He could do it, too. He would use his fae magic, he would subjugate her body and force it to remain there, agonizingly teetering on the edge of that chasm, unable to climax, unable to reach the apex he was simultaneously shoving her toward.
He would deny her until she surrendered.
But I don’t – I can’t…. She was delirious. She didn’t know his name was there, right there, on the tip of her tongue. She need only let it in, let it become a part of her. And then speak it.
Yes, you can. Listen to it, Selene Trystaine.
He attacked ruthlessly, sliding his hand between them as he rode her, to part her soft mound of curls with vicious resolve. A soft sob of lust-filled anguish escaped her throat when he found the hood of her clitoris and pressed inward, driving himself further into her at the same time. The sharp sensation stole Selene’s breath, only to release it once more in a frenzied cry.
Avery’s body hummed with power. He held all the cards.
In her desperation, she tried to say his name, something close but not quite, and lost it again when he pressed his fingers downward once more, moving them in a slow circle that hardened her little button to the point that she growled through clenched teeth.
Say it. Say my name, raven one.
And then, because he wasn’t sure how much longer he, himself, would be able to hold out, he added softly, Please.
Oh god! her mind cried. Avery, please!
My real name, Selene! He could feel himself swelling within her, her tightness around him becoming a gluttonous, terrible kind of friction that was sure to drive him permanently mad.
And then Selene froze in his grasp. She drew back – and looked into his eyes. Comprehension dawned in her beautiful, fine features.
Avery’s breath stilled. The fire in the hearth stopped crackling. The castle yawned into silence, as did the entire realm beyond.
And then she spoke it.
Avery’s heart hammered once so hard, it felt like death, and lights exploded behind his eyes. He rose up, threw back his head, and drove into her one final, forceful time. Selene screamed her absolute, final release, and he echoed it with a roar of his own.
Light filled the room, blindingly bright and all encompassing. It filled every corner, destroyed every shadow, forced the entire universe to glow. The light coalesced then, drawing together like a slow moving tornado, before it shot into Selene’s body, entering through her chest, her heart, and then slammed into Avery’s a second later.
The world ruptured, fractioning into a billion pieces.
It stayed that way for a moment. A short forever or two.
And then, very slowly, it pulled its pieces back in to re-build itself in a way that at last made sense.
Finally. And neither Avery nor Selene were alone any longer.
Chapter Twenty
There was a sound like voices, distant and melted, as if spoken under water. But it was unimportant. Nothing was as important as the pain. It was all encompassing, miserable and red. Red and black. That was the color of pain.
Ophelia sobbed as her vampire body attempted to heal these wounds. But re-creating bone was so very painful. It took so very long. Especially without blood to fuel the healing.
And even these thoughts were fragmented, shattered like frozen tears on a cold, hard floor and splintered into incoherence by the agony riding through her. She was a vessel for pain. There was nothing else.
A cry rang itself from her throat and echoed on the walls as something twisted outward from her, growing and terrible. She stumbled, was surprised she’d even been on her feet, and bumped into a wall. Her blood smeared itself on the smooth stones, dripping and thick. She caught her reflection in this shining red.
There, in the globulous mire of red was reflected a body drenched in crimson: a head, two legs – and no arms.
Rafael D’Angelo had ripped them completely off, one at a time. He’d done it to teach her a lesson about meddling in business that was not her own. To teach her that her hands did not belong to her, but to him, and therefore would do only what he wished them to.
Ophelia fell, her feet sliding on something wet. She refused to acknowledge what it was.
There were those voices again, beyond the wall of her closed lids as she shut her eyes tight and gritted her teeth. Her fangs, pronounced and sharp and devilishly hungry, pierced her bottom lips, only adding to her damage.
Something inside her mind swam like sand in a whirlwind. It spun and mixed with other things, forming a cyclone of thoughts and misery and a building darkness like the bottoms of an abyss. She was going to sink into that darkness. It would protect her. It would take her away from her body, out of consciousness, and far from this life and its pain.
That growing, blackened insanity would swallow her if she let it. So she closed her eyes and swam toward it with all she had left.
But there were those damned voices again! Now they were closer than ever, moving in on her blackness and trying to shove it aside. She needed that blackness!
Nooo!!!
“Lady Ophelia.”
Everything stopped.
The red and black were gone. Just… like that.
The pain, the agony, the suffocating blackness, the swim toward blessed insanity – even the blood.
Gone.
There was a stillness now, where the throbbing had been before. There was a wholeness where there’d been loss.
Ophelia opened her eyes. The world around her came at once into focus, and she found herself gazing straight up into a pair of eyes the color of honeyed amber. They glowed, bright and beautiful in a handsome face tanned by the sun but framed by hair the color of night. That handsome face smiled.
She was entranced.
“Feel better?” asked the man in a voice that filled her chest like a breath of fresh air. He rose above her, tall and magnificent, and offered her his hand.
Ophelia’s gaze slid from his eyes like the sun, over his strong chin, across his chest, to his arm and the hand that he held out toward her. She knew who this was. She’d met his brother once – Ramses, also known as Amon Re. She’d met him what felt like eons ago and given him the footage that would help him find the Vampire King and his new queen.
