall.
Lavinia had stood among their corpses, smiling menacingly as she stood drenched in their blood, a lump of flesh gripped in her hand with a savage bite taken out of it.
I had not brought a single woman here since.
But Stella could come and go as she pleased and she was a beautiful woman, one I had long enjoyed the company of even if I had grown bored of her over time. And Lavinia was currently nowhere to be seen. My cock was already aching to be inside a warm body, because Lavinia’s was cold and unwelcoming. I needed the hot flesh of a Fae to sate me, and it looked like it was time to get what I wanted.
“Let her in,” I called and the door opened, revealing Stella as she stepped into my office in high black heels and a fitted white dress which hugged her perfectly fuckable body.
“My King.” She bowed her head and I leaned back in my seat as I watched her walk towards me, admiring her tight figure.
Once upon a time, she and I had studied together at Zodiac Academy alongside Hail Vega, the other Celestial Councillors and Azriel Orion. Of course, back then I had merely been the spare, below their notice most of the time while my older brother Radcliff lorded it over me, believing he would always be the most powerful Fae in our line and that I would never pose any kind of threat to his position.
Of course, he’d died choking on that belief, staring up at me in horror as he awoke one night finding I had dropped a norian wasp into his bed while he slept, his hands locked to his sides with my air magic, preventing him from healing himself of the severe reaction he had to it’s sting. With healing magic, the norian wasps’s sting wasn’t much of a threat to most Fae, but for anyone who didn’t manage to heal away the effects of it, they suffered a slow and agonising death as their internal organs swelled and swelled until they burst. The process took almost an hour to kill a man as big as my brother had been, and it had been quite the shock to my parents when they found him the next morning. Everyone believed he must have been tapped out and stung in his sleep, his tongue too swollen to call for help by the time he woke from the agony of the sting.
But that hadn’t been the way it had happened at all. Oh no. My big, powerful brother had been awake for the entire thing, woken by the sharp snap of his limbs being immobilised by my power and the angry red and black wasp trapped against his chest within a glass.
He had cursed and screamed while he died, all of it contained within the silencing bubble I had cast while I watched his agony play out within his eyes, and I was filled with the satisfaction of knowing he would never again refer to me as Lame Lionel. I’d mocked him over that as he choked on his own blood and begged me to heal him. “Who’s lame now, Radcliff?”
His dying reply had left a bitter taste on my lips though. “You are,” he spat around his swollen tongue. “You’re unFae, unwanted, and will always be Lame Lionel no matter what you achieve.”
His girlfriend had sobbed so loudly at his funeral. I couldn’t recall her name now but I remembered well how I’d comforted her, taking her to his room so that she could claim something to remember him by. I fucked her on his bed while I watched the tears spill down her cheeks as she tried to bury her grief in affection for me, and I buried my cock in his woman proving just how lame I wasn’t.