I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Everything I had thought to be true surrounding my father’s death was a lie; I had never known of my father’s friendship with Demir’s mother, the enemy. None of this made sense, but the flame remained still under my skin, urging me to believe Demir. How could I trust a story so far-fetched from the mouth of someone I had always assumed was the enemy? Yet here I was, struggling and stunned, believing a man I never thought I would.
‘None of this makes any sense,’ I breathed, not being able to look him in the eyes as my mind tried to process all of this new information. Before he could speak, I asked him something without thinking, my soul yearning for an answer.
‘Did he ever beat you like that?’
His sweet face turned sombre as his eyes glazed over. ‘He did,’ was all he said, not elaborating on anything else.
My heart felt like it physically broke for the man I thought I hated sitting across from me. The silence stretched between us as my breaths turned shallow and my body was overcome with a cold sweat. Demir, not missing a thing, dragged his half-broken body by me and enveloped me in an all-consuming hug. My mind rejected the touch, but my body sank deeper into his arms. He breathed me in, as though he were grounding himself in my scent.
‘I’m sorry for what my father did to yours. I wish could have stopped it, but I couldn’t even protect my own mother from him,’ he said.
He thought these tears were over the loss of my father, but I couldn’t begin to explain that they were for the pain I physically felt at the idea of him hurting. This bond was warping me, but just like at the Academy, my breathing steadied under his muscular touch. I looked up into his piercing honey eyes and his messy brown hair, and my breath began to shallow for an entirely different reason. He stared back down at me, and I saw him for the first time. Truly saw the man that he was. Not the one he let me perceive him as all those years. His mental fortitude and quiet emotional strength. His kindness that left him vulnerable. The arrogance he wore as armour. The alluring strength of his body that right now sent a hitch in my breath with every sweep of his finger on my bare skin.
Slowly, his hand trailed up my arm and over my neck until he cradled my jawline. My tears were now dried, but his thumb stroked over my cheek anyway, as though he were wiping away the images of them that still remained in his mind. Withoutrational thought, I parted my lips and moved them to his thumb. His breathing stopped as he hovered there, too scared to move and break whatever trance we were in. In one agonisingly slow movement, I nipped at his thumb and drew it into my mouth, sucking it as far back as it could go. A guttural moan escaped his body, rumbling through his chest, as his other hand dug tighter into the thigh I had unknowingly wrapped around him. At some point I had straddled him and could now feel the twitch of his cock against me as I sucked deeper once more.
Grinding down, I bit into his thumb hard as he cursed under his breath, but refused to pull back. Slowly, I felt the coppery tang of blood seep into my tongue. A moan that echoed his escaped me as I sucked harder drawing more of the warm liquid in. A bone-deep need overwhelmed me as I bit harder; his eyes blazed as he watched me lose myself to him. My body ground into his long, hard length. There was no anger or shock, just satisfaction. Rational thought faded in this moment.
‘I bet you taste a hell of lot better than I do, Princess. Why don’t you give me a taste?’ he said, smirking down at me as his fingers trailed the thin fabric of the pants I had conjured up when I shifted.
Another moan left me, and as I slid my now slick core down his cock, his eyes closed. A shudder wracked his body as I finally released his thumb and moved my lips to his neck, biting even hard then I had before. His hands instinctively grabbed my hair, pulling me harder against him.
‘Mark me,’ he breathed and I did exactly that as if he had commanded it. My body listened as I drew his flesh into my mouth and sucked until I felt him arch into my touch and lose himself, moaning through the sensation until his body convulsed and his pants seeped with his release. Slowly the fog cleared, and his ragged breath evened out.
Before he could say anything, I stood morphing into a small bird and flew out of the cell. I flew until I found my way out of the castle and into the same courtyard through which I hadentered. I could leave now if I wanted to, but running from him wouldn’t change anything.
My body and this bond wanted him, and if a couple of moments of vulnerability were enough to make me fold… I needed to know everything I could about him to protect myself.
Thirty-Two
Landing on the windowsill of Demir’s bedroom, I sat there fluffing my wings, waiting for any inkling that someone was present, but it was dark, empty and quiet. Almost eerie. This didn’t look like the room of a prince; it looked like that of a servant. Someone despised and hated by his own father and people. He was treated like an outsider in his own home. I couldn’t fathom it. The workers in my walls lived under better conditions.
Shifting into my actual form, I stepped onto the barren stone floor; not even a carpet stood between me and its coldness. The only ostentatious thing in the room was a wardrobe filled with attire befitting a prince likely to uphold appearances. Every drawer and cupboard was empty; not a single personal effect or photograph remained.
