Page 17

The sudden pain slammed into me, hard enough to knock me flat on the cushions. The dark runespell on my chest flared, shadows drinking my blood like it was water in the desert. The more it drank, the more it burned and twisted.

Bind. Sustain. Conduit. Transfer. Dusk. Dawn. Endure. Glamour.

It flashed into other shapes, other runes, running through the verses of the spell. Each flare of shadows seared into my vision.

Within seconds, the spell had absorbed every drop, from the cut in my skin to the stains in my gown. It cooled instantly. A weight pressed into my chest, inside my chest, like the magic had hardened and settled somewhere behind my ribs.

I pushed onto my elbow. Where the raw edges of the cut had been, a black imprint in the covenant spell’s shape marred my skin. I traced a finger against it, expecting to feel something, but the runes faded the moment I touched them.

I exhaled, long and slow. I had survived.

The first part of this, at least.

You can do this. I lifted my face to the vampires before me. The Mortal Bride—the former Mortal Bride—slumped dead at their feet.

I stomped down on my panic. I would not become a blubbering mess on the floor before the Conqueror and the Butcher, no matter what horrors they committed.

“Is that… it?” I asked, managing to sound nonchalant. Almost.

“To make you the Mortal Bride, yes.” Luc licked the blood from his lips. He drew a small rune against his own skin. Clean . It absorbed the remaining crimson drops.

“Oh.”

“No need to be disappointed, lovely.” Jules didn’t care about the blood on him, letting the red run in slow rivulets down his chest. “I’m quite hungry after all that work. Aren’t you, Lucey?”

“Absolutely starving,” Luc replied, those black eyes on the fluttering pulse at my neck.

Everything in me froze. “But you just ate.”

“Hardly,” Jules said.

Without looking at the body, he drew the faint lines of a rune in the air. Incinerate . The former Mortal Bride turned to dust at his feet and then vanished entirely.

Just like that.

Gone in a second.

All that remained was his silver-gold collar, clattering against stone.

No matter the smiles and banter I shared with the kings, that was all I was. A single mortal in a long line of disposable brides. One day, it would be my body disintegrating at their feet while a new bride cowered on the cushions.

“ Take off your dress, bride.”

Luc’s voice shocked me out of my grim thoughts, but my nipples pebbled instantly. “What?”

“You heard him,” Jules said, dipping a finger in the blood on him. He brought it to his lips, eyes fixed on me.

Luc began unbuttoning his doublet. “If you want something to wear tomorrow, take off your dress.”

I had just watched someone die and replaced them as the Mortal Bride, but my courage suddenly failed me. “What if I say no? I’m your willing volunteer—”

“You were our willing volunteer,” Luc corrected. “Now you’re our Mortal Bride. We can now do with you what we please.”

Oh.

Shit.

The kings followed my every breath. I shivered at the weight of their black-eyed stares and couldn’t stop. I was trembling . Had I ever truly done that before? But if there was ever a time to tremble, it was now. I was alone with two vicious vampire kings. There was nowhere to run. Even if there was, I wouldn’t get far.

But did I want to get far? I wasn’t trembling in fear alone.

Stars, I was deranged. Sick. Something was terribly, terribly wrong with me. They were the Imperium. They were murderers. One day, they would kill me .

But a part of me didn’t care. I was so tired of suffering. The loneliness ached as much as the pain. For once, I wanted to feel good. I wanted them to make me feel good. I didn’t believe the godstars were listening, but I prayed to Them anyway.

Please let their venom make my pleasure stronger than my pain.

Please let me pretend they desire me for me.

Please let me have one moment of peace, no matter how brief.

I shook my head and slid to the edge of the chaise. I was their Mortal Bride. Their thrall. They were hungry. This was a transaction, nothing more. I needed to keep all my silly hopes and feelings locked in my chest where they belonged.

I reached for the sleeves of my dress, but I paused a touch away. The kings had seen me naked, but this was different. This wasn’t an almost-innocent bath in a lake.

