Edge of Power

  “Oh. That.” She bit her lip again when he adjusted the fit, as if leaving room. Or testing his depth. “It’s necessary. Sorry.”

  “I understand that this is new for you, but that’s the sort of thing you generally share. In advance.” His gaze was lit in that way that made her heart seem to shiver inside her chest, blue arrogance and a certain forthrightness that should have terrified her. Instead, it made her feel safe. There were no fake smiles here, hiding a black and murderous heart. He might feign laziness, or pretend to be less than he was, but not here. Not with her. She could trust him to be exactly who he was. “ ‘Wulf,’ you could have said, ‘I’ve tucked an extra little gift away, high in my cunt.’ See? Not that hard, princess.”

  “I would have,” she whispered, though she thought they both knew she was highly unlikely to utter that dirty word he liked so much. “But we didn’t really have a moment alone.”

  And still didn’t.

  The reality of where they were hit her again. Like a wallop to the gut. She braced her hands on his chest, even harder now, reveling in all that sculpted muscle and smooth, hot skin. And she knew better than to move her hands. She knew better than to give in to that greedy thing inside of her, spurring her on despite the audience she could hear muttering and murmuring all around them. She knew she needed to ignore the urge to explore him. To take some time with each and every tattoo, each one more fascinating than the last. To run her fingers over those fascinating ridges and heavy, flat planes that together made up that remarkable torso of his.

  But while he might feel safe to her in his way, safer than anything had ever felt since the day her mother died, she knew the last thing she was right now was secure. There were too many eyes on them. Too many judges waiting to see the proof of her downfall—and they were already edging toward too much talking, not enough taking of her supposed maidenhead.

  “Think about me,” he ordered her, as if he could read her mind. He sounded gruff and impatient, as if he didn’t have patience for her anxiety, and somehow, it made that knot of tension in her gut loosen. “Not those assholes.”

  He started to move, then. At last. He pulled out all the way, leaving only the plump tip of himself inside of her. Then he pushed his way back inside, filling her as completely and breathtakingly as before, despite the little bundle of herbs and paste Biyu had given her. And the more he moved, the less she felt that bundle, as if it had started to melt as Biyu had promised it would.

  But that was a practical concern, those herbs and what they were meant to do. And nothing Wulf was doing to her with that giant part of him he could move so smoothly, so intensely, felt practical. At all. The fact that they were in the center of the grand hall, being watched closely by so many people who wished her ill and wanted him dead, did nothing to mute the wildfire sensation that rippled through her. Her body didn’t seem to care that she was on display. That this was the last place on earth she should show anyone that despite all the rumors that she was made of ice, she could in fact feel. A lot. Because no matter whether she’d drunk that numbing tea or not, she needed to pretend that she was barely here at all.

  You need to look serene, she told herself with growing anxiety. Calm and cool and collected.

  But she felt nothing like calm.

  Wulf was watching her much too closely. And there was no hiding from him here. Like this. She wasn’t sure there was any hiding from him anyway, anywhere—but certainly not here. There were too many lights. There were no shadows, no firelight, to confuse the issue, and his mouth was set in that knowing, almost mocking curve.

  He set a serious sort of pace. Not slow, not fast. Every thrust deep, deliberate. She understood that he was giving their audience the show they wanted. His mastery over her. His infinite skill.

  What they couldn’t know was how little it hurt her. How it was the opposite of pain that washed all over her, making her feel much too hot. Making her terribly afraid that she wouldn’t be able to control the sounds she could feel building in the back of her throat. Making her sure that she would lose it—maybe this stroke. Or the next. Or the maddeningly deep and dangerous one after that.

  “Are you going to tell me what you hid away in there?” he asked, and that low voice of his, slightly rough with the hint of laughter, only made the fire burn hotter. Kathlyn struggled to focus on his face, his words—not what he was doing inside of her, each thick, slick thrust slamming into her and sending her reeling. “Is this another mainland game? Let me guess. It’s part of this fucked-up ritual. Every mother tells her daughter that she needs to stick stuff way up inside her junk in order for this bullshit ritual to be sanctified by your compliant god or some shit.”

