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He draws back, his eyes flashing with anguish, and his length still buried inside me swells. The hands at my waist squeeze, and I wonder if he’ll keep me trapped, take me again just for asking.
But instead of fucking me against the wall again, he pulls me off his length and sets me down beside the sex puddle.
“If you leave me, you will never be allowed to return to our realm, only pass through it on your way to the Higher Realm,” he answers quietly.
He bends down to pick up the fur he tossed aside. “The Star Thrall mark will immediately stop growing, and my thrall will cease, but the mark will forever remain. I have not known desire before you, and I will never know it again after. Your leaving will cure me of this madness. However, Adora…”
He wraps the fur throw around my shoulders. “I do not wish to be cured of this madness. I welcome it. I love you, even if it is difficult for you to comprehend this.”
I’m not much of a crier. The Army broke me of that. Yet tears pool in my eyes at his words.
He steps back from me, rising to his full height. “As you said, you were brought here against your will. If you do not wish to stay with Ivar…”
He chokes and falls back into Orcish. “Ivar will understand. Ivar will be sad and will never recover from loss of Little Bride. But Ivar will deny Little Bride nothing.”
Visibly swallowing, he extends a hand toward the glowing portal and returns to the Common Tongue for his last declaration. “If you truly wish to return to your world, I will not stop you. But I can only ever give you this one chance to leave me. You must decide now, Adora. Will you stay with me in my world? Or return to the Lower Realm?”
My chest constricts. Of all the ways I expected this confrontation to end, it wasn’t with a choice.
To go home to the life I knew.
Or stay here with the unhinged Orc Emperor who’s imprinted on me.
Heart pounding in my ears, I open my mouth to give him my answer.
Adora, Aimee, & Adelaide
“And what did you say, Grandma? What did you say?”
My granddaughter Adora stares up at me with big, wide eyes, along with her fraternal triplet sisters, Aimee and Adelaide, their pointed ears quivering in breathless anticipation.…
It’s been a while since I hosted one of my infamous Story Time Sleepovers in the country cottage their grandfather and I downsized to after he retired, and it’s Halloween night in the Lower Realm.
But unfortunately, my no-fun thirteenth daughter threatened to never let her triplets spend the night again if I riled them up with my usual ghost stories—which were basically summaries of random horror movies I remembered seeing when I still had access to films.
So I decided to treat them to the story of Grandma’s Unexpected Trip to the Middle Realm—sanitized, of course. Which means it only took ten minutes to tell them about how, in less than twenty-four hours, Grandma got:
—Pulled out of her bath
—Chosen by the Orc Emperor, Ivar the Terrible, to be his forever bride
—Married in front of his subjects (with no ceremonial details provided to them whatsoever)
—Then, due to a huge misunderstanding, tried to flee back to the Lower Realm the very next morning
—Only to be caught by her new husband, confessed to, then given a choice by the as-it-turned-out Not-so-Terrible, in-fact-quite-reasonable Orc Emperor.
“Well, the thing is…” I pick at the hem of my bestselling Quinnverse is My Whole Universe T-shirt. “I quite liked things like indoor plumbing, indoor baths, and microwave meals that don’t require an open fire pit, so I had to tell him, ‘No, thanks, Emp. I choose the portal.’”
All three of the triplets’ faces drop, completely horrified.
I slap my hands together and point at them, bursting into a cackle. “And that’s exactly how your grandfather looked when I told him that! Right before I said, ‘PSYCH! Of course I’m staying here with you. Total no-brainer!’”
Adora bursts into relieved tears, Aimee swoons, and Adelaide glares at me while putting an arm around her youngest and most sensitive triplet’s quivering shoulders.
“Grandma, you scared us,” she chastises. “That’s not nice.”
“Nice has nothing to do with your grandma exercising her Mother Goddess-given right to tease her granddaughters.” I suck my teeth. “I mean, it was kind of obvious how the story ended anyway. If I’d returned to the Lower Realm, you and your hundreds of Orc cousins would not be here. And you certainly wouldn’t be listening to this story inside a giant tree cottage—which we totally don’t have in the Lower Realm, by the way.”
