CHAPTER 107: ONE HUNDRED & SEVEN

(Still distorted)

Valka

He adores me. He brings me gifts. They’re shiny and pretty. And I wear them, only because he’ll take them off me later.

He feeds me. Food. Fruits. I lick the juices off his hands. He makes a pained sound in his throat when I do that. Sometimes, I think I’ve hurt him, but then, I see the arching tent in his pants.

I pounce on him, giggling as I straddle his thighs and rip off his clothes. He pretends to struggle to pry me off him. He pretends to complain. Then I put my breast in his mouth and he shuts up.

He paints me. I love these moments best. I like the way the paint brush touches his bottom lip before he makes a stroke on the canvas. I like the way his eyes blaze with carnal heat when I arch my spine and pose for him. I like it most when he stops pretending to concentrate and arches me over the desk.

"Why did you come to Ebonheart?"

My fingers remain on the white robe, clutching tightly like he ordered me to. I answer him because I find that he only ever stops asking me those questions if I don’t avoid them. "To find my mother."

His violet gaze flicks to me, the soft scratching against the canvas stalling slightly. "Did you?"

It aggravates me when he does that. He knows the answers to the questions he asks. He knows what I am thinking. He knows me better than anyone. "I did. I took a glimpse of her from afar. She didn’t look like she missed me. Or father. It made me mad. I waited by the gravestone for years and she never came by to drop flowers for the daughter she assumed dead. She never came back."

Lucien’s lips purse, but he doesn’t look surprised. "Why didn’t you approach her?"

"Because it was one thing to think it, and another to be told it." I am suddenly exhausted. My head hurts a little. I toss down the robe and lean back on the desk. "Talk later. Come to me."

"We must talk about it if you wish to get better." He leans over to dab the brush in more green paint. "Tell me about growing up in House Ironfang. Tell me about Rhea’s sons, your brothers."

I am angry. "Stop interrogating me!"

"I am trying to help you, Valka."

"I don’t need help! I just need you to touch me," I whine. He always insists on talking. I don’t want to talk about the things he keeps pressing on. I don’t want to talk at all. The only words I want to speak are ’fuck’, ’yes’, ’harder’, ’deeper’.

He won’t look at me. "You either speak about your family or you speak about the first time you killed, but we’re fucking talking. Right now."

I start sobbing. I fight him. I take the art supplies and throw them at him. I throw tantrums. He doesn’t stop me. He never stops me when I get angry. He likes it when I hit his chest and yell at him.

He says it is good for me. He says my defenses being lowered is the only way to reach what I have buried inside. He says my repressed emotions resurfacing means the memories will come in tow.

When I have exerted myself, my legs give, and my head drops against his chest. "Rhea hated me. But she took care of me. She tried to kill me, but she knew father would hate her for it, so she often controlled the damage. My brothers were no better. They called me a monster. But they were children. They were blood. I cared for them, but they hated me. I hated that house. I stayed because of father."

His fingers are in my hair, soothing as they brush along my scalp. My body tightens with need. I want his fingers inside me. I always want him inside me.

"And before then?" he asks, ruining the moment again. "Where were you before then?"

"I was..." Images push against my mind. I push back. I push harder. I remember this place. I remember here. I remember him. "I was with you."

He straightens, lifting me atop the desk again. His eyes pierce mine. "For a few weeks, yes. You were gone for a while before that, and several months after. Where were you?"

My mate smells good. Delicious. His arms are on the desk, bracketing my thighs. His robe is stained with the paint I’d tossed at him. There is a smudge on his cheek bone. A hue of blue.

I lick it off. It tastes strange, but it is not the strangest thing I’ve licked off his skin in the last week.

"Valka," he hisses when my mouth lowers to his jaw, nipping his skin. "Focus."

He’s already distracted. His eyes are on my tits. I reach down and grab his dick through his robe. He is hard. Very hard. He’s always hard for me. It makes me so hungry.

"I want to taste you," I moan, leaning back on my elbow, stroking his length.

He snatches my wrist, groaning for a few seconds before prying my fingers off him. "Answer me."

I like it when he growls. It is akin to the sound he makes right before he comes. The sound is so deeply sexual, raw, brutish and unrefined, I think if he so much as looks at me and makes that sound again, I might implode and come all over his desk.

"Do that again," I moan, running my hand down his pectorals.

He bares his teeth at me in anger. He is frustrated. I think he is a fine monster when he is frustrated. I love his fangs. I love when he bites me between my legs with them and drinks my blood and ecstasy.

"Valka--"

I push off his robe. Dip my hands in the goo of red paint left on the table and smear it all over him. It looks like blood on his skin. It fascinates me. It makes my core drenched. "Paint my skin," I tell him, reclining once more to reach for the brush.

Something about this feels familiar. It makes my skin burn hotter. "Please," I whimper.

He likes it when I plead. He is a simple man. I can get away with anything if I just say please.

He curses under his breath and I know I have won.

Fingers clasp my thighs, pulling my ass to the table’s edge. My legs dangle around his. His gaze roves over the curve of my breasts, the dip of my waist, the flare of my hips, the apex of my thighs. His nostrils flare. He is very obsessive, my beautiful monster. I see it in the way he looks at me. In the way he’s trying to find new ways to mark my skin all over again.

I want that. I tell him so. I lift my left leg and arch it over his shoulder, raising my hips. "Please."

He stares at my cunt. He shakes his head. He tells me when I am myself again, I’m going to kill him for this.

I don’t know what that means. I feel more alive, more aware than I’ve ever been. Humans complicate things. Lust is. Desire is. We think too much, when in truth, we do not need to think at all. Just feel. Just fuck.

He turns, selecting a brush from the scattered tools. Not a small one. A broad, round bristle brush. He dips it deliberately into an open jar. Not red. Ultramarine blue. Deep, rich, like the heart of a midnight ocean. He lifts it, dripping. The scent of the pigment is sharp.

And then, he whips it in the air, causing it to splatter across my skin like a whip crack. I gasp, bark arching.

The fine bristles tease my skin as he smears me in blue. Green. Red. He tells me blue represents my fear. The green stands for defiance, my will, my strength. He paints me in a lot of green. But the red, I anticipate.

The red, he swats down my thighs, against my folds, down my clitoris, on my nipples. He says red is the heart of me. The need, the fire that reshapes us both and makes our desires depthless. Too many words. My brain can only interpret certain words when he touches me.

So when he tells me he’ll make me scream in the colour red, I understand that it means he’ll make me bleed.

"Yes," I mewl, when the bristle strokes against my folds again.

He is sinfully attractive, alluring, electric when he’s mad. But when he smiles like that, in that low predatory manner... "You are the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen," I tell him, eyes wide with awe. "Do you smile at other women like that, too?"

"Why, Valka?"

"I don’t want you to. Smile only for me from now on."

"Alright," he says.

I believe him. He adores me. He’ll do whatever I want.

His fingers brush the inside of my thighs and my thighs fall open even wider, the scent of me mingling with turpentine. But my King doesn’t use his fingers. He flips the paintbrush, that wooden dark handle gripped loosely between his elegant fingers drenched in red.

And he pushes it through my folds, and in one slick, wet push, it is inside me.