Page 43 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
I narrow my eyes at him. “Why?”
“Because as of this moment, you are as much mine to take care of as she is,” he says. There’s no emotion in his voice. None at all.
I bristle. “You’re going to try to earn me now? After all this fucking time? After the hell you’ve put me through?”
“As long as you start trying to earn me,” says the prince I once knelt to.
“What, as your fucking submissive?”
Auden’s mouth goes hard. “As St. Sebastian. You can decide what that means.”
I have a retort for that, I really do, but then Poe standing behind him raises her hand to her waist and makes a fist. Clenches it slowly.
Like a beating heart.
And just like that, the bitterness leaves me. Why am I fighting this? This, the thing I’ve wanted for so long that I don’t even know myself without it? Maybe that’s it, though. Maybe I’m scared of who I am without this ghost to chase, without longing for a man to bruise my soul and my body while he simultaneously unbruises the past.
“Fine,” I mutter.
“What?” Auden asks.
“Fine,” I say, louder, and then just to be a twat, I drop the tied-off condom in his hand.
If I was expecting a reaction though, I’m disappointed. He merely nods, as if I’ve completed a task to his specifications, and pockets the thing. As if cleaning up after me is one of his new duties.
Oh. Oh, it’s humiliating how much I like that. How I’m already picturing him wiping cum from my body, washing me, watching him wash Poe.
I burn with shame.
“So we’re agreed,” Auden says, looking between Proserpina and me. “The goal is the three of us.”
“Yes,” Poe says, sounding happy and nervous all at once.
“But I think we have to acknowledge certain realities,” continues Auden. “I don’t want to stop doing kink with you, Poe. And I’m also away from here for half the week, leaving you all alone with St. Sebastian.”
“And Becket,” she says. “He stays here when you three go to London too.”
“Still,” he replies. “We need to decide now if we’re betraying each other if we have an encounter between the two of us without the third present, because given that we can’t seem to get through a single conversation without fucking, it’s going to be a real obstacle in the future. And we also need to decide if the others are in bounds. Whatever we woke up on Imbolc—whatever we tapped into—I don’t think it’s fair to ask any of us to fight it.”
“You’re fighting it,” I point out. “You didn’t even come tonight.”
A rueful smile, and then Auden glances down at his trousers. For a moment, he looks sheepishly and adorably like an architect who just came in his pants. “Didn’t I?”
“No to the betrayal,” Poe decides. But there’s an ache in her voice when she says, “But it has to be fair that we can be jealous too. If you and Saint . . . you know, without me . . . it’ll hurt. But it’ll hurt more the other way, the way where we keep doing what we’re doing now, so this is the hurt I choose.”
The hurt I choose.
Yes. The hurt we all choose.
“And the others?” Auden asks. “If I walked over there and had Becket drop to his knees so I could fuck his mouth, would you be very angry with me?”
His words already have a stimulating effect on her, speeding up her breathing all over again. She’s insatiable . . . and a voyeur . . . and an exhibitionist. A perfect little bride of thorns.
“He would have to agree . . . the others, I mean,” she says breathlessly, “it would be their choice. We can’t just say what we want to do with them and then do it.”
“No, of course not,” he agrees, “although if you think Father Hess wouldn’t open his mouth for my needs, then you don’t know him as well as you think you do. No, right now, we’re only talking about our limits. Everything else can come later, organically, but I’m not willing to jeopardize a single fucking moment of what I promised you. Understood, Miss Markham?”
“Understood,” she breathes.
