Page 74 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

This is a liturgy. A holy communion.

We worship our queen the way drowning men worship air. His mouth at her shoulder from behindher, and mine at her throat before her. Her fingers wound in his hair and her nails scored down my spine, and the moon pours itself over us, the only witness.

Sera gasps against my jaw. Arches back against his chest. Says both our names in one breath, tangled, as if they’ve grown from the same dark stem.

And they have. That’s the horror and the mercy of it.

I hold her, and through her skin I can feel his heartbeat—strong, so strong, robust with everything it’s siphoning out of mine—and I press my cold lips to her wet shoulder and, as he tugs up her silk nightdress, and she wraps her thighs around my waist, I thrust inside my poison princess.

And gods, fuck, it’s some sort of dark magick in itself. The water slowing our rhythm to a torturous grind, fusing us impossibly closer, the throaty sounds spilling from her soft lips. I take her mouth, licking into it, my tongue tangling with hers, tasting her, devouring her.

Aldric rocks her body from behind, whispering encouragements, praises, heightening the stimulation. His hands wander over her beautiful breasts, teasing her nipples, making her clench around my cock until I’m swearing oaths into the kiss.

With one last sensual roll of her hips, I bury myself inside her deep, the pleasure torn from me on a shuddering avowal, groaning against her neck. Her heat wrapped around me, my body trembles and jerks with the release, pumping once more to let her have all of me.

I kiss her, slowly disentangling myself, allowing Aldricto come up beside me, where I break away and move into position behind Sera. I hold Aldric’s eyes, already growing hard again as his mouth goes slack at the feel of plunging inside our girl.

“Gods-damn, love, you kill me in the best way,” he mutters, his muscles flexing against the rippling water. His motions are faster than mine, hungrier. His jaw clenched against his need, he fucks into her with vigor, commanding me to angle her hips higher, touch her—her breasts, her clit.

Her ass rubs against my hard cock, and I swear to whatever goddesses she prays to, I’m about to come against her backside at the filthy, slick feel of her soft skin. Maybe Aldric already came once, right here, and the dirty thought catches me off guard, and I spill right against her.

His wicked smile finds me over her shoulder, and he thrusts into her, hard, demanding, chasing his pleasure and hers, sending a ruinous thrill through my overheated veins.

“Pinch her clit,” he commands me. And I do—I slip my hand between their grinding bodies, already becoming aroused again at the feel of his pelvis flexing with each desperate thrust into her.

My chest heaves as I work her until she’s crying out, pleading for more, her body cresting too high with pleasure. Her body undulates against us both, as I tighten my circles around her clit, and Aldric fucks into her, the water breaking over all three of us as Sera shatters in our arms.

Aldric, drunk on her release, takes his pleasure, plunging into her with fierce rolls of hiships until he growls, his jaw clenched. He doesn’t stop until she’s shaking and he’s spent, breaths heavy and fogging the cool night air.

Sera kisses him slowly, tenderly, giving herself in equal measures as her hand clings to mine in the water. Aldric grasps the back of my neck, his ringed fingers drawing me closer, sealing us together in the moment.

After, Sera floats between us in the shallows, her hair fanned dark on the silver water. Aldric strokes it back from her brow with a tenderness I’d have sworn was bred out of him. And she lets him. She turns her face into his palm.

She kisses him.

Unhurried. Unforced. Her hand still holding mine under the water, her mouth on his, and I watch it happen and wait for the jealousy to come and gut me.

It never does.

Because this is so much more than mercy. It’s the proof of the same dark seed brewing in her that I feel splitting open in my own chest—cast there by her own curse, her own hands, her own will.

She fused our fates in wolfsbane and hatred and love, and magick reads the truth of us. Maybe it read a truth none of us had the courage to speak, and has simply been growing it in the dark ever since.

Maybe we’re all cursed now. Damned, the three of us, root and stem. And this dark desire is the reckoning—not the punishment that comes after the sin, but the sin and the punishment sharing one skin, indistinguishable, the way we’re all are indistinguishable in this water.

Because even as I know I’m dying—right alongside this cruel king, drop by patient drop—I also yearn for this. To watch him worship her. To tangle the three of us so tightly in this web of want that the outside world can’t find a thread to pull.

And maybe this is the price Sera said there’d be to pay. Not with our lives.

But a slow, decayed withering of our very souls.

Because I hold her in the water, and he holds her, and she holds us both, and I ask the moon the question I couldn’t fit into my heathen’s prayer… What kind of love could we ever find in this realm?

The moon says nothing back.

Fuck, moons never do.

But Sera’s heart beats against my ribs, and the king’s beats through her skin into mine, and my own stumbles along between them, clinging to what time it has left.