Florian must have scented it, or perhaps he’d sensed I’d woken up.
He ordered thickly, “Roll over.” His fingers squeezed my thigh. “You’re to tell me when you need me, butterfly.”
“You need to rest.” Yet I was desperate enough that I rolled away from his chest to face the balcony doors, which were still sealed in frost.
He lifted my leg, his admission a throaty groan as he slowly pushed himself inside me. “My people believe it is an honor to see a female through the heat, and sweetest creature…” He licked the arch of my ear. “I’ve never felt so fucking honored in my entire life.”
In an effort not to let those words burrow deep within my chest, I didn’t respond. To let them in would be a mistake when this king hadn’t a heart of his own.
Florian set a tray of food on the drawers, the doors clicking closed and resealing with ice.
I wasn’t hungry. Not for food.
Two days had passed since he’d trapped me in his chambers. He seldom left them, and he certainly wouldn’t let me leave. He’d forced me to hydrate, and he’d even withheld more orgasms until I’d eaten.
I studied his bare back, wishing he’d remove those pants and come back to bed. A bed that would need some serious tending to after this heat had left. I traced a smear of blood upon the bedding while he prepared dishes, his back still to me as he said, “Time to eat.”
“You?”
He stilled, then eyed me over his shoulder. “Careful, butterfly.”
But I’d meant it.
The hunger I now felt might have been foreign, but I was aware of what it was. The desire had grown with every hour spent together. I wanted to drink from him as he had me. It was a want so harrowing that my own blood pulsed in my ears with each step he took toward the bed.
He crooked his finger.
I crawled across the bedding to him without a shred of thought or shame, and gripped his pants.
He tutted. “Not yet.” I glared up at him. He smirked, then ordered softly, “Open those lovely lips.”
I did, and he bit into the strawberry before placing it between my teeth. With hooding eyes, he watched them sink into the fruit. “You make me want to kill anyone who’s ever looked at you.”
It hurt to swallow, both the small bite of fruit and his words.
He swiped juice from my lower lip, then sucked it from his thumb before offering me another strawberry. I chewed as he returned to the tray of food, unsure how I was supposed to move forward after this. After all of the feeding and fucking and feeling.
I’d walked the finest of lines for weeks. Now, after the heat had forced my surrender, that line had disappeared.
The loathing, hurt, and fear twined in a protective barrier around my heart refused to stay. He’d unraveled it so thoroughly and expertly that there was not enough left to return to when this ended.
If it would ever truly end.
He’d bathed me, fed me, held me, taught and learned me. He’d tended to the overwhelming evolvement of my body with a stamina few males would possess.
I should hate him. A part of me still did, though it was now mostly due to the shame he made me feel for my growing obsession with him.
But most of all, I was just… grateful. Relieved that it was him seeing me through the heat, and that I hadn’t needed to find a willing stranger or attempt to endure the impossible by waiting for it to pass.
“Thank you,” I said, the word close to a whisper when he returned to feed me some bread and soup.
Florian’s hand paused over the golden bowl, his eyes upon the creamy concoction within. Then he brought the bread to my mouth. “Do not thank me, butterfly.” Lust brightened his gaze and dropped his dark lashes as he watched me eat. “I am far from selfless, especially when it comes to you.”
I understood his meaning, and it didn’t erase my gratitude in the slightest. “I’m sure many a male has desired another in the way you do me, but that does not mean they’d be so…” I gripped his wrist, taking the rest of the bread and smiling as I chewed and settled on, “Doting.”
Florian huffed, again wiping at the food that’d escaped my lips and sucking it from his thumb. “Doting is not the right word,” he said, and headed back to the tray.
Instead of asking what was, for I had a feeling he would not answer, I asked another burning question. “Who’s watching Snow?”
He returned to me with more bread. “The twins.”
I missed her. It hadn’t been that long, yet I was beginning to miss the entire estate I’d thought to be my prison full of enemies. “Can I see her tomorrow?”
“Not unless I bring her to you.” Noting my displeasure, he murmured with a gloss of his knuckles over my cheek. “You’re still vulnerable.”
I gently pushed his hand away when he offered me another bite of bread, forcing back a smile when he scowled. “I’m over the worst of it.”
“I’m not,” he said, gruff. “I want you where I know you’re protected and can see you until it’s over.”
I sighed and bit into the bread, the pleased glint in his eyes tempting me to bite his fingers. He wouldn’t mind, and so I didn’t bother.
“What happens,” I said, swallowing the dough, “after it’s done?” I’d been so distracted with trying to survive it, then satiating it—obsessed with overindulging in this king with an appetite to rival any goddess-given heat—that I hadn’t been able to give enough thought to what would come.
Florian glared down at the bowl, as if unsure how to answer that.
Cold slithered into my chest.
I attempted to ignore it by saying, “My abilities.” I’d never expected to have any outside of materializing unless they were small and few, for I’d never expected to discover that I was a royal.
“Your ability to materialize will be easier, but as for the rest…” He dipped the bread and pushed it between my teeth. “We wait and see.”
If I could materialize with more ease, and if Florian could teach me how to break into the energy folds for that to happen, then I could reach Baneberry.
I could reach King Molkan. My father.
Perhaps, I thought dangerously, I could even find more than the answers I desired about my family. Perhaps I could find more information about this hatred between Molkan and Florian.
And perhaps then I could help end all of this.
Unable to bite my tongue nor keep the gathering eagerness from my voice, I said far too quickly, “I want to test it. Materializing.”
The king frowned as if knowing exactly why I would want to learn. “Not while the scent of your constant state of arousal still lingers so potently.”
Of course, he would not teach me such a thing. He didn’t trust me, and he was right not to.
I didn’t take it personally. I would indeed run as soon as an opportunity arose, and Florian trusted very few. And though I knew he would tend to my every need inside these chambers, I did not trust him either.
If there was a way out of this game of war and revenge, I would not find it here. No matter how skilled the king was at tempting me to believe in this false sense of safety.
“It is a song,” Florian explained in my silence. “A call to the wild that has found many their counterpart.”