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“Why did you kill the King?” he finally grated out, his normally smooth rumbled voice scratchy and whiskey soaked.

“I didn’t,” I whispered back.

The tip of the blade dragged across my belly, licking fire and ice in its path toward my bared breasts. My core tightened and wept with need as the blade flat skipped across the meat of my tit and let the edge dance along my sensitive nipple. I tipped my head back, pressing it into it, throwing caution to the wind. My mind was gone, blown away on an angry gust, and I was nothing more than desire-soaked flesh determined to experience what we had been dancing around since our eyes first locked together.

“Why did you poison the King?”

His breath was hot on my nipple, pebbling it as it strained toward his lips. My back bent, arching into the biting edge of the knife.

“I didn’t.”

The blade slid into my flesh. The dichotomy of the unending waves of tightening lust pulsing through me twinned with the searing pain. It exploded into fireworks behind my eyes as he dragged the knife from the middle of the fleshiest part of my breast down over my ribs. It was a sensitive spot, one whose nerves were already at peak attention, with him being so close.

Nerves scattered in chaos as they tried to figure out which sensation they should be feeding my addled brain. Was it agony? Was it pleasure? Was it torture? Was it rapture? My body was too confused at the discordant sensations and stimulation to know which was which, so it chose neither and decided to make one the other and vice versa.

I groaned deep in my throat, a bestial, primal sound that echoed off unseen walls and fed back to the throb between my thighs and in its twin at my side.

“Who poisoned the King?”

His voice was behind me. This time, his thighs found mine, and one knee stroked up and down the back of my leg in a slow, luxurious pattern as if to simulate what it would feel like if he were riding me.

“I don’t know.”

The cuffs bit in, tiny little serrated teeth clamping down on tender skin.

I sensed his head tip up, the brush of his hair that must have come undone grazing my bare shoulder. “Interesting,” he murmured to himself.

“Who poisoned the King?” he asked again, his voice honeyed fire against my ear, dusting over the pointed tip and filling my senses with nothing but him.

“I . . .”

“They will bite again, and so will I. Do not lie, Sóna,” he commanded, his knee inching toward the screaming aching center of me.

“I don’t know who they were. They were in black, head to toe. Thin. Snuck in without a single sound and left without a single sound. They wore a hood. It was all black inside of the hood. I couldn’t see anything,” I grated out, needing him to move just a single inch to the left.

“Good girl,” he purred, dragging the tip of the knife down the river of my spine, turning me to jelly. I sagged against the cuffs, arching like a cat into the scratch of the blade. He returned to my ear, though, his lips burning so close to my flesh without touching me that I wanted to scream out in frustration. “Do you deserve a treat for your obedience?”

“Please . . .”

The whimper sounded so foreign on my tongue. So weak and so supple. It was not my head speaking but rather my throbbing, aching clit that wanted nothing more than for him to plunge himself deep within me and give me some sort of relief.

“That word on your lips is prettier than I could have ever imagined. Say it again.”

His knee moved an inch to the left and wedged itself between my thighs. I could feel his heat through his leather riding pants, pulsing into my body. Leather against my damp pussy felt like heaven, and I wanted to be sung home to the gates of pleasure.

“Please!”

Glossy gloves wrapped around my hips and drew me down onto the firmness of his knee as he ground me into the leather stretched across his circling knee.

I cried out, the thin thread of my control on myself snapping in an instant the moment my flooded pussy pressed into the friction of his leg. I needed this. Oh, gods, I needed this. He barely even needed to guide my hips as I rode his leg for every single snap and pulse of divine pleasure that popped behind my eyes.

Mere seconds, that’s all I was given, only moments of pure bliss at feeling the heat of his body against mine, before he was pulling away again. Whimpering, plaintive sounds fell at my feet as I silently begged him to come back. I didn’t care—he could drag that knife across whatever part of my me he wanted if he gave me some relief, any relief at all. My need for him was a forest fire, struck carelessly, burning within me and singeing away any semblance of sanity. And from the panting half growls behind me, he felt it, too.

“Why did the Fae in black kill the King?”

His question was jagged, broken rocks at the bottom of the cliff of restraint he had flung us off.

“I don’t know.”