CHAPTER 124: ONE HUNDRED & TWENTY FOUR

He approaches me where I breathe harshly, my spine leaning against the headboard, settling beside me. "I had such great plans for you." He brushes my hair back from my sweaty forehead. "But you wither with each day." His grandmother’s blood is cold against my skin as he caresses my skin. "If I grant you this, you must give something in return."

The rejection sits pretty on my tongue, but he isn’t done.

"You will owe me, Valka. Your every hour, every thought. You will express your gratitude by agreeing to be mine. And you must mean it." His grey eyes are stormy waters of a rising tide, seeking to flow into mine. "Or at the very least, pretend so well, I cannot tell the difference. Starting this moment."

I stare at him. I do not know how many days have passed. I have not seen the sun, or the moon, or Lucien. My body feels like an empty house, all the doors unhinged, all the windows broken. I am fighting to keep something alive inside me, but I am fading too, and I cannot wait anymore for rescue or the right moment. This is the best chance I’ll ever get.

"Yes," I whisper. The word tastes like ash.

His brows rise. "Yes what, Valka?"

"Give me your word that you will my child," I force the tremor from my voice. "and you will no longer need to keep me bound." I force hope into my eyes. I force trust into my words. I let Margot’s teaching--things I’d never thought I would need--settle and take hold.

I know his word means shit. But I must force myself to trust in something. So I trust. In that madness and obsession in his eyes. In that desire banking in his grey depths. In his inhumanity, his cruelty, his need to own me.

His eyes widen, disbelief shinning in them. "Prove it."

I reach for him. My fingers graze his jaw, tracing the cleft on his chin, and then higher, until I cup his cheek. His breaths grow shallow. His lips part. And then, I kiss him.

It is everything he wants, heat, tongue and submission. But for me, it is something else entirely. Each scrape of his tongue against mine, each bruise of teeth, is a vow. Each breath he steals is a promise. I let him take and take and take, until his fingers tighten in my hair and he groans against me like he’s won.

He pulls away from me abruptly, eyes dark with lust, lips bruised. Whatever he searches for, he must find because he orders, "Again."

I press my lips harder to his, not to taste him, but to plant a lie hot upon him, to make him believe his triumph, however short it is. Because there exists as much passion in love and lust, as there does in hatred. For the first time in days, my mind sharpens, my grief brightening into something diamond-bright.

His hands find my waist and dig tightly, a curse parting from him and rumbling between us. I will never forget. I will never forgive. If this is what I must become to slip under the enemy’s skin, then I will embody it and ensure his death is slow and painful.

My fingers drift into his hair, tugging him closer. I imprint the vow onto his mouth and scratch it into his skin with my nails. I will play this vicious game, and I will win it. This war was always mine to conquer, and it begins with this.

A kiss.

**

The next day, I am moved to a different set of quarters, befitting my status as concubine. The chains are taken, but the collar remains.

**

What wakes me is the scent of winter and cologne, and I feel his eyes on me long before I am even fully awake.

I don’t remember falling asleep. I am still in Rafael’s castle. The collar still sits around my neck. My quarters are around me, draped in soft pink and ivory. The dress I’d worn to be shown off to Alphas, Betas, Dukes, Duchesses, whose money fill up the royal coffers hang off the sitter on his left.

It doesn’t feel at all like a dream. I’d been trying since that day to dream walk, to find him, or even conjure up memories of him, but other than my day dreams and seeing his face in everyone else, it’s proven to be near impossible.

Lips run along my jaw in little, precise kisses that make my spine arch and my lashes flutters and my fingers curl around nothing as I bare my neck to him. "Lucien?" I breathe as that familiar weight dips between my legs, his hands pulling reactions I had forgotten all about from my body.

My nipples pebble against the silk, my insides flame with heat.

"How many are there?" my mate asks, his fangs nipping the swell of my breasts teasingly. My insides clench and I reach out to touch him, but phantom hands keep my wrists leashed to the bed on either sides of me.

"How...many... what?"

That hot mouth closes around my nipple through the fabric and my hips buck upwards. "Men, Val. How many are there?"

My brain is filled with wool and his tongue flicks over the aching pebbled bud deliciously, a moan slipping out of me. "Twenty thousand." His warm hands travel up my thighs, taking up my garment and the scent of me wraps around us both. "The half breeds...Oh..." Two fingers run up my slit through my panties and push in an awful, playful manner. "I..." Repeat. "Cannot... think when you are doing that..."

My hip rises off the bed to meet his fingers as he pushes asides my panties. "Try harder," he commands and pushes a long finger inside me. My insides clench around him like a glove and my lips part around a hoarse plea, my thighs spreading wider. "Focus," he says, but insists on fucking me with his fingers, the first pushing into me in a slow glide, before the second joins in.

"I do not know the exact number of them--" Oh gods. The back of my eyes flash white as he curls, forcing the words out of my mind, forcing me to think less. And in that moment, I think of every meeting Rafael had forced me to sit through in the last week as distraction. In the sheer clothes. While the eyes of other men had glowed with hunger and the frustration that they wanted something they could never have. I try remembering the figures Rafael had no problem flaunting around, because he was so sure having that information couldn’t shift the tides of the war anymore.

"Roughly..." I groan. "Ten thousand. Divided through Voss and cutting off the paths around Ebonheart to lay siege." I wish I could say that it left my lips that way, but it is mostly incoherent gibberish.