Page 54 of The Midnight King
I hear what he’s saying, but my mind is too blurry to fully comprehend what he means. All I know is that my body is trembling with arousal, and I need him. I clutch his arms, trying to pull him closer. “Please, Killian.”
“You would never do this sober,” he replies, pulling away. “Not after what I did. Not when you’re so angry with me.”
He climbs off me and walks a few steps away.
I get to my feet unsteadily. “Killian, please look at me.”
He gives my nude form a cautious sidelong glance, his throat bobbing as he swallows.
“Don’t you want me?” I say softly. “I’ll lie right here on the bed, just like this.” I lay back, arch my knees, and move my legs wide apart. With my fingers I spread open my pussy for him so he can see the glistening wetness. “Please come here. I’m hurting.Youhurt me, and I need to feel better. You can come inside me, right here.”
“Oh fuck.” He turns away again, one hand over his mouth. “This is the torture I deserve.”
“Please.” Tears trickle from my eyes because I justwanthim, I want to be held, I want him inside me, wrapped around me. “Please fuck me.”
“No!” he barks out, despair in his voice. “No, I won’t touch you tonight. I have to go.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere else.”
I sit up, but the room pitches and warps so much I have to lie down again before I get sick. “I’m begging you, Killian. Lie down with me.”
He walks over to me, his jaw clenched, and for a second I think he’s going to relent. But he only pulls the blanket over my body and bends to plant a burning kiss on my forehead.
“If I stay, I will fuck you,” he whispers. “So I’m going to do both of us a favor, and not add this to my list of sins.”
More hot tears spill down my cheeks. “If you leave me now, don’t speak to me or touch me again, ever. I don’t want your favors or your help.”
“Go to sleep, Celinda.” He looks at me for a tortured moment, desire and guilt warring on his face. Then he creates a portal, little more than a flicker in the air, and disappears.
16
Killian doesn’t appear to me in his natural form during the entire next week, nor do I try to summon him. But we see each other at the engagement feast, when Prince Brantley places his mother’s ring on my finger and announces to a crowd of disappointed young women that he has chosen me as his bride.
My stepmother allows me to wear one of Amisa’s dresses for the feast. She attends by special invitation, as the mother of the Crown Prince’s fiancée, and during the following week, she takes on most of the duties of planning the wedding.
While I still care for the animals in the early morning, I’m excused from all my other duties at Eisling House. I am my stepmother’s golden goose, and for once in my life she refrains from making me do heavy labor. Instead she uses her winnings from the ladies’ dice games to hire a temporary housemaid.
Two days after the engagement feast, Gilda asks Brantley if my whole family can live at the palace, and he agrees. My stepsisters spend most of their time lounging in their luxurious palace suites, giggling in the hallways, flirting with the guards,and touching priceless objects with a careless sort of curiosity, like children in a museum.
Meanwhile I submit to an endless rotation of dress fittings, elegant dinners, cake tastings, and consultations about the décor and music for the royal wedding. I’m not allowed to make any of the decisions. Gilda dictates all my choices, right down to the style of my wedding gown. I’m a docile puppet with an empty heart, manipulated by the strings of my stepmother’s will.
Killian shows up now and then in the King’s form, carrying on the ruse that His Majesty is still alive. When we’re in the presence of others, I’m courteous to him, but whenever he tries to speak to me privately, I avoid him. Trying to reconcile his two faces is difficult enough, but it’s harder when I think about how he rejected me when I begged for comfort. He was doing the noble thing, the right thing, but it still hurt when he left.
He swore he would save Brantley and me. Yet I don’t see how he could possibly manage that, and I refuse to let myself have any hope. Once the wedding is over and Brantley has been enslaved, maybe Killian will try to rescue me before I’m murdered. If I’m locked in a dungeon, he might let me out and try to persuade me to run away. I’m not sure I would.
I once thought I could relinquish the Prince to his fate and leave the kingdom in my stepmother’s hands, but now I don’t think I can, even if staying here means losing my own life. I am the poison in the Prince’s cup, though he doesn’t know it. It’s my fault he’s vulnerable, and I can’t simply abandon him just to save my own skin.
While Brantley readily gave my mother free reign with the wedding plans, he makes her operate under the watchful gaze of the Palace Steward, who has been tasked with keeping the wedding on budget. The Prince spends hours each day studying various thick tomes on whatever topic has most recently captured his attention. When he isn’t studying, he’s experimenting in his laboratory in the North Tower or sparringwith one of his bodyguards, an attractive young man with dark skin and brown eyes named Winston, whom Brantley has referred to several times as his “best friend.”
The bodyguard seems suspicious of me and my step-family, which makes me like him at once. But I’m fearful for him, too. I hate to think what will happen to Winston if he interferes with my stepmother’s plans once she’s in full control of Brantley. She could order the Prince to have his bodyguard executed, and though Brantley would agonize over it, he wouldn’t be able to resist.
On the morning of the wedding, I’m heading from the baths to the dressing room where I’m to be clad in the puffy atrocity that Gilda calls my bridal gown. A handful of maids are escorting me, along with my stepmother. Perhaps I should be glad to have maids, but truthfully I prefer doing personal tasks on my own. Having servants feels intrusive, especially with Gilda’s sharp eyes on me the whole time. She’s been drinking less, perhaps because she realizes that a misstep this week could spoil her greatest triumph.
The maids and servants have been respectfully silent throughout most of the wedding preparations, but I know they’ve noticed how much my stepmother despises me. She fawns over me when the King and the Prince are around, but when it’s only the servants, she allows some of her true nature to leak between the cracks of her smile.
As I follow the hallway with my entourage, the sound of voices catches my attention. Through a doorway I spot the King, Brantley, and Winston engaged in some kind of heated discussion.