I choke down air, trying to keep the terror at bay as my heart pounds a warning in my ears. “I just want to be fucked by you.”
He sits up and slaps my tit.
I jolt, yelping in shock, and he clamps his hand over my mouth and the terror swells to a crescendo in my gut.
Every fiber in my body is telling me to get up and run. It’s a crawling sensation beneath my skin that I can’t shake.
Run far. Run fast.
Run. Run.
RUN.
Hand still clamped over my mouth, he says, “No.”
One menacing word delivered with enough fire to burn.
My body is writhing for something, anything. Release or defeat or pain or pleasure.
I can’t contain it and I can’t think straight and my clit is throbbing.
“Please,” I say, the word muffled around his hand.
The pressure of his body is gone in a beat and I blink up at the loss of him.
“I’m not going to make you my pretty little broken fuck doll,” he tells me, and then he stalks from the room and I gulp down air.
I lie there on the rug for several long minutes, not entirely sure what just happened and if I actually survived it.
Am I dead?
I feel like I just leapt off of a cliff, but I haven’t hit yet. I’m still falling.
As the dark clouds roll in and the rain falls harder, I finally breathe normally and crawl up to my knees to fetch my sweater.
I get dressed and collapse into Vane’s abandoned chair, feeling spent but unsatisfied too.
Goddamn him.
I hate him. Which just makes me want to make him give in even more. Just so I can gloat about it.
But maybe he’s right—wanting that might make me a glutton for punishment.
And oh how sinister that punishment would be.
24
PETER PAN
When I come up from the tomb, I find the Darling in the library curled in one of the leather chairs by the giant circular window. She’s just staring at the glass as rain plinks against it, but there’s a book open in her hands.
The sun is gone, but it’s hard to know for sure, the sky is so heavy and dark.
She is a tempting sight. Like a wild, exotic bird that I want to capture and cage so that only I can hear her sing.
When she realizes I’m there, she blinks over at me and shifts in the chair, unfolding her legs from beneath her. She’s wearing only an oversized sweater, her legs bare. I could easily slip my hand up her thighs, steal in beneath the sweater, make her writhe beneath me.
I get a flash of what I did to her last night and my cock aches for a repeat. I don’t get lost in pussy that often. Sometimes I need to fuck just to feel, but I haven’t fucked like that in a long time.
“Hi,” she says to me.
It’s such a simple word, casual and light. A mortal word.
No one says hi to me. Hi is for friends and I have no friends.
Only enemies and allies.
And even the latter feels hollow and thin lately.
“Hi.”
She smiles at me, pretty little Darling girl. I want to drive her to the floor and shove my dick in her mouth, watch her gag on it.
I am not a nice man. I am a worse king.
I can pretend though, for now.
“What are you reading?”
She shuts the book and looks down at it, as if only just now realizing she had it. “Frankenstein.”
“Classic.”
“I guess.”
She’s reading a book about monsters in a den of monsters.
How fucking poetic.
“I need to prepare you for tonight,” I tell her and she looks up with interest. I don’t usually warn the Darlings of what’s to come. I don’t know why I feel the need to warn her.
“Okay.”
“My shadow,” I say. “It was a Darling that took it.”
She frowns. “Which one?”
“It was a very long time ago. Several generations back.”
I can’t speak her name because I have forgotten it.
There is only a dark void where she used to exist and all that remains is the feeling of her.
“Memories of your ancestors can be inherited,” I tell her. “Buried in blood. But memories are wild and tumultuous in children. That’s why…” I trail off, sighing.
“That’s why you take the Darlings at eighteen,” she guesses.
“Yes.”
“How do you search the memories?”
“The fae can get inside a mind, but especially the queen.”
Her tongue flicks out and wets her lips. “That’s why they all go mad, isn’t it?” Her eyes well up and I have to fight the urge to reassure her.