The fingers withdrew, leaving me empty for just a moment before I felt something larger, hotter pressing against my entrance. He held my hip with one hand as he pushed forward, entering me with a slow, inexorable pressure that had me gasping for breath. The stretch was delicious agony after so long without this connection.
This is what I’d missed most in my cold cell. Not just the physical pleasure, though God knows I’d ached for it, but this sense of completeness, of being joined to someone who saw beyond my pretty face to the woman beneath. My beasts, my princes, my salvation.
He began to move, slow at first, each thrust careful as if afraid I might shatter. But I wasn’t fragile, not in this. I pressed back against him, demanding more, and he obliged, his pace increasing as his control frayed. His hand snaked around to where we were joined, fingers finding that sensitive bundle again, working it in time with his thrusts until I was trembling, suspended at the edge of something monumental.
“Let go,” he whispered against my ear, his voice deeper than I remembered, smoother somehow. “Let go for me.”
The command broke whatever restraint I’d been clinging to. Pleasure crashed over me in waves, each more intense than the last, my body convulsing around him as I cried out. Though which prince, I wasn’t sure. My mind had gone blank, reduced to nothing but sensation and relief and gratitude that somehow, across whatever hell separated us, he had found me.
As I floated in the aftermath, he groaned, his rhythm faltering. Strong arms wrapped around me, rolling me onto my back as he positioned himself above me to finish too. I opened my eyes at last, eager to see which of my loves had come to me.
And found myself staring into eyes blue as winter sky, not amber like forest honey.
Prince Alain gazed down at me, his handsome face taut with pleasure, black hair falling across his forehead in damp waves. Not a beast. Not a prince of a cursed realm. The second son of Durand, my captor, my would-be savior.
I woke with a strangled gasp, my body still pulsing with the aftershocks of a very real climax. My thighs were slick, my nightdress clinging to sweat-dampened skin. Alone. I was alone in the white room, moonlight streaming through curtains I hadn’t closed before falling into exhausted sleep.
My hand flew to the claiming mark on my shoulder, touching it as if to reassure myself that the bond remained. It did. I could feel them, distant but present, three faint pulses of connection across the veil between worlds. My beasts. My true loves.
But my body still thrummed with the phantom pleasure given by a different man entirely thanks to my muddled thoughts.
Kisses instead of licks.
Flesh instead of fur.
Hands instead of claws.
Prince Alain… with his suspicious blue eyes and gentle hands. With his misguided determination to save me from what he couldn’t understand.
Shame burned through me, hot and sickening. How could my subconscious betray me like this? How could my body respond so readily to the image of a man who kept me prisoner, who stood against everything the princes represented?
I curled onto my side, pulling my knees to my chest as if I could physically contain the confusion threatening to overwhelm me. This didn’t change anything. Couldn’t change anything. My loyalty belonged to the beasts who had saved me, who suffered in hell while I lay on silk sheets dreaming of another man.
Tonight, in the quiet darkness of my gilded cage, I couldn’t deny the truth my body had already recognized. Something in me was drawn to Prince Alain Legrand, whether I wanted it to be or not.
And that terrified me far more than any corrupted beast lurking in the Forbidden Forest.
thirty-eight
Laurent
The obsidian beneath my paws sliced deeper with each step, black glass that hungered for blood as much as the creatures that stalked this realm. I’d grown used to pain in this place. We all had, but Bastien’s labored breathing behind me scraped my nerves raw in ways the mountain never could.
Marcel caught my eye, the silent communication we’d perfected over years of brotherhood speaking volumes. Our younger brother was fading. The poison that had seeped intohis wound days ago now pulsed through his veins, turning his normally vibrant energy into something dim and stuttering. We needed to rest, but in Hell, stillness was just another invitation to die.
“There,” I projected through our bond, nodding toward a slight depression in the mountainside ahead. It wasn’t much. Just enough space for the three of us to huddle together, protected on two sides by jutting rock. But it would have to do. Bastien couldn’t continue like this.
Marcel nodded, his massive form moving ahead to secure the area. Even in this half-transformed state, walking on two legs instead of four, my oldest brother maintained the regal bearing that had made him king in our former life. He’d lost none of his authority, none of his strength. But I could see the fear he tried to hide, the way his gaze kept darting back to Bastien.
I fell back, positioning myself beside our youngest brother. “Just a little farther,” I encouraged in my almost human voice, letting my shoulder bear some of his weight. “We’ll rest soon.”
Bastien’s drowsy gaze flickered toward me, fever-bright and unfocused. “I’m fine,” he growled, the words slurring slightly. “Stop coddling me.”
Stubborn as always. Even with poison eating through his system, he refused to acknowledge weakness. In our previous life, I’d found this trait exasperating. Here, it might be the only thing keeping him alive.
We reached the ledge just as Bastien’s legs finally gave out. Marcel caught him before he could fall, lowering him gently to the smoother section of obsidian. Our younger brother’s fur was matted with sweat, his breath coming in shallow pants that made my own chest ache in sympathy.
“The wound’s worse,” Marcel observed, carefully examining the gash on Bastien’s thigh where a demon’s barbed tail had caught him during our last skirmish. The flesh around ithad turned an ugly, mottled black, veins of poison spreading outward like cracks in glass. “The darkness is spreading.”
