I stroked the raven’s sleek feathers, drawing comfort from its solid presence. “I need to get out of here,” I told it softly. “Before Gaspard arrives. Before Alain loses what little perspective he has left.”
The raven hopped onto my wrist, its weight surprisingly light for a creature of such presence. Its beak opened, and for a wild moment, I thought it might speak. Instead, it dropped something into my palm—a small, smooth stone that glowed faintly amber in the darkness, the exact shade of my eyes.
I closed my fingers around it, feeling warmth pulse from within. Magic. Raw, untamed magic like what flowed through my veins, what I’d used to heal Thibaut, what connected me to the cursed princes. A key to something I didn’t yet understand, but whose significance I couldn’t deny.
For the first time since Alain had stormed out, a smile tugged at my lips. The raven hadn’t just brought me hope. It had brought me power. And with power came possibility.
Alain might think he could keep me. Gaspard might think he could claim me again even though it would break the curse. The king and Theron might think I was just a pretty, powerless thing to be used and discarded.
They were all wrong. And soon, they would learn just how wrong they were.
I pressed the stone to my heart, feeling its energy merge with my own. “Thank you, friend,” I whispered to the raven.
forty-four
Alain
Her body felt like silk under my fingertips, warmer and fuller than the last time she’d appeared in my dreams. I curled around her from behind, my chest pressed against her back, one arm snaked beneath her to pull her closer.
This wasn’t just another fantasy conjured by a desperate mind. The scent of wild roses filled my lungs, too vivid, too real for mere imagination. Isabeau. Even her name felt like aprayer on my lips as I brushed them against the shell of her ear, feeling her shiver against me.
The borrowed nightdress she wore had ridden up to her waist, exposing the curve of her hip to my exploring hand. I traced the shape of her, savoring how the once-sharp angles had softened with her recovery. She was no longer that half-dead creature I’d pulled from the dungeon floor. Still slender, yes, but with flesh that yielded beneath my touch rather than bones that threatened to slice through skin.
I’d wanted her either way. Even when she was more ghost than woman. What kind of madness was that?
“Alain?” she whispered, and the sound of my name in her voice sent heat spiking through my core.
My palm flattened against her stomach, feeling the rise and fall of her quickened breath. Something dark unfurled within me, a possessiveness I hadn’t allowed myself to acknowledge in waking hours.
She planned to leave me. To return to them. To whatever beasts had marked her flesh with claiming teeth.
The thought made my hand tighten around her hip, fingers digging into soft flesh hard enough to leave impressions. She gasped, the sound halfway between pain and pleasure, and I felt my control slipping.
“You’re mine,” I growled against her neck, the words emerging from some primal place I barely recognized. “I found you. I saved you. I rebuilt you.”
She whimpered as I pushed inside her, her body wet and ready despite—or perhaps because of—the edge in my voice. The feel of her around me, tight and hot and perfect, made my vision blur at the edges. I held her firmly against me, one hand splayed across her stomach while the other gripped her thigh, keeping her open for me.
God, she felt incredible. Fuller, healthier than before, but still undeniably her. Still the woman who had crawled under my skin from the moment I laid eyes on her, heard her in my mind. The woman my brother dared to look at with lust plain in his eyes across the dinner table.
I’d wanted to tear his throat out. Had barely restrained myself from leaping across polished mahogany to drive my fist into his smirking face. Only my father’s presence had stayed my hand. Later, though, when Theron made that crude comment about warming Isabeau’s bed if I couldn’t satisfy her...
My hips snapped forward at the memory, driving deeper, harder. I’d left a bruise on his face for that. Worth every moment of my father’s subsequent rage.
Isabeau’s fingers clutched at the sheets as I took her with increasing force, her breaths coming in hitching sobs that only fueled the fire building inside me. I buried my face against her neck, inhaling the scent that had become as necessary to me as air. Wild roses and female heat and something ancient that whispered of magic I’d been taught to fear but now craved like a drug.
“Please,” she begged, though whether she was asking me to stop or continue, I couldn’t tell, but then she moaned.
I eased my grip slightly, shame cooling my ardor for a moment as I registered the marks my fingers had left on her skin. Something in her voice drifted a note of desperation that matched my own. It snapped the last of my restraint.
I drove into her with abandon, our bodies sliding across silk sheets with the force of my thrusts. Each stroke was punishment and worship combined, my way of telling her without words that she belonged here, with me. That no forest creature could give her what I could.
“Why isn’t my love enough?” I demanded, the words torn from my throat. “Why can’t you stay with me?”
She didn’t answer except to moan, her body tightening around mine as she neared her peak. I felt my own release building, pressure coiling at the base of my spine, threatening to explode at any moment. But I needed to see her face. Needed to watch her come undone beneath me, to know it was my name on her lips when pleasure claimed her.
I gripped her shoulder and rolled her beneath me in one fluid motion, settling between her thighs without breaking our connection. Her amber eyes flew open, wide and startled and swimming with...
Tears.