The kings planned to feed on me.

The kings planned to fuck me.

I didn’t care what distinction Maire made. To me, they were one and the same. The fear rose, washing away every other emotion.

“I don’t…” I swallowed. “I don’t think I can.”

Luc flicked a finger in my direction. “Julien, assist our bride.”

“With pleasure.”

Jules approached, a bloody grin stretching across his face. He stripped his own tunic off with a quick flick of buttons. My heart pounded, the best low in my core. He dropped the fabric without a care, baring the crimson-streaked, toned lines of his perfect chest.

He stretched out his arm and wiggled his finger. The dead Mortal Bride’s collar flew off the ground and into his waiting hand.

I froze.

No.

Jules ran his thumb over the silver-gold band, inspecting it with a casual air, as if it hadn’t just been wrapped around a corpse’s throat. As if it wasn’t still warm from another’s skin. From someone whose body had disintegrated to nothing.

I couldn’t breathe.

Jules stepped closer.

Panic clawed up my throat. My lips parted, but I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move.

The cool weight of the collar brushed my throat, smooth metal gliding over my skin like a lover’s touch. The pressure settled against my throat. The air in my lungs turned thin. My pulse thumped wildly beneath the metal, a frantic drumbeat in my ears.

Click .

The lock snapped shut.

Sealed. Done. Unbreakable.

Before I could start hyperventilating, Jules swept his hands across my shoulders. My gown parted, the straps sliding in a slow, traitorous glide down my arms. It didn’t even bother putting up a fight.

One second, it was on me.

The next, a puddle on the ground.

Cold air rushed over me, raising goosebumps across my bare skin. I gasped.

Jules’s stare dropped from the collar to my breasts. He licked his lips unabashedly. For my blood, not for me. But my nipples didn’t care. Aching, humiliating peaks tightened under his attention.

Wicked, sinful girl .

I crossed my arms across my chest.

“No.” The King of Dusk was behind me in a blink. Luc’s fingers curled around my wrists, tugging them gently but firmly behind my back. “You are ours now, Nessa. We want to see our new bride.”

Ours . Heat rushed in every direction—to my cheeks, to my chest, to my cunt. “You already have.”

“You didn’t let us look.” Luc inhaled deeply against the back of my hair. “This time, we will have our fill.”

Their black gazes traveled over me like a caress. Jules’s focus lazed down to the expanse of my soft stomach, pressed kisses to the curves of my hips, and lingered at the tuft of curls between my legs.

Luc traced a slow, deliberate path down my spine. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I felt them. Felt them fixed on the roundness of my ass. He ran his fingers through my long, loose hair at my waist, tugging just enough to make me shiver.

I writhed underneath the kings’ devouring stares.

Why were they looking at me like that? I wasn’t meant to be looked at like that. Not by anyone as gorgeous as them—

Jules cupped my left breast, rubbing his blood-stained thumb around my nipple. A trail of red smeared across my skin. I stuttered out an exhale as a spark jolted through me.

Every thought vacated my head.

He let loose a sigh. “Stars, I’ve wanted to touch these pretty pink nipples of yours for days.”

He swirled his finger faster and faster. The blood—the dead Mortal Bride’s blood, some part of me yelled—made his touch glide over me. Oh, fuck. I bit my lip to stop my moan—

Luc’s knuckles closed around my right nipple and twisted. Another wave of heat burst through me. I yelped, flinching away. But I didn’t get far, the King of Dusk’s body at my back unyielding.

His breath tickled across my ear. “What an exquisite little sound you just made. Perhaps Jules had the right idea, keeping you to ourselves.”

I forced a snort. Exquisite? Me? Not at all. Not in any reality. “There’s no need to play games anymore.”

Both kings’ fingers stilled, though they remained hot on my flesh. Luc circled to my side, keeping his grip on my wrists. “Games?”

“The pet names. The quips. The… flirting, I guess?” I said, managing a flippant tone. “You were pretending so I’d be your willing volunteer. There’s no need for that anymore.”

