Wexley stood with his usual regal grace, his posture commanding as ever. But she could feel his eyes following her and she sensed the slight shift of body weight, the whisper of cloth as he began to make a gesture, perhaps started to say something, but caught himself, holding back.
Kaete didn’t look up as she crossed the echoing marble expanse of the entry hall, her gaze locked on the intricate tilework beneath her feet. It was easier that way—not having to meet the butler Wexley’s eyes, not wanting to see the disapproval that lingered there. His unspoken judgment was a constant weight upon her.
She ascended the left-hand staircase. The right would have led to the Lord's wing. The Lady’s chamber belonged to Celeste, the room connected to the Lord’s chamber by an internal door, so that they could pass between into each other’s beds without the rest of the household knowing.
Kaete’s bedroom was in the family wing–where the nursery, children, and the servants who attended them, would be in a normal Fae household. On their wedding night when Sterling had brought her to that room, she had been disorientated, unfamiliar with the house, but it had seemed too faded and shabby for the Lady’s quarters. She had not realized that he had brought her to a guest room instead, making clear from the start what her role in the household would be.
It might have once been a pretty room, but it had been stripped to bare minimum before her arrival, pictures taken from the wall, the curtains from the bed. What remained was faded wallpaper in a seafoam green, furniture that wore the scars of decades of use and carpet that had seen better days.
Kaete closed the door with a soft click and leaned against it, pressing the heel of her hand to the bone-cage of her chest, trying to calm the hammering of her heart. Her breath came in uneven gasps, her hands trembling.
Entering heat meant three days of isolation in her chambers.
If Sterling tended to her, it would be three days of uncomfortable, demeaning sex.
If he didn’t, it would be three days of agony.
She had no idea which he would choose.
Fumbling for her phone, she cast a hasty locate spell. There were Fae men—professionals—who served the recently bereaved or those separated from their mates by war, accident, or politics. She found one who was available, able to arrive by morning if needed.
She submitted her details but stopped short of summoning him.
The thought of a stranger tending to her while her fated mate slept under the same roof was brutal.
She told herself she didn’t want Sterling. Didn’t crave his touch.
But her body disagreed.
This heat had been triggered by proximity to her mate—and instinct didn’t care that he preferred a half-human enchantress over his wife.
Her cry was soft, and yet it still rang out into the stillness of the room—a raw, primal sob of anguished pain, echoing off the empty walls. She gripped the heavy dresser, dragging it across the floor with grunts and groans of effort until it was pressed tight against the door. Behind it, she wedged the couch, and then an armchair, creating a train of furniture from door to the opposite wall, wedging the door shut.
Her body burned with need, an insatiable fire, and she ripped the remnants of her dress off, stumbling into the shower. The cold water washed over her, but it did little to cool the heat that surged through her veins. She stood beneath the spray, sobbing, her body aching for release. She walked naked and wet to the bed and was in the process of stripping off the heavy covers when she heard it—the scrape of furniture, the heavy thud of fists against the door.
“Kaete!” His voice was low, filled with an anger she could feel deep in her bones. “Open the door.” Kaete! Was followed sharply in her mind, a stinging command, as if he could not believe that she would hear and ignore him. Open the door.
Her heart skipped a beat, but she didn’t move. Instead, she stood silently, watching the barricade she’d made with grim satisfaction. For a moment, there was a fleeting sense of victory.
Kaete! This is ridiculous! He was beyond fury, the heat of anger gone ice cold. The pounding stopped, but the silence felt far more oppressive.
She flopped onto the bed, her wet hair soaking into the sheets. The moonlight streamed through the window, bathing her in its ethereal glow. Her body still burned. The heat was a wild untameable thing–one she couldn't control. She covered her face with her hands to muffle her sobs, frustration rising in her chest. She needed release, but she refused to receive it–not from him.