  “I want to bleed.” She said it so starkly. Almost as if it hurt. But that was because of what he was doing to her, inside and out. That maddening, deliberate rhythm that was making everything inside of her ache. And yearn. Pull tight, then tighter. And hunger for what she knew was coming, thanks to that night in her rooms—except it wasn’t. It couldn’t.

  Not here. Definitely not here.

  “What the fuck is the deal with you people and blood?” Wulf asked from between his teeth. “It’s creepy as hell.”

  Kathlyn gazed up at him, her whole body shuddering with each deep thrust. She hoped it looked like pain from a distance. And he was hardly touching her. She didn’t have those wonderfully battered, infinitely capable hands moving over her skin. Neither his mouth nor his fingers working that wicked magic between her legs. There was only the way he filled her, over and over, as if he could carry on doing it forever.

  The very idea made her shudder again, harder and longer this time.

  Because there was something about the resolute and determined way he thrust inside of her, again and again, as if nothing could make him change his pace—make him go faster or slower or do anything but continue that slow hammering exactly as he pleased—that was making Kathlyn shake. The way she had that night.

  She was dangerously close to falling over that edge, right here in the unforgiving glare of the mounting stage. And that couldn’t happen. That was signing up for her own eternal disgrace. Or more of it, anyway.

  She tried to hold herself still. She tried to fight it back, somehow. Her hands curled into fists against his chest and she bit down on her lip again, until it stung, but it didn’t help.

  It didn’t help.

  She felt herself tense, everywhere. This was turning into a crisis.

  “Looks like you’re in some trouble, baby,” Wulf murmured, sounding delighted at the prospect, and a little bit smug besides, she noted in the far-off part of her brain that wasn’t consumed with the sensation pooling inside of her and rapidly approaching a boiling point. “What are you going to do if you come right here? The proper princess all dressed in white. Coming and coming while all these people watch a raider king fuck her like this, hard and mean.”

  Even as his words seemed to pour fuel all over the already dancing flames that made her feel swollen and perilously close to succumbing to the exact picture he’d just painted, Kathlyn couldn’t imagine such a horror. She literally couldn’t imagine it. Had it ever happened in the history of mounting ceremonies? She didn’t think she’d ever seen anything like it at the ones she’d witnessed. Though she was hardly an expert on the subject. But she honestly couldn’t remember a single time that anyone had looked as if they were experiencing the sorts of things that she had with Wulf.

  The sorts of things that were swirling around and around inside of her, nudging her much too close to that precarious edge.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please, I just want to bleed. I might be ruined already but I don’t want them to know that. I want there to be doubt. And the only way that can happen is if—”

  “Blood,” Wulf muttered as he kept up his demanding pace.

  “That’s why . . .” But she was so breathless now, filled with panic and need and wonder and fear. “Herbs . . .”

  “I got it.”

&
nbsp; Kathlyn tried to clarify what she meant but she was rapidly approaching the point of no return. Her body didn’t care that this was the last place in the world it should be exerting its influence. It didn’t realize she should be fighting off this roaring fire with everything she had. Her body didn’t seem to care what might happen to her.

  Right then she wasn’t sure that she did, either.

  All she knew was this moment. That dark lick of fire that moved all over her, getting worse and worse—better and better—every time Wulf surged inside of her. Heat tugged at her nipples behind her white dress, making her breasts feel swollen, engorged, as if Wulf’s hands were on them when they weren’t.

  And still he moved inside of her at that same set pace. As if he could do this for hours and hours. Days.

  Kathlyn had no doubt at all that he could. And something inside of her cracked at the idea, like a tree trunk that had finally taken one axe swing too many.