There was a long pause.

Luc slowly arched a dark brow. “Why would we pretend?”

He wasn’t serious. Was he? “You’re the kings of an entire impire. If you hadn’t wanted me to be your Mortal Bride, you never would have noticed me.”

Luc arched his brow higher. Jules remained restlessly still, like a beast about to pounce on his prey.

Shit… they were serious?

No.

“I’m not interesting or young or pretty and if you aren’t at least one of the three, you’re nothing.” I raised my chin and kept my voice firm. “So let’s get this over with. Stop playing games with my feelings and fucking bite me already.”

The kings just stared. They weren’t even blinking. I clenched my fist and told my body to stay still under their scrutiny. But my pulse hadn’t yet steadied from their touches, the pounding of my heart giving me away.

I wanted them to want me. I shouldn’t have wanted them to want me.

It didn’t matter. The Imperium could never want a shy, broken spinster who preferred books over people.

Then Jules shuddered. “Fuck, that made me hard.”

My eyes widened—and dropped to his trousers. My mouth dried. He wasn’t lying. Or maybe he was. Vampires controlled their own blood. If he could will away his erection on the hellsteed, he could as easily summon one.

I swallowed. “I’m not surprised distress does it for the Butcher.”

Luc had his hand around my neck in a blink. Everything within me clenched.

“Being an insolent brat does it for the Butcher,” Jules said, then grinned at Luc’s hand. “And the Conqueror.”

“Let me make something clear.” Luc pulled me closer until my back pressed into his chest and slid his hand to my jaw, tilting my head back, back, back until I met his eyes. “We are the kings of an entire impire. We have no need to play games. What we want, we take.”

It took everything in me to hold his dark, powerful gaze. “And what is it you want?”

“Right now? To fuck that defiant little mouth of yours while you come screaming on Jules’s cock.”

My mouth dropped open as the fire in me burned bright. Luc’s dulcet tones summoned wicked images in my mind, ones I had buried in my sickest fantasies. My core was slick between my legs. I pressed my thighs together, a useless attempt to hide my reaction.

Jules breathed in and groaned. He pulled back his blond hair and tied the strands in a knot. “You’ll have to wait your turn, Lucey. I need to taste her right now.”

My brow furrowed. “You’ve already tasted me.”

Luc smirked. “He didn’t mean your blood.”

What? But before I asked, Luc was gone from my back and my thighs hit the cushion. I tumbled onto the chaise. The question fled my brain alongside my insecurity.

Jules dropped to his knees in front of me.

Oh, fuck. I tried to scale back on the chaise, away from whatever he had planned. “What are you doing?”

“I need to see if the rest of you is as sweet.”

“But…”

He looped his arms around my knees and pulled me closer to him. Odran’s blood smeared from his chest to my knees. “But what?”

I still couldn’t understand it. “You shouldn’t want to touch someone like me.”

“I shouldn’t want to bury my head between the thighs of my soft, innocent bride?” Jules spread my legs wide until every glistening part of me was exposed.

Luc groaned at the sight over his shoulder.

My skin pebbled, my breath rushing out of me in fast pants.

Jules didn’t give me a chance to reply.

It all happened at once.

As my butt hit the edge of the cushion, Jules dipped his head between my thighs. He lapped his tongue through my wet center. All thoughts vacated my head at the slow, languorous lick.

Oh my fucking stars.

I jerked in his hold as pleasure flashed through me. When he reached the top, the ball of his tongue piercing bumped against something hyper-sensitive. My clit. I squeaked, an embarrassingly high-pitched sound. My thighs whacked against his shoulders as I clenched. I felt his bloody smile— felt —before he rolled his tongue around and around.

“You… you… Ahh.” I couldn’t even form a sentence. My entire being focused on the jolts of pleasure shooting through me from that tiny nub I had searched for but never found.

