“I brought us something to drink.” Neela pivoted away and went back to the exit. A serving girl was there, in the passage. I couldn’t see the girl well, but when Neela returned, she had a silver goblet in each hand. “Is something wrong?” she said.
“Nothing.” I cleared the wobble from my voice and took the drink she offered me. “It’s nothing.”
Neela nodded, but from her expression, she knew I was lying. Or maybe she just believed I should have offered more. An apology, perhaps, for what my father did to her. I could have inquired about Jarryd as well, asked how many men were lost in the battle, or if Draken were gathering forces for another attack.
All of those things would have required far more composure than I had. I barely had enough to stand and drink in the sight of her without losing it.
Then, she smiled at me, and I couldn’t even do that. It was an open, delighted, amorous smile like I was the only man in the world and it completely disarmed me.
My hold on the barrier between us slipped. The wall broke, and she rushed in.
Her barefaced emotions and intent invaded me, and they were easy to decipher. Her sentiments had one basic theme. Neela wanted me to touch her.
Before I did, I moved away.
“I’m sorry if I remind you of her,” she said.
“That isn’t…” I glanced back. I could sense her discomfort as acutely as my own. “This isn’t about your mother.”
“Good.” She was quiet a minute. “I dreamt of you.”
“Oh?” I said, nearly choking on my wine. Recovering, I tried to feel her out without being specific. I didn’t want to ask about Reth’s spell if she didn’t already know. “Do you have a lot of my memories? The exchange is different for everyone.”
“No, I don’t believe I do. A few hazy moments of your youth, perhaps.”
“When did you regain consciousness?”
“Two days ago. It’s been nearly four since you cast your spell. The entire time, I’ve been having, what I believe, are your dreams.”
Retreating to the wall, I leaned against it, and downed half the goblet in one gulp.
“Is that even possible?” she asked, strolling over, “to share a dream?”
“I suppose,” I said, with a nonchalance I definitely didn’t feel. “We are connected.”
“They were quite vivid. Explicit, even…considering we barely know each other.”
The color left my face. “I’m sorry if it disturbed you.”
“It didn’t.” Neela took a small drink. “They say dreams let our most inner thoughts out to play.” She sat her goblet down on one of the tombs and came right up to me. We were nearly touching. “Do you really want to do those things to me?” Her eyes wandered down. I clenched my jaw, trying to fight it, but my interest in her was blatant. “You want to do them to me right now. Don’t you?”
I had nowhere to go. My back was literally against the wall. I didn’t trust myself to touch her, even as long as it would take to move her out of the way. I didn’t think looking at her was smart either, so I kept my eyes down. I just didn’t keep them down far enough, and before I knew it, I was counting the rows of beads that lined her bodice.
That led to mentally tracing the flower-like pattern; down around the collar, over the curves of her breasts and the flat plane of her stomach. I imagined doing it with my fingers. I saw myself reaching out, gripping the bodice and tearing it straight down the front. I could almost hear the beads bouncing as they hit the stone floor.
“Ian,” she said. “Look at me.”
I raised my eyes. I watched her lips part. She wet them with a slow caress of her tongue and things tightened in me that were already about to snap.
“You frighten me,” she said.
An awkward laugh slipped out. “I know the feeling.”
“You misunderstand. It isn’t you that frightens me. It’s how I am when I’m with you.” Doing away with the last, little space between us, she nestled in close. “I want to touch you. Here.” Neela ran an impatient hand down the front of my breeches. “And here.” She started stroking me through the leather and my pulse turned painful.
“Neela,” I breathed. “What are you doing?”
“If you have to ask then I’m not doing it correctly.”
I swelled in her grip. “You are. But we shouldn’t—we can’t. Not here.”
“So my mother does stand between us,” she said with anger.
“No, but…”
“Then finish it. Finish what you started that night when you came into my room…when you laid me back on the bed…when you pushed up my dress.” Her caress turned brisk. Blood throbbed in my veins. I was taught, aching. “You awakened this in me. You put your hands on me. Your mouth.”
