“Shit.” His voice is rough and ragged around his gasp, his entire body jolting from the contact.
My legs are trembling, but I manage to turn myself around, until I’m on my knees between his legs, my breasts pressed to his spread thighs.
He tortured me. Now I mean to repay the favor.
All while I hold two magicks in play.
Alexus rises on his elbows, staring at me with a glistening mouth, his expression shadowed with longing. The light in the room shimmers in his eyes as I swirl my tongue around his broad, swollen head, sending the tiniest trickle of his own magick into his flesh, eliciting a groan.
“This.” His deep voice shudders as he slides his hand into my hair. “This is going to fucking break me, isn’t it?”
I smile and nod.
And then I begin.
28
COLDEN
The Eastern Territories
City of Quezira
Min-Thuret Temple
* * *
“Why do I feel like you’re leading me to my death?”
I watch the prince closely as we walk across the wide courtyard beneath a soft, evening rain. The sky is gray, the air cool. Twilight here smells like incense and soggy earth and coal fire and cooking. I’m certain there’s more to take in, but my attention drifts between the prince’s strong yet slender form to the tide of red shadows swirling like a misty ocean in the wake of his feet.
When he turns a sharp glance over his shoulder, his damp hair—fittingly the blue-black of a raven’s wings—falls into his eyes. The style is less severe than usual. It draws my attention to the raindrops clinging to his feathery eyelashes, black as kohl, the water sparkling beneath the brazier lights. I shouldn’t notice. But I do.
“Thresh?” the prince says to his captain who follows behind me. “Did you prepare my whips and chains? The stocks?”
Thresh doesn’t even snicker. “I did, my prince.”
As we turn a corner and slip into the cloisters, I offer the prince a cocky, tilted smirk. “Oh, the things I would do to you if my hands and feet weren’t bound.”
I don’t expect his next words in the least, even though he’s become a little softer toward me these last weeks. It’s usually me with the gibes. But he grabs the long, iron handle of a massive door, opens it, and when I pause before him says, “Don’t tempt me, Moeshka. I might finally hold you to task.”
Thresh punches the hilt of his dagger into my spine, urging me to keep walking. Tearing my eyes from the prince’s gaze, I enter a cavernous space, a gathering hall, one Thresh guides me through until we’re in a long, narrow corridor marked by several doors. Dormitories, I think.
I have to wonder where Rite Hall is. I hate that I missed it. Bron said eastward when she explained its current use, though I also hold knowledge passed down from Alexus. The old ritual room Alexus once frequented with eastern royalty is now where the prince communicates with Thamaos’s spirit, that virulent bastard.
“Stop,” Thresh says in that sonorous voice of his once we reach the end of the hall.
I roll my eyes. “Surely not.”
He opens the door and shoves me inside. I take several steps across the stone floor, until my feet meet woven rugs and rush mats. The chains linking my ankles are just long enough that the effort of walking isn’t miserable, but not so long that I could get away if I decided to try.
It’s an apartment. What appears to be two rooms. Smaller than my chambers at Winterhold, but not cramped, though there are no windows save for one tiny rectangle pane through which I can see raindrops and gray sky.
The main room, with a small wood stove instead of a hearth, holds a sitting area and wine cart, along with a small library, empty writing desk, and copper bathing tub. One glance into the next room reveals a bed. Nothing extravagant, but after so many weeks sleeping on the ground and then a thin cot, I would give my pinky finger for a night’s sleep beneath that canopy.
The door snicks shut, and I turn to find that I’m alone with the prince.
“Well, this is unexpected and awkward,” I say.