  “Oh no,” she whispered as that wave inside of her started to build. Higher and higher, soaring through her and then beginning to pool into that place between her legs where she burned the brightest. “Oh no, please, I can’t—”

  Wulf shifted a little bit closer to her, without actually dropping down from where he still held himself up on his hands. “Look at me.”

  It was another command. He sounded harsh, and the blue in his eyes was so bright, so sharp, she was shocked it hadn’t bored holes straight through her.

  “It doesn’t look like you’re going to have a choice about this, princess,” he told her then, and there was something in the way he said it. A tightness in his voice, maybe. Kathlyn had the sudden, thrilling notion that this was as hard for him as it was for her. That he was lost out there on the same rising wave that she was. “When it takes you, you look at me. You don’t shake. You don’t moan. You don’t make any fucking noise at all.”

  She heard him, but she could feel it building. It was coming at her even harder now, that wave getting nearer and nearer its crest—

  “That shit is mine, not theirs. Do you understand me?”

  Kathlyn nodded, as panicked at the thought of what was about to happen to her as she was consumed with it.

  “Say it,” he growled. “I need you to say it and mean it and do it, Kathlyn.”

  “I understand you,” she managed to get out.

  “Hold on to me,” he told her then. “Don’t be afraid to make it hurt. But don’t you dare give them what they want.”

  And then everything got very serious, very fast. Wulf didn’t change his pace. It was the same slick, impossible hammering, deep inside of her. She could feel him too well. She could feel that thick head as it dragged inside her, and the rest of his heavy shaft as he maintained the same deliberate rhythm that shuddered through her and lit her up and made her burn.

  And the more she burned, the less she cared about all the reasons she needed to hide was happening to her.

  She didn’t care about ghosts. She didn’t care about nostalgia. Wulf burned all that away, like sunlight through fog. It was as if nothing existed but this. Him. The inexorable pounding that was bringing her closer and closer to ruining herself all over again and this time, in front of a much larger audience.

  Kathlyn held on to him. She dug her nails in.

  And when it broke over her, he knew it. She saw that knowledge spark in his icy blue gaze, hotter and wilder than she’d ever seen it before.

  She bit down on her bottom lip again until it stung, she felt tears leak out of the corners of her eyes, and she tried. Kathlyn tried to stay stiff and she tried not to thrash and she tried—oh how she tried—to remain still—

  Wulf sped up then. He dropped down closer to her and moved faster. A blistering, breathtaking speed that was so overwhelming it took her moment to realize what he was doing. Finishing, yes, but more than that, he was covering her as she fought to conceal the explosions wracking her.

  He was hiding whatever her body might have been doing with his much larger one, so nobody but him would ever know.

  Kathlyn closed her eyes and shook inside. It tore her apart, more intense and somehow wilder because she couldn’t give into it entirely. She had to conceal it, fight it off. Because entirely too many people were watching her.

  But it only seemed to make those explosions last longer inside her.

  Wulf didn’t roar the way the men sometimes did, though she felt him release himself inside of her, scalding her from the inside out. He slammed into her a few final times, then stopped, and she thought it must’ve been obvious to anyone watching that he was breathing heavily. It was strange, maybe, that it made her feel something like powerful, that she could do that to him when she was sure, somehow, that very few things winded this man. And for a moment he stayed where he was, sprawled on top of her, pressing her down against the mattress as if he could feel the way she was still spinning and shuddering inside.

  It occurred to her that he could. Of course he could. And that was very likely why he was still crushing her into the hard mattress.

  “Are you with me?” he asked eventually in that low, low voice that was only for her ears, confirming it.

  Kathlyn nodded, though it felt as if she was operating her own body from afar. She opened her eyes and stared over Wulf’s broad, tattooed shoulder at the faraway ceiling, so many balconies crowded with people above her head. She could feel the aftereffects of what had happened, still shuddering through her. That powerful thing that had wrecked her from the inside out. Was still wrecking her, if she was honest.

