He doesn’t make a fucking sound.
While Aries’s lips part with a gasping pain that I’ve never heard her make before. She breathes through it in cutting breaths. Her lashes flutter over and over again, and still that fucking cock nugget, Cardence, just keeps the pin in place, lodged in their fucking flesh.
“Just a bit longer, Princess. Gotta let the blood intertwine,” he mumbles.
Her lip trembles, and that’s my undoing.
I’m behind her in an instant. My hands clasp over her hips, and she sags into me when my chest barely brushes her back. Long silver hair teases my lips. Smooth, perfect skin is beneath my palms. And then her free hand is over mine. It’s a vice grip capable of crumbling every bone in my fingers.
And I let her.
“You’re okay, Crow.” I breathe the words without sound. I have no voice. But she understands.
She nods to me.
I hold her tighter.
She clings to my hand like she’ll never let me go.
Why the fuck do I like it?
“And done,” Fae Fuck Cardence says with an elaborate pull of his sharp pin. He slides it from their hands, and the very second she’s free, she turns to me and wraps her lithe body all against mine.
My heart drops like a stone into a boiling deadly cauldron.
Then my palms push down her back, and I feel every heartbeat in her chest. I hear every cutting breath in her lungs. I... I have all of her vulnerabilities in the palms of my hands.
I’ve never felt her like this before.
She’s never let me.
“Uh... alright. One more, correct?” Cardence interrupts, his sweaty fat head turning from her to me, and then back again.
Aries nods, her silver hair jarring against her small frame as she steps back from me. She releases me until only my hand is held in hers. Deep red blood slides over her knuckles and against my palm, but I never look away from her damp eyes.
She has to do it again.
Because of me.
I’m not even a demon. Some pretty little fae magic is really supposed to bind a seraph to a fae?
Doubtful.
We’re just putting her through more pain for no reason. But she won’t tell them my secret. And I have to keep that secret until my brother’s future is figured out.
Whenever the fuck that might be.
“I bind thee in magic. I bind thee blood. I bind your mind, your body, and your soul. Until death do thee part,” Cardence says on a bored, tired tone.
The threads I feel connecting me to the king fray. I feel them slip away like bindings that allow me my own voice once more. The pin slices through my skin like a blade blessed by the gods, and when it settles fully in, an unimaginable pain cuts through my heart.
“Fuck!” Deeper the agony pierces my soul, and in a matter of a single heartbeat, I realize this is much more than just physical pain that Aries and Damien were experiencing.
And they handled it a bit better than I am.
“Son of a cock fucker!” I growl out before grinding my teeth together so hard I taste enamel.
A shaking laugh slips from Aries’s lips as tears stream down her smiling face.
