Chapter 28

I tried to pull away, but instead, I found myself in his arms, my back against his chest and his arm wrapped around my waist possessively. His other hand held mine up in a tight grip, fingers interlaced with my own, and with a forceful step forward, we began to dance.

The music was slow, sensual, and he guided me through the moves seamlessly. The fae royalty knew how to dance, of course. But the intense warrior I saw in him surely couldn’t move like this?

He spun me round and round, and I watched as he turned on his own heel, never losing his grip on my hand. His monstrously tall height should have caused me to stumble, but I remained perfectly balanced in his grip.

I didn’t dance.

When would a human slave ever get a chance to dance, besides the drunk chanting in the alehouse? But our bodies played off each other, the sheer closeness…I couldn’t help but move with him. He twirled me into his shoulder, and I looked up, eyes tracing over his face, the high curve of his cheekbones, his full, lush lips, and into swirling ice-blue eyes.

I needed to snap out of it. "Are you making enough of a show for you guests?" I choked out, groping for my anger. Trying to force out my increasing physical desire for the monster who had kidnapped me.

"Not yet," he growled, then twirled my body out onto the dance floor. For a second, he was engulfed by the crowd of fae on the dancefloor, then he was tugging me back to him, wrapping a strong arm around my middle as he materialized.

The flat of his palm slid over my hip, down my thigh.

My breath caught.

"I'm human. They'll never believe you chose me because you wanted me," I snarled, digging my fingers into his arm and fighting the urge to arch into his warmth.

"Then make them believe," he said. His lips brushed over my cheek, leaving a burning trail of heat that set every nerve ending in my body afire.

Panic swamped me at the strength of my reaction.

"I hate you," I hissed, channeling all my rushing energy into trying to quell whatever the fuck my body was doing to me.

"Then make them believe it. Wasn't it you who recently reminded me of my reputation? The cruel Prince who would bind a tool of the Gold Court to him in marriage, just to fuck with his enemy.” His eyes flared. “The kind of monster who would force a female who hates him to want him."

Anger powered through me, and control over my body flooded back. I moved, separating our bodies, but his grip on my hand was vice-like. "You're twisted," I snarled through gritted teeth.

"And you're a liar."

"What?" He spun me again, tugging me into his side and dipping his head. His lips brushed my ear.

"Tell me, gildi , what have you seen in your few short days here with me?" I faltered, not answering him fast enough. "Have I given you a single reason to believe my reasons for binding you to me in marriage were anything other than to save your life?"

Heat was coursing through me, making it hard to think straight. How was he doing this to me?

"You just want me for the statues," I spluttered.

He wanted me for the statues. Just the statues.

He shifted, turning me so that my back was to his chest, and pressed his hand to my stomach. Pressing me back into his body. “You feel that, gildi ?”

I gulped down air.

I felt it. I felt him. Hard and huge and un-fucking-questionable.

Warm breath tickled my neck as he bent low, brushing his lips across my bare shoulder. "I want you for so much more than what you can do with gold. But you will believe whatever you want to believe."

“Mazrith!” I never thought I would be relieved to hear the Queen’s shrill voice. I expected the Prince to release me, but he pulled me tighter. Tighter into the outrageously distracting erection he was pressing into the small of my back.

“I am dancing with my betrothed,” he said, the crowds parting in a wide circle around us.

“So I see.” She cast a long glance up and down my body, and I wished my cheeks weren’t as flushed as I knew they were. “That’s quite a dress.”

I dipped my head an inch, too distracted by the tower of solid male behind me to remember what I was supposed to do in front of the Queen.

Rangvald coughed next to her. “It does not hold a candle to yours, my Queen,” he said.

“Oh, right, no,” I said quickly. “Yours is, erm… very regal.”

Mazrith’s grip somehow tightened even further, and I let out an awkward cough.

“This farce will not be allowed to continue,” the Queen hissed suddenly, stepping forward. Her black teeth were bared, and there was a manic glint in her eye. “You are human. A slave. Born of my sister’s disgusting Court.”

I felt no need to defend the Gold Court, but a surge of defiance for my race rose in me.

Mazrith spoke before I could. “Stepmother, I have given you my reasons for this betrothal,” he said so quietly no one else around us would hear. “This little woman will help me in furthering a potentially powerful weapon. And in the meantime, I find myself taken with her uniqueness.” He traced a feather-light finger along the ridge of my bare shoulder as he spoke. “She is really very different to any delicacy I’ve tasted before.”

My insides clenched at his words. To be tasted by him would be…

“Mazrith, I do not trust you.” Her tone was light, yet the words dripped with venom. “If you are not able to prove to me what purpose she has to you by the end of the week, I want her on my table.”

“Table?” The word left my lips unbidden, and her vicious gaze raked over my face.

“My dear, I believe Mazrith to be correct on that front. You will taste nothing like any delicacy I have tried to date.”

I recoiled, with nowhere to go but tighter into the Prince’s chest.

“Thank you for the party, stepmother,” the Prince said. The growl I felt under his clothes didn’t match the politeness of his tone.

She stared at him long enough to make me want to be anywhere else, then turned slowly on her insanely high heels and wafted away. Fae fell into step around her, all talking at once, passing her drinks and plates of food that she picked from as she made her way to the doors.

“Is she leaving?”

The Prince lifted my now sweating hand, turning me sharply to face him.

I did everything I could to keep my face neutral and failed.

He was stunning. Light played against every shadow, lifting the pale white scars, highlighting the perfection of his bone structure.

The fae, and the warrior.

The beautiful monster.

“You believe me to be the villain of your story. You are wrong.” I watched his lips move as he said the words.

“If she is the villain, what are you?”

He splayed his fingers across my back, and slowly tipped me back, in time with a swooping beat in the music.

His head bent low, tantalizingly close to mine.

“I am no hero.” His breath whispered across my lips, his mouth was so near mine.

“I don’t need a hero.”

“What do you need, gildi ?”

“Why would I tell you?” My words were a gasp.

He scooped me back up, lifting me clean off my feet as he turned me, then gripping my thigh and lifting my leg as he set me back down. Instinctively, I wrapped my calf around his massive thigh. My core pressed against solid muscle, and I wanted to move against him so badly it almost made me turn and run.

“You would tell me because I am the first person you have ever met in your life that doesn't bore you to fucking tears,” he murmured, staring down into my eyes. “Keep that wicked, lying tongue still. I know it is true. I see it in you. You were born for more than your life has offered you. And you know it.”

Fear forced its way through the accursed fucking arousal he was causing.

Had he got in my head?

No. He was using a line he likely used on all women. A line that made him sound special. Not me.

But fuck, he was right.

I had always known I wasn’t meant to spend my life in that workshop. That I had never fit in.

Reyna, that’s not exactly hard to work out! You’re a slave, with hair nobody else in the five Courts has! I chastised myself, even as his gaze bore into mine.

“And you? What do you want?”

“Right now? You.”

His hand slid down my leg, whilst the other snaked up my neck. “I thought we were playing your stepmother’s game?”

“Not anymore. She gave us an ultimatum, remember?”

I tried to pull my leg away, but his huge hands tightened.

“Let me go.”

His grip loosened instantly. I stepped backwards, and a man dressed in a tiny strip of fabric appeared out of nowhere. He raised a tray covered in glasses of something with bubbles in it, and I swiped one up.

When I looked back at him, the Prince’s eyes were loaded with need.

Need he wasn’t faking.

“I will fight you,” I whispered.

“I will wait.”

“What?”

"That wine is dangerous to humans.”

I glanced at my glass, and when I looked up he was gone.