He was back at my side. “Why?”
I did not dare press my eyes closed, not even with the succubus behind thick metal bars. I’d known this moment would come. Arran was much too smart not to work it out. But I hadn’t expected it here, now, when I my pussy still ached from the feeling of his cock inside of me and with my words of love hanging heavy in the air around us.
“I am the reason they came to Annwyn again, after all these millennia. My void power opened the pathways that had been closed.”
Silence.
The horrible, unearthly sounds of the succubus continued. The gurgling of black bile, the scraping of bones and hiss of death. But I did not hear any of it—not even the pounding of my own heart in my chest. I waited for Arran to speak.
Instead, he took my hand.
I heard my heart now. It was about to explode.
“Wouldn’t killing you close those rifts?” he said quietly.
“Or keep them open forever,” I whispered.
Arran’s hand tightened. “They cannot have you.”You are mine.
Fae or beast, male or mate, Ifeltthose words.
I inhaled sharply, regretted it instantly, and was pulled back to the cruel reality around us. “If they are human, he must have brought them here through a rift. There are the official ones, but we discovered months ago that there are others, secret or forgotten. There must be one nearby. Human minds are easier for the succubus to overtake. He may very well have brought them here as human men, and then bided his time. Eventually, without any amorite, the succubus invaded their bodies and turned them into this.” I shook my head at all that implied. “Palomides knows what is at stake, and yet still he plays games.”
Arran held my gaze for several more seconds. His eyes blazed with black fire that I would gladly have let burn me to nothing.
Then his jaw ticked, his dark brows drew together, and he forced his eyes back to the cells.
“Yes. But to a purpose. He is keeping them here…” Arran paused as if weighing his words. “He knows the amorite protects him and his guards. He is building his own army.”
I shivered, unable to repress the chill that slithered down my spine. The betrayals would never cease. First Gawayn, who believed he knew what was best for Annwyn. Roksana, thinking I would be the easier Pendragon sibling to control. My mother and Gorlois, whose plot had been decades in the making so that they might command the kingdom of Annwyn for themselves. And now, another ambitious lord who sought to overthrow my throne.
It should not have been possible.
“How do you know?” I hated how melancholy my voice sounded in that dungeon of death, where strength was required above all else.
“Because it is what I would do, if I wanted what he wants.” Arran dragged a hand up through his hair. “Power.”
Arran had never wanted power. It had been seeded in him from birth. Thrust upon him by Arthur’s death.
I had longed for it. The power to defend myself. To free myself. I claimed those things eventually, and they had nothing to do with magic. The power that flowed through my veins now, ignited by the male at my side, was nothing without the ability to claim it. To master it.
Arran had taught me that.
In the time we’d been apart, when I’d been forced to stand on my own, I had started to learn what that power could truly do.
Before I had been terrified of my power.
But now I had bigger things to fear. And the power to protect those I loved.
Arran was not holding my hand any longer. His fingers stroked over the head of his battle axe, tucked back into his belt. “War is coming.”
“I will not let it get to that,” I said fiercely.
My fault.
I was the reason the succubus had returned to Annwyn. I had to find a way to defeat them, to push them back before their death and darkness spilled over from the human realm. I would not let it come to all-out war. I couldn’t.
I could not send my subjects to die knowing that it was my fault.