She stroked her hand down the rise and fall of her body, through the neatly trimmed hair at the join of her thighs, and found her clit with her fingers, smothering her whimper. She was too tender, the touch of her fingertips too much. She explored the oversensitivity, trying to find the balance between pleasure and pain that might lead to orgasm and relieve some of the burn of need from within her, arching in desperate tension as she felt the pleasure rise within her into the promise of release, only to feel it slip away again and again, building the frustration until she wept from it.
His voice, muffled by the wood, came again, this time with a hint of something softer, something more desperate. “Kaete…” I can feel your need. Let me in.
A part of her wanted to let him in. That part of her wanted to feel his skin on hers again and was willing to suffer degradation in order to do so. But no. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Not after the evening they’d had, the humiliation, the rejection. His skin would still smell of Celeste’s perfume and taste of her sweat.
No. She had to be stronger. She had to keep him out—keep herself safe from both him and the yearning that tore at her insides. In the morning, she would summon the professional, and that would be that.
With shaking hands, she took the scissors from her dresser and used them to cut and rip the top sheet of the bed into strips and tied her ankles and then her wrists to the frame, using her teeth to pull tight the last knot. She pulled against the restraints, feeling the fabric pull tight.
Then, the window exploded inward. Glass rained down like sparkling stardust as he swung in landing with fluid grace amongst the shards, his breath coming in ragged gasps and his eyes catching the moonlight as they scanned the shadows and found her on the bed, naked but for the tangle of her long hair, and tied splayed to the bedposts like a sacrifice.
“Kaete,” he breathed, voice thick with bewildered anger and… hurt.
“You tied yourself up... Why would you do such a thing?” His words were low and dangerous. It wasn’t a question that he expected an answer to. The ice in his eyes told her that he knew.
He stood, rigid with barely contained rage, before dragging a hand through his hair.
His gaze darkened. “You would deny me.” He murmured, more to himself than to her.
Kaete’s chest tightened, a mixture of anger and helpless desire suffusing her.
“You’re burning up in here, fighting instincts that you can’t control, and yet you would deny me. Do you think it makes you strong? It doesn’t. It just makes you an arrogant fool.” His eyes locked onto the bindings again, his jaw clenching. “This could have been different. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
Her heart ached and tears ran hot down her cheeks as she closed her eyes turning her face away.
Sterling moved closer, each step slow and deliberate, heavy with resignation. “Fine then,” He leaned down, brushing his fingers over her forehead, unravelling the hair that stuck to her skin, stoking it back. His touch was oddly tender, at odds with his anger. “I won’t fuck you. But I will stay. I’ll burn with you.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed, his back to her, muscles tense and pulling his shirt into sharp creases, his body radiating restraint.
His proximity made the heat worse, just as it had triggered it. She tried to hold it back, to fight it down, to bank the rising flames, and felt her skin break out in sweat, her hips rising from the mattress, and the bedposts groaning as the straining cloth rubbed against them. Finally, she couldn’t help it, she gasped out a sob of anguished pain.
He looked over his shoulder, a muscle in the corner of his jaw twisting as he clenched his teeth. “One word, Kaete,” he growled. “Just one word, and we’ll both get what we need. Until then, I’m not moving.”
She cried out in despair, a broken sound that had him flinching away. Her breath came in shuddering gasps, the sheets beneath her were wet with sweat. Every nerve screamed for release, but her pride held her back.
“Kaete,” he whispered again, his voice full of agony, a tortured plea. Kaete, please.
“Sterling…” She rasped his name out on a plea, a surrender.
He didn’t need more. He rose to his feet, stripping off the shirt and his pants, casting them over the back of the chair. The moonlight through the broken window cast his body in tones of silver and shadow, highlighting the width and power of his shoulders, the shift of bicep beneath his skin, the valley that ran down the centerline of his body between the sculpted ridges of his abdomen.
His chest was broad and smooth, every breath he took drawing soft shadows into the hollow between his pectorals, the rise and fall rhythmic and heavy. The lines of his hips narrowed into the deep cut of his pelvis, that V of muscle that drew the eye down, down, down. He was carved from moonlight and ice—hard, elegant, divine. Light played along the long sweep of his thighs, the tension in them betraying the effort it took for him to remain still.