I had touched myself before, but it hadn’t felt like this. My pleasure was a muted trickle, a rarity. My pain was a forest fire and all too common. But this… this felt like… I whimpered. I didn’t even know how to describe it.

Like death.

Like life.

I never wanted it to end.

I spread my legs wider. I didn’t mean to. But I couldn’t help myself. I needed his tongue deeper inside me. Jules chuckled, and I nearly screamed as the deep vibration traveled right through me. I grabbed for the cushion behind me, anything to hold me down to reality. My head dropped back as my body trembled.

A hand fisted in my hair and tugged my face back up. I met luminous black eyes, the King of Dusk towering behind the King of Dawn. “Eyes on me until you come.”

Pain flared through my scalp, a quick rush before the soothing rune washed it away. But it made the pleasure between my legs stronger. I moaned.

“Does it feel how you imagined?” Luc asked. “While reading all those dirty little books of yours.”

“I—I—” Jules’s tongue leisurely swept toward my entrance before he came back to my clit. I swallowed. Stars, I’d get this sentence out if it killed me. “It was just one book.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Luc said. “Julien.”

Jules took the little bud into his mouth and sucked. A shout burst from my throat. My eyes nearly rolled back, stars flashing behind my eyelids.

Luc tightened his fist in my hair. I mewled, snapping my gaze back to the King of Dusk. “When I ask, you answer. When I command, you obey. Am I understood?”

I exhaled shakily. “Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

Everything within me tightened even more somehow. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Good girl.”

I whimpered at the words.

His smirk became a grin, a rare and gorgeous sight. “Now, does your king’s tongue feel how you imagined?”

Jules circled faster and faster around my clit, his piercing scraping against the edges. “N—no. I never could have—oh stars—imagined this.”

My chest heaved, my words breathless, but I had answered. Jules continued his torturous pattern, spinning the heat higher and higher in me. The pleasure writhed under my skin, invading my every cell.

Through it all, Luc watched. My panting, flushed face. My heaving breasts. Jules buried in my cunt. His cock had hardened visibly beneath his trousers, but he didn’t touch himself. The Conqueror wasn’t ruled by his body. He ruled it—as he did the bodies at his feet.

Jules dipped his tongue lower again, this time circling the rim of my entrance. I gasped at the sensation. The building pressure. The shooting tendrils of heat. The way my body clenched in eager anticipation.

But I knew it wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. It never did. My body wasn’t meant for pleasure, only pain. My panic spiked—

Jules dipped his tongue inside me.

I tensed, bracing. First, the stretch as my cunt expanded for him. And after that… after that… The heat in me built, but it didn’t turn to shattered glass, scraping at my insides.

My nipples tightened.

My breath spiked.

My nerves tingled.

I cried out, a desperate whine. My legs jerked, but they were trapped within Jules’s grasp, locked between his body and the chaise.

Without warning, the King of Dawn lifted my thighs and hefted them over his shoulders. Odran’s blood smeared against my inner thighs, but I barely noticed. His tongue slipped deeper into me.

“Fuck, fuck, oh, fuck.” My legs tried to snap closed, but they only looped tighter around Jules’s back.

“What a loud, dirty mouth you have,” Luc purred.

I clamped my jaw shut. Shame rushed through me. Quiet, girl. My stepmother’s voice snapped through me. I was too loud. I was always too loud. Too tall. Too soft. Too big. Too much. I curled into myself, wishing the chaise would swallow me whole.

Jules’s lidded black eyes flickered up to me. Something wicked flashed through them.

Luc had the same idea. “Make her scream louder.”

I bit down on my lower lip, knowing it was in vain.

Jules pressed his tongue against my inner walls. The ball of his piercing rubbed against me. Pleasure lit my every cell and nerve as he grazed against a spot as sensitive as my clit.

I couldn’t hold back my scream. I stood on the edge of a cliff, almost there, ready to jump off, ready to fall.

But I couldn’t. Not only did my body turn pleasure into pain, but it denied it entirely. Jules pushed me higher and higher. I wanted to crash. Wanted the bliss to destroy me.