This was Amon’s brother. She was looking at a god.
Ophelia felt different. It wasn’t only that her pain was gone. It was more than that. She peeled her eyes from the god to glance down at herself where she knelt, not on the cold, stone floor, but on a rug, thick and white. She raised her arms, turned her hands over, and moved her fingers. Whole.
But she was whole in a way that went beyond the flesh. As she thought on her experiences with Roman, what had brought her here to this point, there was not the seething, the regret, or the bitterness that normally washed through her.
She felt calm. Pleasantly numb. At peace.
Slowly, Ophelia took Kamon’s hand. His touch was as warm as his eyes, like being kissed by sunshine – something she had not felt without the aid of warlock magic for two hundred years. Somehow, that magic dimmed the warmth. She realized that now.
Kamon helped her to her feet, their movements so fluid, so graceful, she felt almost as though she were one with him.
He smiled and leaned in, his lips beside her ear. “Did you really have two ribs removed just to fit into a dress you thought would attract the attention of a man?” he asked, his voice gentle and incredulous.
Ophelia blinked. Then, quite suddenly, she giggled. Giggled!
She nodded. Yes, she had done such a thing, in fact. Two hundred years ago! He knew this? Of course he did. He was a god! She had been so stupid back then…. But in all fairness, she hadn’t been the only foolish female to destroy her body for fashion. It was to be a folly of the fairer sex for generations to come, and Ophelia didn’t see an end to it any time soon.
But that didn’t matter now. In fact, it felt so very far away, it was laughable. Which is why she’d giggled.
He released her hands and moved ba
ck, and she was afforded a view of the rest of the room. She was no longer in the dungeon Rafael had left her in. This was a suite, the kind of room a president would pay for in a five star hotel. It was fit for a queen.
But it was Kamon, himself, that ruled here and stole Ophelia’s attention with ease. He had the rare, flawless body of a man born very tall but perfectly proportioned, broad on top, narrow at the waist, with a musculature that revealed itself with every graceful move. He wore extremely expensive-looking linen pants and a white button-up shirt of the same material. The sleeves were rolled up on his forearms, revealing more of that perfect, tanned form that would make women’s mouths water. He’d slid his hands into his pockets, the very picture of calm sophistication.
He was amazing.
She’d known that Rafael was working for Kamon Re. But she’d never personally met the god. She wondered why she was doing so now. What had changed?
“Where are we?” she asked.
The room was decorated in gorgeous, expensive, dark woods and leathers, its carpet was the thickest she had ever felt, and one entire wall of the enormous chamber consisted of nothing but floor-to-ceiling windows. It didn’t smell like darkness here, like dank and forgotten-ness or metallic, like blood. Here, it smelled like sunshine on furniture polish and faint air fresheners and hope.
Kamon did not reply, but turned away to move to the windows. He stopped there to gaze out over a city that must have been a hundred floors down, because she couldn’t see it from where she stood.
Ophelia slowly moved up alongside him, feeling light and unnaturally at ease for what she had just gone through, for the atrocity she had just suffered at the hands of her master.
She wasn’t even afraid. And from what she’d heard of Kamon and his power, she knew she should be. She just wasn’t.
“He is not your master any longer,” Kamon said softly. “So you will no longer think of him as such.” Ophelia stopped at his side and peered down. A city shimmered far below.
Far, far below.
At once, she knew where they were. This was the top level of the Burj Khalifa, a famous 163 story building, and the tallest building in the world. She’d read about it, and seen pictures – and that down below, was Dubai.
And there she was.
“Am I dead?” she suddenly asked, as she realized that it would explain everything.
Kamon glanced at her over his broad shoulder, smiled broadly, and Ophelia felt new, wonderful emotions flutter to life inside her. “To Rafael D’Angelo, yes,” he replied calmly. He turned toward her away from the windows. “And to his brother as well.” His expression grew more serious as those eyes peered through to her soul. “You have suffered greatly.”
He said this with a softness that confused Ophelia, but that put her at ease as well. It was… liberating and validating for her just to have someone know what she had gone through.
“I’m truly sorry for their treatment of you. This violence is not how a real man treats a woman, Lady Ophelia. No woman. But especially not a woman of royal blood.”
Ophelia the human would have blushed under such a compliment. But there was no guile in Kamon’s flattery. In fact, it wasn’t flattery. It was not meant to get her into bed, it was not meant to disarm her. For once in her life, Ophelia faced a man and knew that the words he spoke were simply and absolutely true.
“Neither can see the potential in you that I know is here,” he continued. He raised his fingers and gently touched her chest, and she could swear she felt him actually touching her heart.
“But that will change,” he said. Then he looked back out over the sunbaked city beyond. “You have a new master now, Ophelia. A change of residence is only appropriate.”
Again he faced her, and again he smiled, putting her completely at ease. “Make yourself comfortable. He gestured to the enormous room and its hallways and attached rooms beyond, “for this is your new home.”
