I kick, fingers scraping the strong band around my waist.
“Faerie cunt,” Maxian seethes.
“No!”
I twist as another forearm brackets my neck. In that moment, I feel my nakedness, and how I am dizzy and reeling and bleeding. I scratch harder, the king slamming my spine against his torso. My breath stops as I feel it against my lower back.
He is hard.
My body goes slack in shock. My hands drop away, the fight paralyzing in me. It’s over—it’s all over, and all I can do is stare atmy frozen friend, slumped in the chair by the king’s fire, struggling to breathe, as he presses himself against me. As he pants, unmoving, we both understand his arousal. He is disgusted and excited by me.
The king lowers to his knee, shifting to hold me to his chest like a bride. My body heaves, my eyes trained on my friend, until I feel a soft caress on my jaw. He turns my face up to him, hand coming away wet with tears and blood.
“Avery,” he breathes. His eyes dip to my exposed body, upturned to him, pulsing with pain, falling into the shadow of the Mountain. Heat rolls off his golden skin as he takes in my body, a sight he requested in his bedroom, then was denied.
“Yes?” I manage.
And here we are, streaked in each other’s sobs and sweat and blood. As he clutches me like I am life, I feel my own self slip away: a knowing. When he takes me, it will hurt. When he takes, I must give and give some more because maybe it will satisfy him, just for a moment, maybe it’ll be enough to return him to the caring façade he sees as himself. Maybe Maxian the Magnificent will not allow his favorite faerie to freeze to death. He wouldn’t because he is not his father and I will not fight him because I am no longer mine.
“Avery,” he croaks.
I close my eyes, let the tears fall, will my face into placid femininity. I am not Avery and this is not the king. This is a stranger in a tavern who stands in front of the door. Whose approval I must receive so that I can cross the threshold.
I become female; I become nothing.
An empty parchment pressed of dead matter, waiting for the ink to spill.
“I thought you were different from the rest,” he breathes. “I need you to be different. I need…something from you.”
To reach that door, to be able to carry my friend through it, I betray my own kind, faeries, females, servants—we are all the same. I open my eyes, blink up at his beautiful, garish face.
“I am different,” I say.
He shakes his head. “You have to know. You have to understand my mother and father because I need you to do something for me. Please, you must do this, and never tell a soul.”
“What is it?” I whisper.
He shakes his head, clutching me tighter to his chest, squeezing his eyes shut. For a flicker of a moment, I hear the screaming again. That awful, animalistic wail inside his head. My fingers reach up, stroke his cheek. He leans into the touch like a starved predator. He kisses my fingertips, his lips soft, and I brace myself for the violence of the act that will seem gentle to him. Maxian the Mountain, son of the Sun King, our first kissing king, the kindest lover in the land.
“Forgive me,” I breathe.
“How can I?”
“Then punish me.”
I beg you, punish me instead,Jeremee cried on coronation day.
Hurt me,I think, just as Benji wished. Enough hurt and maybe it’ll balance the scales, maybe I will have paid enough, maybe it will set things right.
Another voice, not unlike my own.Please. Please, don’t do this.
An iron grip, a large hand wrapped around my entire arm. I am screaming as a child, struggling against the fighter who lost a match and came home determined to win another. My mother pleaded, throwing herself at his feet like an offering, a concession. As if the only option when living with an angry male is to redirect him. As Briar learned and so did my mother and grandmother and now, me.
I am an adolescent, screaming that I will never be weak like her.
I bent to avoid breaking,my mother told me once.It was all I could think to do.
“Please hurt me instead,” I cry now, sobbing in the king’s arms as he cradles me, as my friend lies dying, as he knows the location of the boy I’d do anything to protect. “Please, I beg you.”