“And you told me to stop,” I reminded her.
“Now, I’m telling you to finish it.” Snappish, she said, “I am Queen, Shinree. My will is law and you will obey.”
“Obey?” What the hell is wrong with her? “Are you ordering me to bed you?”
“Do I have to?”
“No. I’m not a—”
“Slave? I think we both know that you are.” Neela seized my rigid cock tighter. Glancing down at her prize, with low lids and a devious grin, she whispered, “At least part of you recognizes my authority.”
Resentment clenched my jaw. It’s the dreams. It has to be. The memories, the lust—they’re funneling through the link, affecting her.
“You said you’d show me how to be a woman.” Neela took the cup from my hand and tossed it. She brushed her lips over my face, my mouth. “Do it. Show me.”
“You aren’t yourself.”
“I can’t be myself. Not ever. Not with anyone.” She drew back and looked into my eyes. “Only with you. Only right now.”
I shook my head. “It’s the spell I used to heal you. It’s influencing you, confusing you. That’s all this is.”
“I don’t care what it is. I don’t want to do what’s right and proper. Just this once, just for this moment, Ian, I don’t want to be Queen. I want to be the woman you dreamt of. I want to feel like you made her feel. Just this once.”
Frustration mounting in me, I growled. “You don’t understand.” Her body was rubbing up against mine. Her tongue was on my skin. I was so eager to be inside her—to feel the real her wrap around me—I was shaking. “If we do this, Neela, walking away after, having to leave you…it will wreck me.”
Her smile was unequivocal. “I know.”
FIFTY FOUR
Little bits of stone fell away as I pushed Neela back against the wall. More showered her hair as I leaned in. Crushing my mouth to hers, digging my fingers into her arms in a feverish attempt to make her real, I held her there. I liked the feel of her in my hands, the permanence. I liked how she didn’t mind my need to dominate her. It was as uncontrollable and irrational as the clear hunger in her embrace.
Frantic and eager, drawing my lips into her teeth, winding her tongue around mine; a familiar, desperate yearning was in her every kiss, every rake of her nails as she snaked her hands under my shirt. It was obvious. Neela shared in my hysteria.
I gripped the captured fabric in my hands tighter. Yanking, I pulled the sleeves off her shoulders and ripped them down over her arms. The bodice tore, spilling beads down the front of her like tiny icicles. White against the black of her skin, they clattered to the floor, just as I imagined.
As Neela shrugged out of her ruined sleeves, the pieces of cloth fell around her hips. She stood before me, half-naked, with no tension whatsoever on her face or in her body. She was giving herself to the moment—and to me. I think I stopped breathing.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“No,” I said honestly. “Not in the least.”
Basking in my loss of composure, an impish grin tugged at Neela’s lips. It faded into a more serious expression as her fingers slid between the laces of my breeches. She loosened them, one after the other, with ridiculous, painstaking precision,
seeming not to notice that I was dying with every second that ticked by. Just as deft and slow, she removed my shirt. Regarding me first with her eyes, then her hands, Neela traced the contours of muscle on my chest, arms, and stomach. She bent down and did the same with her lips, and a chill ran over me.
I pulled her up. I kissed her, gently this time. I moved my lips over her chin and down her neck. Caressing her shoulders, gliding my hands down to the small of her back, I made my way leisurely around to her stomach and up over the curves of her breasts.
Supple and damp, they were more than I could hold in my hands. Her nipples were dark and erect and I gave them attention, caressing them, rolling them in my fingers. I plucked one into my mouth. Neela moaned, and her pleasure burst over me like a cloud break. Her desire, the sensations I provoked in her, all came hurtling at me through the link. The outpouring was unbelievably strong. The feel of her was extraordinary. I didn’t even consider shutting her out. Together, we were a seamless, unending wave of tingling nerves and burning skin, rushing blood and pounding hearts. Every sense, every touch intersected and overlapped; the heat rising between her legs; the crushing, merciless pressure growing in me.