He moved away from the windows to the door across the room. She watched him go and knew with absolute certainty that no matter what he asked her to do, she would do willingly. And with a happiness she had never before known.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Her father was a man I met at the library in London,” she told him. “He was sweet and smart, and I was lonely. And not getting any younger.” She laughed, but it was clearly an empty sound. “It was so very much like that song by Heart. Know the one?”
Avery nodded. But his vividly colored eyes, where they held her in such keen regard, contained wells of untold emotion.
“Anyway, I never saw him again. And a few months later….” Her voice trailed off. She had never said the words aloud to anyone before. “A few months later, I miscarried our child.”
Avery was silent for a long time. When he finally did speak, he took a deep breath first, and shifted in his chair. “If you want, I can tell you why it happened.” He spoke delicately, clearly knowing the subject was painful for her. She appreciated the kid gloves, but in truth, she was feeling able to talk about it more than she had since it had happened. His nearness was putting her at ease in a way nothing else had ever been able to.
She nodded, giving him permission.
“I’m afraid you are not meant to carry the child of anyone but a fae,” he told her. “And not just any fae, but your soul mate.”
Selene found herself growing warm at his words.
“It’s encoded into your body, as it is in your soul,” he continued softly. “Any other attempt at a union will ultimately fail. For years, my brother and I did our best to put an end to the act of creating Changelings, for many reasons. This was one of them. As Changelings, our own people would ultimately grow up thinking they were mortal and attempt to raise families. Their attempts have always been doomed. We wouldn’t wish this pain on anyone, but especially our own.”
The pain of the loss of her child had been so thoroughly, deeply horrid, Selene would not have wished it on anyone either. And yet here, now, the truth of why it had happened was like a salve on her spirit. It was helping to heal her wounds. Especially since she knew, once and for all, who that soul mate was.
“It was decorated in purple and orange,” she said after a long, contemplative while. She took a sip of the hot cocoa Avery had ordered for her. It tasted like heaven. “Her nursery, I mean. We decorated it in lilacs and lavenders and all modes of orange in honor of Figment, from the Epcot Center ride in Disney World.”
Avery smiled. “I know the ride well. It’s one of my favorites.” He sat back and his smile turned wayward. “It’s one of Cal’s too, though he would never admit it. And he liked it better when it had the Dreamfinder.”
Selene nodded, smiling. “So did I.”
They had been talking for hours. Avery did his best to fill her in on the pieces of fae history and the different realms that her genetics did not automatically remember for her – and Selene told him about her. About her life, about her dreams. About her hopes. And her losses.
She had somehow found herself comfortable enough with him to tell him about Moon. Selene and Minerva had decorated the nursery together for the unborn daughter she would never have…. She hadn’t thought about that in a very long time. And now, for some reason, it didn’t seem so very painful.
They were seated across from each other at a small round table by the windows of a café inside a rainbow. An actual rainbow.
All around them, white marble floors stretched, dotted with round tables and chairs. Above, chandeliers of prism crystal hung elegantly from an equally white ceiling, catching the light and reflecting it all around them in a colorful, mesmerizing display. The walls of the café were constructed of sheer, clear glass. Beyond the glass were the changing, swirling, magnificent spectrum colors of a real, live rainbow. The small, wondrous restaurant floated above it and within it, and if you looked closely enough, you could see the mortal world move and spin and slowly change far, far below as the rainbow made its journey from one land to another.
It was supposedly the most exclusive café in the fae kingdoms – at least on the Seelie side. At the moment, in fact, it was reserved for the king and his court.
Avery and his new queen were given the best table in the house, of course. Here, Selene was able to sit back in her extremely, unnaturally comfortable chair, sip at the most magnificent cocoa she had ever had, and gaze at the fae inhabitants around her with a surreptitious eye over the lip of her steaming mug.
Selene was an imaginative painter. Her canvases were always thick with color that took forever to dry. But never in her wildest dreams had she pictured the beings she saw around her now.
At a table not too far away sat a gentleman in a business suit. That was the impression Selene had of him – a gentleman. But there was no part of him that resembled a human male. His snout and eyes were that of something akin to a bull mastiff, his ears drooped soft and long like the cabbit’s had, and every inch of his body was covered in fine, soft-looking fur. Perched delicately atop his nose were a pair of spectacles. He was reading what looked to be a paper.
Beyond the gentleman was a table around which sat a group of five very small men in red caps. Their features were exaggerated, their boots appeared to be no more than stiff socks, and their expressions were stern. They were playing some type of game that consisted of dice constructed from gemstones, and cards that looked like they were gilded in gold. Their table had been lowered to accommodate their tremendous lack of height, and they played their game without speaking a single word.
To the left of them, at another table directly beside the windows on the other side of the café sat three beautiful women.
To say they were beautiful was rather a gross understatement. They had the finest features Selene had ever seen, their skin was completely pore-less, their bodies were so long and lithe, they resembled the people from James Cameron’s Avatar. Long, pointed ears rose in classic elven style, and two of the women had decorated theirs with a series of sparkling earrings, some looped by chains, others studs of delicate shimmer. Cascades of braided and curled hair, thick and luxurious fell over shoulders and down their backs.