The crown tightens.
A thin, metallic hiss cuts the air. Not loud. Loaded. The house answers with a low moan, old wood shifting like it heard a vow it doesn’t like.
Voren slams into me and then grunts, unloading with Dreven following shortly, pumping their cum into me as I tremble in their arms. Dastian takes me from them before I’ve even finished shaking. He slams into me, pressing me against the wall as he drives in deep, harder than I’ve ever felt him, even after unloading only moments ago.
“Yes!” I scream as he makes my toes tingle, and the current runs up my entire body. It snaps me in half, thrusts turning brutal, bright, necessary. I claw at his shoulders, at the peeling wallpaper, at anything, and the crown tightens again like a halo with opinions.
“Dastian—” I beg, and he gives me everything, groaning a filthy oath as he drives deep and spills hot, the aftershock sparking up my spine until I’m wrung dry and shaking.
A hiss breaks through the ragged panting, and Dastian’s eyes narrow as he stares at me.
It was me. I hissed at him.
My hand flies up to the crown, and it’s placid, normal metal, not the snake that it was before I drowned.
“Did you just hiss?” Dreven asks, moving closer.
“Yes,” I murmur, still shaking from my orgasms. “The snake… when I was underwater it… entered me. I forgot until now.”
“Entered you how?” Voren asks.
“It bit me, and then it slid into my body.” I climb off Dastian’s cock and bend to retrieve my clothes. Voren goes still, the kind of still that means his brain has sprinted a mile ahead. “Show me.”
“Can’t,” I snap, yanking my tee over my head and shoving my legs into my leggings. My hands shake. “It bit me at the base of my skull and slid under my skin. It felt like barbed wire and ice.”
Dreven steps in front of me, palms hovering either side of my neck without touching. The air tightens. “It’s not in the flesh. It’s riding the seam between you and… you.”
“Between,” I echo. The word tastes like seawater and stubbornness.
He presses two fingers against my sternum. Cold threads in, fine as spider silk. The light under my skin flares and snaps at him. He doesn’t flinch. “It’s braided through your soul,” he says quietly. “Symbiosis. Not possession.”
“Comforting,” I mutter.
Dreven’s gaze flicks to my mouth, then back up to my eyes, before he slides his gaze over to Voren, whose face has gone deadly still.
Chapter 15
Dreven
Bad doesn’t quite cover this news, and I wish we’d known it before we let Nyssa loose on the innocents of BlackFen Edge.
“What?” she asks, eyes narrowed and definitely pissed off.
“That was meant for me,” I say slowly, gauging her reaction. “The God of Shadows.”
“Meaning?”
“You are now the God of Shadows.”
Her eyebrow goes up, sceptical, of course. “Explain.”
“It braided to you at the seam. Shadow lives in the between. That’s my domain. Your seam is in the in between.”
Nyssa folds her arms. “So the snake crawled into my soul and nicked your job?”
“It isn’t a theft.” I take a step closer, checking the set of her shoulders, the gold burn under her skin that shouldn’t make my teeth ache and yet does. “It’s inheritance. Aethel’s light woke in you when you died. The Crown recognised the gap and filled it. Shadow is the hinge. Radiant and Wraith meet there. You’re holding both ends.”
“Which means what? I still don’t know what any of this means.”
