Page 42 of The Fae Queen's Captive
I was right. I can feel her antler torc dragging and digging into me as she moves.
At the first hot stripe of her tongue, I cry out to the low stone ceiling, and at the second, I’m a wild thing in my chains. Trying to get more, trying to get away from the intensity of her kiss, I’m not sure, but it hardly matters, because Ican’tget away, I’m chained and spread for her, a sacrifice before the sacrifice to come.
Her tongue, wicked and clever, works me from side to side, over and over, fast enough to have me groaning, then slow, torturing, wringing whimper after desperate whimper from my lips.
The orgasm is a heavy thing, like another length of silver chain anchoring me to the stone, and it almost hurts as it ripples free, yanking and weighted in its pleasure. Morgana moves back up, a hand once again braced by my head, and while I’m still in the throes of my first climax, she uses the hand still between my legs to pull yet another out of me. Her touch is fast, hard. Inescapable. I don’t even know what noises I’m making. All I know is that I want her to kiss me, kiss me with that mouth still wet from me, and I don’t even want the fairy fruit, because it’s her I want. Just her. No fruit, no crown, nothing save for obsidian eyes and perfect aim and a flair for cruel pleasure—just her. Morgana.
I come again, of course, inevitable as it is, and the pleasure rolls in burning pulses up to my chest and down my thighs, and my scalp is tingling and so are the soles of my feet, and everything is breathless, dizzy, wonderful.
Except she still keeps her mouth away from mine.
“Kiss me,” I beg. “Kiss me before you kill me.”
She doesn’t answer. She keeps her hand pressed against my swollen pussy, and her forehead to mine, and I can feel how heavy and hard her breaths are coming right now, like it’s taking everything she has to stay still, to stay exactly how she is.
A long sigh shudders out of her, and she lifts her hand from between my legs and presses her wet fingers to my mouth. I kiss them, lick them, tasting myself, and then she drops her lips to her hand too. We’re kissing, but with her hand between our lips.
Though she’s so very close, I still see the moment her eyes close. A tear, hot and fast, drops from her lashes onto my cheek and rolls into my hair.
“Go,” she says shakily. “Go, Janneth.”
“Wait, what—”
She’s already moving off me, swiping impatiently at her face as she unlocks the cuffs at my wrists and ankles with a mere press of her thumb. They click open, and once they’re all unlocked, I scramble to the side of the slab and then to the ground, looking at her across the surface of the stone.
“Go,” she repeats. “Take the torch and follow the hallway until you see a door carved with the sign of a rose. It will lead you out into the garden. From there, a trail will take you through to woods to the loch. The tomb will take you home.”
I can’t stop staring at her. The dark hair swept up and pinned with delicate carved bone, the glittering eyes. The high cheeks dusted with a flush that nearly looks gentian in the blue light of the torch.
The lips swollen from kissing me, but not on the mouth.
“You’re saying I can just go,” I say. My voice isn’t inflected in a question or pitched as an assertion. It sounds as numb as I feel. “After all this…you’re just going to let me go.”
“Yes,” she says, lifting her chin. “But you must hurry. It is close to midnight, and the witnesses will be gathering at the tithing place. They will be expecting you.”
I’m still too shocked to move. “But what will happen to Faerie if the tithe isn’t paid? What will happen to you?”
She meets my gaze. “I do not know for sure. But I do know that nothing means anything to me if you are not in the world, Janneth. I love you. Despite how stupid and foolish it makes me. Now go.”
I want to tell her I love her too. I want to tell her that this love makes me stupid and foolish too, because even now the idea of leaving her feels akin to ripping out my own throat, and I want to tell her that all I want, even now, is to stay her pet forever, sitting beside her in fairyland.
I don’t tell her these things.
I take the torch from the wall, glance back at her standing motionless in the room, candlelight making her a statue of gold and shadow, and then I do what she told me to do.
I go.
Chapter17
The way out is as Morgana said: a rose-carved door, a garden, a narrow path through the woods. Thunder echoes through the trees as I hurry down the path as fast as I can; a low, angry storm is churning in from the sea. Lightning dances in the cloud bellies above me, and there’s no rain yet, although I know it’s just a matter of time before it reaches me.
My feet are bare, and I’m still in my chiffon dress, and I’m sure my tits are frozen off by the time I see the loch glinting through the trunks of the trees. I turn to look back at the castle, lit blue and gold against the night, and my heart twists like an apple being yanked from a branch.
I love you, I think.No matter what you planned to do. I love you.
And then I turn and start half jogging along the shore of the loch, relieved when I see the tomb’s hulking shape. It’s ringed with torches, just like it was in the mortal realm on the first night of Samhain, but there’s no one there that I can see, no Maynard or Idalia waiting to kidnap me again, no Felipe ready to drag me back to the castle.
Elphame will just have to suffer. Unravel.