But it wasn’t meant to be. I didn’t work—

Luc tightened his fist in my hair. “Stop resisting.”

“I can’t,” I whimpered.

“You most certainly can.”

“No, no, I can’t. Please, please please—ohhh…”

Jules slid one hand down my thigh. His fingers threaded through my curls to my clit. He didn’t even need to search. He found it on the first try, the practiced hands of an expert. The begging trailed into an obscene moan.

He tweaked that aching bud. I shrieked. The drop started—

Luc chuckled. “That’s it. Come on my soulbound’s tongue for me, little curiosity.”

Waves of ecstasy crashed into me. I shuddered, thrashing against the kings’ hold on my legs, in my hair, but they held me firm, their grips unyielding. A shriek escaped my lips, the sound wanton as I buckled and thrashed and came on the Butcher’s tongue.

My orgasm wrecked me, destroyed me, remade me.

I had never felt anything like this before. Never imagined something like this. And I never would’ve expected it here, little more than their thrall and sacrifice. But the King of Dawn lapped at me like a delicacy, like the best thing he had ever tasted. I whimpered as he guided me through the bliss with gentle strokes.

As I spasmed, Luc released my hair. I slumped back into the cushion, heaving and boneless. Aftershocks of pleasure fizzled through me. I stared hazily at the cave’s ceiling.

Fucking godstars.

I rubbed my hands down my face. I lay naked on the chaise, the fabric soaked beneath my ass. I wished the pillows would swallow me whole.

I had come on the King of Dawn’s tongue. He hadn’t even bit me first. It felt like a betrayal to my whole country, to every thrall born and raised in the Impire. It was certainly a betrayal of the Church and the godstars.

But I couldn’t force myself to care.

Jules gently removed my legs from his shoulders. I didn’t resist him at all, little more than clay in his hands. My toes brushed the floor, a shock of cold. It wasn’t enough to pull me from the haze.

Weight pressed down on the edge of the chaise. Light kisses trailed up my stomach and around my breasts. Breath ghosted across my left nipple before lips closed around the tight bud and sucked.

A strangled, exhausted cry escaped me.

The King of Dawn flickered his smug, black gaze to me from where he had crawled over my body. When he released my nipple, my cry turned into a pitiful whine.

“So demanding,” Jules murmured against my chest.

He brushed his lips across my chest to my right nipple. I moaned as he rolled his piercing around and around the aching nub. With a faint brush of teeth, he pulled back with a wet pop. I shuddered.

Jules trailed kisses along my collarbone, to my pulse point, then across my jaw. I watched him move without reaction, floating in bliss. When his lips hovered over mine, he murmured, “I’ve never tasted anything like you, lovely. Melted sugar, with just the faintest spice of blood. You’ll be writhing on my tongue daily.”

Blood. He meant my blood.

I should have cared. Should have been mortified. I had come apart on the King of Dawn’s tongue, and he had tasted the blood that always came with my arousal.

The thought barely registered. My mind was too slow, too soft, drifting in warmth.

All I managed was a hoarse, “Uh-huh.”

He grinned at my response.

Large hands looped under my arms. I was pulled across the chaise from underneath Jules to between two thick, golden-brown thighs. I left a humiliating wet trail along the cushions.

Jules hadn’t been the only one to climb onto the chaise. Luc now rested on the huge pillows propped against the wall. He settled me on top of him, his skin soft and warm. I melted into him—strong chest, smooth abdomen, and a hard length burning into my lower back.

I gasped. Seeing Luc’s cock and feeling it were two different experiences. There was no way it would fit within me. He’d tear me in two.

Jules noticed my shock as he prowled forward. “Don’t worry. You’ll only take my cock tonight. Luc will have to fuck those beautiful, plump asscheeks of yours.”

As Jules said the words, Luc pulled me closer, closing that last inch. He pinned his erect cock between us, the hard length burning into the curve of my ass. His piercings pressed against my skin. All five of them, little studs at the ends of thin bars. My head dropped back on his left shoulder.