Neela’s lust added to mine was a towering wave of desperation and madness.
When it became something beyond measure, I picked her up and threw her down on the first surface I could find.
As I separated the leather of my breeches, she lifted her dress. I gripped her bare thighs, pulled Neela’s body toward mine, and her warm, wet flesh swallowed me whole.
She was tight. Sweltering. Soft.
She opened up.
And I fell.
Her body was the door. Her thrusts were the perfect, eager snare. Her walls, like hot silk soaked in honey, were the treacherous boundaries of a bottomless abyss.
They closed in. I fell deeper.
I had no control, no grip. I plunged past reason and conscience, tumbled past tenderness and attraction. The catacombs, our link, restraint—they all became background noise as I plummeted into the one thing left in the dark with me; the waiting arms of the dream.
I felt it happening. There was no fighting it, no breaking free of its embrace. Defiling my sense of pleasure, the spell polluted my desire with an impatient, lust-fueled frustration. It stripped my morality and corrupted my affection. It warped my passion into a kind of voracious, selfish depravity, until I had only one motivation, one concern: my own, primal need for release.
In consummating my obsession, its focus had shifted. She was unimportant. Her body was paramount. It was a means to an end, a path to satisfaction. And I used it as such. Slamming into it without respite, my thrusts were brutal, long and deep. My touch turned rough, my kisses harsh.
I had a dim sense of fingers clawing at my arms, of breasts jutting and bouncing, and legs wrapping in a frantic attempt to slow me down. Her cries prompted a scattered notion that I might be hurting her, but I didn’t stop. Her pleasure, or discomfort, was secondary to how badly I was burning. How hollow and starved I was. All that would fill me was to empty myself in her.
Yet, I couldn’t. It was quickly becoming apparent that no matter how fast our bodies hit, or how far I pushed inside, it wasn’t hard enough or deep enough to satisfy.
It never will be.
There is no relief to be had in her.
And that was the point. It was the crux of the spell. It was one final jab from my father that the lure he dangled in front of me, the life he offered in exchange for the stone, was unattainable. Even if Neela came to care for me, my desire for her would become tainted by constant frustration. The thing he made me want more than any other—the allusion of utter contentment I felt in the dreams—would be forever out of reach.
Even dead he plots the course of my life.
Panting, I pulled out of her and stepped back. Damp curls clung to her face. Sweat glimmered like dew in the flickering light. Passion glazed her eyes and it was almost enough to make me believe I was wrong.
Then I saw cuts open on her skin. I heard laughter that wasn’t there.
I reached out to Jarryd, for added strength, and got nothing. I gripped Neela’s arms, trying to stay in the here and now. But the wet on her skin felt like blood.
With a sound of revulsion, I let her go.
Neela tried to pull me back. “What’s wrong?”
I flung her off me. “Everything,” I snarled. “You. Us. You don’t know how badly I need you to be real. How I need all of this to be real. But it’s not. It won’t ever be.”
Her brow tightened. “Calm down.”
The hiss of drawn metal came out of the dark. Past the torchlight and the gloom, something was in the doorway. The shape of a man, it moved slightly.
Watching it, I said, “You turn everything upside down. I can’t trust myself with you. I can’t trust my own senses. I know we’re alone. Only, I swear…I swear I can hear him in the room with us.”
“I heard it too.” I went for a weapon and her hand shot out to stop me. “I heard a servant, Ian,” she said, slow and persuasive, “that’s all.” Holding my gaze, she spoke louder. “Come out of the shadows, boy.”
There was a noticeable hesitation. I held my breath through the whole thing.
I let it out when a lanky figure crawled clumsily over the broken door and fell into the chamber. Gripping a torch in one hand, he kept his head lowered and his eyes down as he picked himself up. Clearly, this was the last place he wanted to be. It was also the last place I thought to see him.
