He was beautiful in his horror.
He settled his large body between my legs, and the feel of his hardness against my thigh was solid and overwhelming. His fingers worked at laces I hadn't known were there, fabric falling away until nothing separated us but heat and hunger.
I could feel the large head of him pressed against my opening, and a wave of fear overcame me, forcing me to close my eyes.
"Look at me."
When he entered me, I gasped—the stretch and fullness tearing a sound from my throat I'd never made before. As I watched him thrust himself within me, his gaze never slipped from mine.
"I own you."
I swallowed hard against the words that echoed through my mind, knowing with every fiber of my being that I should despise and reject them outright. They were the words of conquest, of ownership, of a possessiveness that went against everything I valued. I should have been revolted by the notion that I could belong to anyone, let alone this man whose kingdom I'd been sent to infiltrate and destroy.
And yet, despite all logic, there was some treacherous part of me—in some deep corner of my soul—that thrilled at the words. That responded to the raw claim in Arthur's voice with a heat that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the most basic, fundamental desires I'd tried so hard to suppress.
The realization terrified me.
As he moved inside me, the dragon also moved. Scales rippled with each thrust. Wings flexed. The serpentine neck curved, and those painted eyes opened—ancient amber fixing on me with recognition.
You are ours,a voice sounded in my mind, layered with echoes of something vast and hungry.You belong to us.
Not Arthur's voice. Something older, darker, speaking from beneath his skin. The dragon.
You can never leave us.
Arthur's rhythm intensified, driving deeper, and the dragon writhed in response—no longer a tattoo but something alive beneath his flesh, pushing against the prison of his body.
You are our treasure.
His hand fisted in my hair, yanking my head back to expose my throat. Instantly, his mouth found the vulnerable column of my neck, teeth scraping against my flesh, and I shattered around him—pleasure so sharp it bordered on pain, my water magic flaring wild and uncontrolled, causing snowflakes to suddenly dance in the air above me.
Arthur's eyes blazed gold as I erupted with pleasure around his cock, which was still buried deep within me. Then he stilled and pulled up from me, his attention captured by the chamber surrounding us.
"Brothers. Kings of old. Come and feast."
Arthur's voice rolled through the hall, resonant with command that raised the hair on my arms.
I then caught the sound of the lids of the crypts beginning to groan—massive stone slabs grinding against their marble bases in a symphony of protest that echoed through the vast burial chamber. The sound reverberated, a deep, guttural scraping that seemed to come from the bones of the earth itself. Then came the rattling—a percussion of bone—of skeletal fingers drumming an impatient rhythm on tomb edges.
Burial shrouds whispered against marble as bodies that should have remained at rest began their grotesque resurrection. I could hear the squelch of decomposing tissue separating from bone, the drip of grave moisture hitting the floor in steady, horrible drops.
I refused to turn around and allow my eyes to affirm what my ears were reporting. Meanwhile, each sound built on the last until the entire hall filled with a cacophony of the dead stirring to wakefulness—responding to their king's call like hounds summoned to hunt.
"Enjoy her flesh," Arthur called to the dead as he pulled out of me, and the realization of what he intended hit me like a lightning bolt.
"No." The word stuck in my throat, barely a whisper.
He stepped back, that golden light still burning in his eyes, his expression serene. Satisfied.
The first king—little more than a skeleton wrapped in tattered burial shrouds—wobbled up to me. Empty sockets fixed on me as bony fingers scrabbled at the tomb's edge. Behind him, another rose, flesh hanging from his jaw in gray strips. Then another. And another still. A procession of the dead, shambling toward me with terrible purpose.
I looked at Arthur, my mouth hanging open in shock and revulsion. "Please—"
"—you owe a tithe." His voice remained unconcerned, conversational. Bored even. "The kingdom demands payment."
Skeletal hands closed on my ankles. I tried to pull away but couldn't move, paralyzed as the first skeletal king positioned himself between my thighs. When he entered me, I clenched my eyes shut but couldn't ward away the sound of bone scraping flesh as the corpse thrust into me with determination. No warmth. No life. Just the rhythmic grind of death taking what it wanted.
Behind him, the others waited.