The King of Dawn pushed onto his knees between my legs, his erection bobbing with the motion. My mouth watered. He lifted one of my calves and hooked it over Luc’s thigh, then did the same with the other.

Spreading me wide and open for him.

I should have cared. I should have been terrified or embarrassed. He was going to bite me and fuck me.

But I remained loose and floating.

“You have one last choice,” Luc said right into my ear. “Do you choose the bite of ecstasy or the bite of agony?”

“I prefer the ecstasy myself.” Jules leaned over me until his nose brushed mine, trapping me between their powerful bodies. “As both the bitee and the biter.”

“Most who choose the bite of agony the first time never choose it again,” Luc continued. “But it is still a choice for you to make.”

It wasn’t a choice at all. I had experienced pain nearly every other day for a decade, the last week the one exception. I wouldn’t ever choose agony when pleasure was the other option.

Wicked, sinful girl.

But I didn’t care what my stepmother or the Church thought of me anymore. In their eyes, I was doomed the moment I decided not to marry.

“Ecstasy,” I whispered.

“You’ll have to repeat that,” Jules said. “I didn’t quite hear you. Did you, Lucey?”

“No, unfortunately not.”

I swallowed and cleared my throat. I blinked some of the haze from my brain, just enough to respond. “I choose ecstasy.”

The tip of Jules’s nose brushed my earlobe. “Then consider this your warning.”

Jules’s canines morphed, the ivory stretching into faint, swaying shadows. I stared, entranced. I hadn’t witnessed the transformation this close before.

Luc tilted back my head, baring my throat for Jules—and him. His lips brushed down the cord of my neck, the sharp tip of his fangs grazing my skin. They both planned to bury their fangs in me, like they had the former Mortal Bride.

Panic finally burst through my lust.

Two sets of fangs pierced my neck.

I gasped, my body locking tight. It burned. The pain licked up my spine, curled through my ribs like a fist squeezing my lungs—

But then it softened. Melted. The sharp, stabbing sting dulled to a languid pull, a heat that coiled through me, rich and dizzying. My nipples peaked. My clit throbbed. Fuck, I needed them. I had just come, but I needed to again. Now—

Everything shattered.

Sensation exploded in my veins.

Heat. Fire. A mind-breaking pulse. It slammed into me, wrapping around my bones, twisting through my blood. It filled every part of my body, from my head to my fingers to my toes.

It wasn’t pain.

It wasn’t pleasure.

It was something else.

Something more . It filled me up, my entire body prone in its grasp. It reached through me to the bodies above and below me. Luc and Jules’s fangs were in my neck, blood dripping down my skin, but they didn’t move, as entranced as I was.

I settled into the warmth, the otherness, letting it in.

And in.

And in.

It didn’t stop. It just built more and more, higher and higher. I tried to shuffle under the sudden weight of it, but still I couldn’t move. My wonder twisted, darkened.

I couldn’t fucking move.

It wasn’t like before, when Luc paralyzed me. I felt the kings around me, the hard press of their cocks, the softness of their skin, the tickle of their hair against my face. It was like something had pinned still my very soul.

And was now determined to crush it.

The pressure ground me down. Any second now, it would crack my bones, pulverizing me beneath it. I thrashed internally as it built and built, higher and higher.

I breathed out slowly through my nose. I couldn’t control much, but I could control that. I knew pain. I survived pain. I would survive this, as well.

Sometimes the only way out was through. Resisting my illness only made my stress worse, which in turn made my pain worse. It was a vicious cycle that never ended. The only way to stop it from spinning on and on was to surrender. To let the pain wash over me and not worry about when it would end.

It would end.

I relaxed my every muscle, going slack in between the kings and the power whirling within all of us. I gasped as it filled through me, that agonizing pressure now a rush of warmth.

For a second, I was complete.

Unbroken.

Invincible.

Strong.

Then the power latched onto my very bones and pulled me into darkness.