  And she wanted to cry. Not because of all the emotion she could feel swirling around inside of her that her mounting ceremony was finally done, or that Wulf had been the one to do it, but because she felt so very grateful—almost pathetically grateful—that both of those things were true.

  “Don’t you dare cry,” Wulf ordered her coolly. “That’s one more thing you don’t hand over to these vultures. None of it is theirs.”

  His command was a gift. It snapped Kathlyn back to herself and reminded her of the larger goals she had tonight. He might have cut through all the fog of her memories, her ghosts, even the nostalgic parts of her that had been so determined that this night be exactly as she’d imagined it in honor of her lost mother, and that was its own gift, but there was still more to do.

  She fought to focus on him. “When you pull out, there should be blood.”

  “I’m sure it’s a fucking abattoir,” he said in the same cool tone. “Congratulations. Except it’s not really blood, is it?”

  She didn’t let herself smile. This was no smiling matter. “It’s close enough.”

  Wulf’s gaze searched hers, icy and incisive, and she had no idea what he saw. She had the sinking feeling it might be everything. Then he moved. He pulled himself out from deep inside of her, shifting his body back on his hands so that he was holding himself at a higher angle over her. As if he was looking down, surveying what he’d just taken, and didn’t much care if their huge audience watched him as he did it.

  She thought it was a nice touch. A good part of his act. But then it occurred to her that he’d never seen a mounting ceremony before, and that he wasn’t acting.

  There was something on his face then, some expression she couldn’t define, that wound around inside of Kathlyn and made her glow. And she knew somehow that it was far more dangerous than anything else that happened between them before. Even here.

  She was afraid to look down at herself. Wulf’s idea of an “abattoir” and hers might not exactly match. So she did what he had told her to do all night. She looked only at him, though she could hear the muttering of the crowd all around them. She ignored them and concentrated on all that blue. His tough, beautiful face, that compelling mouth framed by his blond beard, and the icy blue eyes that saw every last part of her.

  “Tell me it worked.”

  She didn’t know why he smiled then, that little curve in the corner of his mouth that she found she wanted to taste. Mayb
e it was because she’d commanded him this time. As if he was one of her attendants and she was a king.

  “I think you’re good, Your Highness,” he murmured, and the title he used washed over her, endearment and reprimand at once.

  He angled himself back then to kneel between her legs, pulling her dress down as he moved, and Kathlyn kept right on looking at him and only him. It wasn’t a hardship. She took her time letting her eyes follow the sculpted length of his body to those tempting slashes cut on low diagonals into his abdomen, and that was when she saw it. That marvelous thing of his that had performed such wonders inside of her was stained. A dark red he was doing nothing at all to hide from their spectators and that looked a great deal like blood. Indistinguishable, in fact, from the kinds of similar stains she’d seen at the mounting ceremonies of actual virgins so many times in the past

  Her heart leapt inside her chest. And she didn’t realize, until she pushed herself up on her elbows and looked down at herself, how much she’d expected for this not to have worked. Biyu could so easily have lied. That little bundle of herbs and paste she’d claimed would melt down like magic could have failed to do their job.

  But no. It really did look as if she’d bled. It was on Wulf as he rolled to his feet and tucked himself back into his trousers—taking his sweet time, she noticed, as if he wanted the entire kingdom to look at him while he did it. And it was on her, too, she saw as she sat up and pushed her gown down even further, covering as much of her legs as she could. That should mean it stained the sheet beneath her. And that in turn meant that her ruin, accepted so widely over the past week, would now forever have a question mark next to it.

  That was what Kathlyn had wanted. She couldn’t change what had happened. She couldn’t make Lorna take back that scream that had summoned the guards and had brought the whole of the courtyard crowding into that hallway to find her dressed like a courtesan. She couldn’t change her father’s reaction or the vile promises he’d made her. But she could change the conversation about it, and here in the palace where gossip was exchanged and hoarded like currency, that mattered.