Page 40 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
Auden’s eyes—nothing but shards of glittering shadow this far from the light—move over to me. “I always know,” he says. “Remember?”
I always see you.
How I’ve cradled those words in my mind over the years, polished them with thought and desperate self-reassurance, that once upon a time Auden Guest saw me and wanted me. Once upon a time, we almost lived happily ever after.
Before I fucked it up.
Before he found the one thing that could hurt me as much as the memory of hurting him.
Poe steps forward, as if she’s stepping between us to stop a fight, which is ridiculous since both of us are still slouched on either sides of our little book-and-glass arena. “This is what I mean,” she says, frustrated. “This is exactly why I can’t just say screw it and do what I want, which is to fuck both of you constantly. Preferably at once.”
We both react visibly to her words. What red-blooded people wouldn’t? The idea of non-stop sex, the three of us together, long, hard muscles pressed against her giving flesh . . . a spread of fingers and mouths and tight places needing fucking?
“There’s not just something between me and Saint,” she continues, “or something just between you and me, Auden. This is between the three of us, because the something between you two isn’t only hatred and it isn’t only lust, and you know it. There’s something else. And either we let that grow or it hurts us all.”
Auden takes another drink, then straightens up. “Out with it then,” he says imperiously, like the lordling I always knew him to be. “What would you have us do, little bride? Fuck each other once a day, like medicine? Like a vaccine against enmity? Because I’m telling you I can fuck St. Sebastian Martinez all day long and still not forget what he did to me.”
“I’m not asking you to fuck him or forget what he’s done,” Poe says impatiently. “I’m asking you to forgive him.”
Her words coincide with the end of one of Becket’s songs, and so they hang in the air, not loud enough for the still-gossiping others to hear, but loud enough to cut across Auden and me like a whip.
“And this is a condition of what, Proserpina?” Auden asks dangerously. “If I don’t forgive him, then what will you deny me?”
Poe shivers a little, licking her lips, and I know she likes this dangerous, possessive version of Auden as much as I do. But she fights past it. “If the three of us can’t be together, then—then I’m sorry, but none of us should be together.”
Auden tenses at that, but he doesn’t speak. Not yet.
“I don’t know if it started when we were children or if it’s the kink or if it’s something else, some kind of Thornchapel magic, but there’s a beat . . . a pulse. Right here.” She puts her fist in front of her—in the middle of our triad—and clenches it over and over again. A beating heart. A beating heart between the three of us. “It’s meant to be the three of us. And if it’s not, if we pair off, I’m worried this thing we have will sicken and die and we’ll be worse off for it.”
“So it’s forgiveness or nothing,” Auden elucidates. “That’s a very extreme and uncompromising order, Ms. Markham.”
She lifts her chin, luscious mouth set in determination.
“And what if I tried to work on forgiveness,” Auden suggests, looking over at me in a way that makes my toes curl in my boots, my cock jolting at the same time as my mammal brain signals run. danger. run. “What if I’m working on it, but then I’m flogging you one day and your little cunt needs to be fucked? What if I’m letting you kiss my feet—yes, Proserpina, I see how you look at my feet—until you beg me to let you bury your face in my lap and suck me off? Or what if St. Sebastian is all alone in his empty library and you go to visit him, and you just can’t resist the boy with the sad brown eyes, the boy who just needs his throbbing cock not to hurt anymore? What then?”
I’ve straightened without even knowing it, drawn in by Auden’s coarse and carnal words. Poe is practically swaying on her feet, lips wet and wetter from all the licking and nibbling she’s doing to them.
“What if we get to Beltane and nothing’s settled? The May Queen will be the lord of the manor’s by right—the lord’s to penetrate, the lord’s to fuck. Will you deny us that? Deny me or Saint or Rebecca or Delphine? Deny our priest, if our priest needs inside you? If he’s the lord this time? You look over at that fire, Poe, you look over at Father Becket Hess, so tall and fair and strong, and so, so, so fucking good. You tell me if he needs to fit his long cock inside you to feel better, that you’d stop him? If he’s meant to claim you by the fire, that you’d say no because Saint and I haven’t kissed and made up yet?”
Poe’s eyes are glued to Becket now, to his long fingers currently working open the foil of a champagne bottle, to the fire burnishing his golden hair bronze.
“So I need to know exactly how you plan to deny us all, little bride, including yourself. Will you shun Saint and me, but take comfort in the others? Are Saint and I to take comfort in the others as well? Because I heard what you asked earlier, I heard you ask about lust and pain. If you’re asking for our bodies to quiet while our hearts decide . . . maybe before Imbolc . . . maybe before the six of us knew what we’d feel like in the circle, with the fire and with the thorns and with each other. But there’s no going back now.”
“There’s no going back now,” she repeats in a whisper, her eyes moving from Becket to Auden and then to me. “Maybe we can be with the others, but just . . . just not with each other while we figure this out. It’ll be an incentive for you and Saint to really work at it, because God, I need it. I need it right now.”
A noise rips from Auden’s throat—a growl. “Proserpina.”
“The thought of either of you being with someone else makes me furious,” she says, swallowing. “But it also gets me hot. Oh God. So hot.”
It’s my turn to rumble a low growl.
When did I move so close to her? When did Auden? But we have, we’re surrounding her, and I’m close enough that I can see the pulse pounding in her neck. “Maybe,” she says breathlessly, “maybe we don’t start this quite yet. Maybe the three of us can take the edge off one last time—”
She hasn’t even finished speaking before Auden has her caged against the back corner of the bookshelves, in the place of deepest shadow where the others by the fireplace won’t be able to see. I’m over there just as fast, in time to see his hand delve under her skirt as if he has every right to what’s under there.
“These tights,” he hisses. “Once I earn you, you’re never wearing this shit again. I want your pussy naked and available for my use, understood?”
She nods and then arches, and I don’t have to see to know that he’s cupping her. Hard.