“Liel,” I sighed. “Gods...” I ran my hands over my face, wiping away the sweat. The panic was harder to shed, but I took a few, relieved gulps of air and recovered enough to pull up my pants.
Liel’s recovery was going to take a bit longer. His face held significantly less color than my eyes and he wasn’t even coming close to looking in our direction. “Pardon me, Your Grace,” he muttered. “It’s the Langorian Ambassador. He’s returned and is asking for you.”
Neela spared him a frown over her bare shoulder. “I’ll need some time. See if you can scrounge up something to feed him while he waits.”
I looked at her. I was hoping for an explanation. But she just turned away, with her emotions all over the place. There was dread, fading desire, and a lot of humiliation. She was ashamed of her appearance, which was not exactly pristine. Her hair was sticking out all over. A visible sheen of sweat layered her skin. Smudges clung to her once-white gown, which I had completely wrecked. I’d done the same to her usual poise and dignity, and she was having trouble recapturing it.
Mostly though, she was nervous as hell.
“The Ambassador wishes to meet with Troy as well,” Liel added.
“Me?” I said in surprise. “What does he want?”
Liel’s voice was strained. “I couldn’t say, My Lord.”
I peered at him through the gloom. “You survived the battle without injury?”
“Yes, My Lord. But many were far less fortunate.” Liel raised his eyes. He looked straight at me. “Many that should be here aren’t.”
“That’s enough,” Neela broke in. “Troy is aware of the rigors of war.”
Liel’s gaze plummeted like a stone. “Yes, Your Grace,” he said, his normally impeccable posture slumping. His floppy curls seemed to go flat and lifeless, too. As if the weight of worry pressed them down. Even more peculiar, he hadn’t bowed once.
I might have chocked it up to simple embarrassment. After all, the boy did just catch me fucking Rella’s Queen on the tomb of her ancestor. Except, it wasn’t shame he was exhibiting. It wasn’t fatigue either, or trauma from witnessing his first battle.
Liel was radiating fear, anxiety, and a good amount of despair.
“That will be all,” Neela said to him. “Tell the ambassador I’ll join him shortly.”
Eyes on his boots, Liel nodded. He fled the chamber like it was on fire.
Neela slid off the top of the crypt. I stepped back, giving her room to pull herself t
ogether. I would have helped, but she shimmied into what remained of her sleeves and flattened down her rumpled skirt in silence. She combed a hand through the tangles in her hair, looking anywhere but at me. Running her fingers through the strands, a few got stuck in the pearls on her head but she worked them out on her own. The front of her gown (in two pieces now) gaped stubbornly open, and the longer Neela fumbled with the material, clutching the tattered fabric to her breasts like a shield, the more I was certain she was looking for ways to avoid me.
“The castle is quiet.” I snatched up my shirt and slipped it on. “Were there no celebrations?”
“Not really.” Still holding her dress together, Neela didn’t look up. “There is a lot of work to be done.”
“Funny,” I said, tying the laces on my breeches in quick, angry motions. “I didn’t see anyone doing any work.”
“Oh?” Her tone was careless, but I felt a ripple of anxiety bounce between us.
“There are things you aren’t telling me.”
“There are things you aren’t privy too.”
“If the healing spell had gone differently, I would have been privy to everything. As it is, all I can feel is how much you’re lying to me right now.” I put up a barrier and choked off our link. Point blank, I said, “You won, Neela. The Langorians are gone. You have your throne back. Yet, you aren’t happy. Why?” Her absence of an answer tightened my voice. “Where are all the people, Neela?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“My father is dead. Langor is defeated. Yet, that poor boy that was just here looked too afraid to breathe. I want to know why.”
Neela stared at me a long moment. Then, so soft I could barely hear her, she said, “We didn’t win.”
The Crown of Stones: Magic-Price Page 46