I thought back to my time at the Academy and where I had always hidden my private and personal effects—under the mattress. Within two strides, I was by the bed, lifting it, and there sat a thin box. When I opened it, a silver necklace lay there—one I had seen his mother wear at formal occasions over the years. Likely a memento he kept of her to remember her by. A photo of her long brown hair and honey eyes that mimickedhis stared back at me; she had been beautiful. I couldn’t grasp the fact that she was dead; I thought, after all this time, she was simply living a quiet, secluded life behind castle walls. No one had thought to question her disappearance from events over the years. Our shadows and whispers had only ever been able to track rumours of her losing her mind and needing constant care somewhere deep in their lands.
Beside it was a broken hair tie. Was this the one he had kept of mine all those years? My heart clenched. There was a photo next to it of Everett and him as young boys, smiling genuine smiles. It was a look I had never seen on him before. Not one shrouded in arrogance or mock amusement. It was real. He was happy, and at the bottom lay a single note.
My perfect princess,
You will never read this, and if the need ever arose, it wouldn’t matter anymore, but I need the world to know. My father is becoming more erratic by the day and it’s only a matter of time before he turns on me the way he did my mother. I knew it was an obsession when every break from the Academy felt like torture—a brutal agony far greater than any physical wound my father could ever inflict.
After we graduated, it was so much worse because there was no guarantee I would ever lay eyes on you again. Just the thought of it alone sent me into the panic. You were the one thing I always looked forward to, but now, on your 21thbirthday, I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. My only hope is the Alumni Ball. I’ve never believed in the gods, but if you knew the depth of how I pleaded with them to have you there, to see you one more time before it’s too late, you would finally understand.
Every broken bone, every scar slashed into my skin and every moment of isolation—your face, your enraged face—got me through when my only company was the darkness. You were my light through it all. The way you never stopped fighting made me want to do the same, and for so long I tried, but something in me is breaking. There is not a single drop left of the man I once knew in my father and I don’t want to die athis hands; I don’t want to die like my mother did. So I pray to every God in every realm I see you one last time because the moment I see those dark brown eyes filled with so much fire and strength, I will finally be able to take that blade to my throat. I will not be used to hurt you, my Princess. I would rather end it all here than carry out a single act against you, because acting against you would be acting against myself. You have unknowingly embedded yourself in the deepest recesses of who I am.
I don’t know when it came to be, but at some point, I stopped living this life for myself. You were the reason I bothered to wake up every single morning and why I endured the pain. You may be a queen, but I fell for you when you were my princess, my ethereal goddess of death, destruction and unparalleled strength. I watched you for so long at the Academy, the way you would get up every time someone beat you down. The way it sent a thrill through you when you sent fear through the others. The way you looked covered in the blood of your enemies, the delight in your eyes. Your unrelenting power. The way you let everyone underestimate you, only to decimate them in class or on the grounds when they thought they had caught you unaware. You were unlike anyone I had ever seen, and there wasn’t a single person who could break you. They tried to, they chipped away at you but nothing and no one could ever truly shatter you.
As my father worsened, I tried to channel that unbreakable strength of yours, but since graduation, I have felt more and more disconnected from this world and my life, like the distance from you has left some part of me empty. So there is no point in any of this any longer.
I can never be a part of your world, even though you are mine in its entirety, and I’m tired of living through the pain, all of it. So I will do everything I can to see you at the ball one last time, and then, then it will be over for me. I think I love you, Princess, but the word feels too inadequate. I am obsessed with you. I don’t want you, I need you. I live only for you, and the saddest part is I barely know you, and you definitely do not know me.
Consumed by you always and forever,
Your princeling
After droppingthe note into the box, I slammed it shut and shoved it so far back under the mattress that I nearly threw myself out the window in a rush to get some air. I felt the scratch of panic clawing at my skin, but there was no one here to save me from it until something shocked me and stopped it in its tracks, a single thought. He knew how to calm me at the ball because he had been suffering through the same thing because of me. Had the bond truly always been there for him to some degree? I had never known anything about his feelings. How could I have been so blind to it all? He was ready to end it all—what had changed? Was it the bond snapping into place? God, he had been planning to kill himself while I had planned to kill him. What a sick twist of fate that the very thought now sliced through me. Without thinking, I flew back to the cell and shifted midair, slamming into him. Holding him so tightly that I wanted to scream, it felt as though he was smoke and water and would slip through my hands.
‘What’s wrong?’ he whispered, fear and worry coating his voice.