His eyes narrowed as he looked down at her, watching her face as she looked at him, and assessing her reaction to his beauty with cool smugness. If she wasn’t on heat, she would have blushed to be caught blatantly staring, open mouthed, and wanton. His lips curled in a sneering smile.
“So, it’s not my appearance that repulses you,” he observed. “That is good to know. I had wondered. You are about as responsive to me as a familiar woven of twigs and wishes left in place of my wife in bed.”
She swallowed hard. His words confused her, and her mind was too awash in fire and need to unravel the mysteries behind them.
“Now is not the time,” he said as if agreeing to something that she had said. “There will be a time, my wife, however, that you and I will talk about all the dark things that lie between us.”
“Sterling,” she moaned. “I…”
He knelt between her parted thighs. “I could make this impersonal, purposeful, if you prefer it,” his narrowed eyes held hers, challenging her. “Like a paid professional. I could fuck you without touching you in any way unnecessary to the act. I could pull the sheet between us, to keep my skin from touching yours. I could hold myself away from you, keep my gaze averted. Is that what you want from me? Yes? No? Maybe? Hmm. That’s what I thought.”
He lowered his body onto hers, his skin searing where it met hers, all that heat and hard muscle pressing her down into the mattress like gravity made flesh. He didn’t rush. He moved slowly, deliberately, a predator savoring the moment before the kill, and in the firestorm of her nerves, she wasn’t sure if she was the prey or the one who’d begged to be hunted.
His forearms bracketed her head, muscles flexing as he held himself just above her, their mouths a breath apart, their hearts slamming in uneven rhythm. His hair, dark and tousled, fell forward to brush her cheek, and still his eyes held hers, ruthless in their focus.
She could feel his cock, its tip nudging against her cunt. If his weight did not pin her hips down, a simple shift in angle would join them. He had done it on purpose. Letting her feel him, so close to sating the lava of need within her, but held back, controlled by him.
“But I will do this on my terms, not yours.” He continued his tone darkly satisfied. “And you will thank me for it.” He rocked against her, just once, just slightly, the friction enough to make her gasp. “Say it.”
“Please.” Tt broke free of her lips. She wasn’t sure she could cry any more or any harder than she was, overwhelmed by the need, baffled by his behavior, and just broken by everything that had happened in the past month since their wedding night.
“Close,” he murmured. “Close enough I think. Mmm,” his eyes flickered, and his mouth softened as he allowed his cock to breach her.
She moaned caught between the greedy need for more and the bliss of his cock spreading her cunt, pushing through her swollen with need flesh, filling the hole within her both figuratively and literally.
“Yes,” he whispered. “That’s what you needed, wasn’t it? Don’t look away,” he shifted slightly, catching her jaw, so that her eyes opened in surprised shock. His smirk was a twisted thing as he shook his head. “I want you to see who is fucking you, my dear little Corwin wife,” he said through his teeth. “I want you to remember that you asked for this. Don’t you dare look away.”
She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue, but her eyes remained locked on him.
“Good girl,” he purred, and began to thrust hard and deep, pressing her into the give of the mattress so that the bed groaned and complained beneath them. Her fingers wrapped around the fabric that strained between the bedposts and her wrists, clinging on, but that was all that she could do–hold on and surrender whilst he drove her body up and over the crest, breaking through the horrendous heat, the fierce tightness that coiled within her, and into an orgasm so ferocious that she was certain her heart stopped at its peak.
He collapsed heavily over her, his cock throbbing within her, squeezing out the last drops of his cum, soothing the fire temporarily at least, his heart pounding so hard that it seemed to wish to break through both their ribcages and make a new home in her chest next to her own. She could feel his panted breath, hot and wet against her neck as he recovered.
“Hmm,” he sighed with heavy satiation. “I think we broke the bed.”