Chapter Text
Feyre Archeron woke with a dry, rasping gasp.
She choked on it, the air fighting to reach her lungs as stale as final breaths and wilted grave offerings. Every suffocating inhale was thick with incense, and her eyes watered painfully as she turned her head to the side, coughing around the knot in her throat.
“Easy, love,” a velvet voice murmured above her. One gentle hand whisked away the tears gathering on her cheeks. Another massaged her throat until her wheezing turned to smooth, steady breaths. “Easy.”
The fingertips on her cheeks migrated to her hair, brushing back a lock tangled in her lashes.
The touch, though it was little more than a graze, was full of something protective. Something possessive. And even though she was lightheaded and reeling, Feyre leaned into it, soaking in the safety it promised.
Her eyes burned when she finally blinked them open to look at Tamlin.
But—gods.
It wasn’t Tamlin touching her.
Her next breath tangled in her throat, and she choked again, sputtering.
Rhysand.
The High Lord of the Night Court stood over her, his body angled over a short stone wall so he could gaze down at her with eyes limned in silver.
He looked nothing like she remembered. She sputtered as she stared back at him, wide-eyed and horrified.
The last she had seen of Rhysand, he was furious and frantic, crawling across a throne room with a dagger in his hand and death in his bloodshot eyes. His skin had been ashen, his hair in dusty disarray and his fine black clothes soaked with blood. He had been… Feyre thought back, dredging through her muddled memory. He had been fighting someone... fighting Amarantha, finally, his teeth bared and face feral as he launched himself at her with a roar.
This wasn’t the same male.
So Feyre stared at him, and he stared back, apparently content for once to let her look without a sly comment.
The more she looked at him, the more she saw to differentiate this Rhysand from the Rhysand from her memories. His hair was neatly brushed back, bearing an otherworldly blue-black shine that had been absent until now. But it was the silver at the temples that made her hands itch for a paintbrush—swirls of starlight amid the midnight canvas of his hair.
His violet eyes crinkled as if he’d heard that thought—and, gods, the nosy prick probably had—drawing Feyre’s attention to the fine lines that marked the skin at their edges and the deep, bruised circles beneath them.
Tired—he looked so tired. More so, even, than he had been at his worst Under the Mountain. When he’d inexplicably retreated to the cell of Amarantha’s human prisoner for just a few moments of peace and quiet.
Despite his evident exhaustion, though, the rest of his skin was a warm, lovely shade of brown that spoke to fresh air and sunshine and good food. Night-dark power flowed off of him like smoke—the foreboding mantle of a dark king. And Feyre didn’t know how she could tell, but she knew that it was too dark, somehow, writhing in agitation as if something within his soul had rotted.
But Rhys was not agitated. No, he watched her with soft eyes and lips parted with something like awe.
Something like utter adoration.
Feyre glanced away from his face, suddenly uncomfortable.
But, as she cataloged the width and breadth of his shoulders instead, she found more questions in his clothes. He was clad in black—as usual—but…
She squinted in the dim, strange light.
The collar of his jacket—it was devoid of the fine embroidery she remembered, and the once-brilliant onyx dye was replaced by a plain, somber shade.
Mourner’s black.
It was the sort of suit of a dark, distinguished widower might wear. Or, at least, the sort of suit Feyre thought humans might wear.
The cut was different, the fashion entirely alien, but it was the same mournful color her father had worn for years after her mother had died. She remembered it well, because he had worn that suit to rags after they lost their fortune.
She must have lingered on the jet buttons at Rhys’s collar—their subtle carving of three mountains the only sign of finery on him—a beat too long for his comfort, because strong, warm fingers cupped her face to guide her eyes back to his.
It was a touch far too loving for a male who barely tolerated her, and Feyre flinched back.
Her shoulder hit stone, and she glanced around herself with wide eyes. Her uneasy lungs collapsed as she realized where she lay.
Coffin!
Every fiber of her being shrieked with horror.
The memory of a sickening, final snap echoed in her head, bouncing off the walls of her skull.
I died! her helpless mind screeched. I died! I’m dead!
“No, Feyre, you’re alive,” Rhys told her. His hushed voice was steady, but his lips trembled as he stroked her cheek. “You are so, so alive.”
Feyre whimpered, hating the way a knot inside of her chest loosened at the sound of his voice, at the feeling of the rough pad of his thumb lingering near her lips, so she slapped at his wrist. He huffed a dry laugh but removed his hand. At the perimeter of her mind, dark talons she hadn’t even noticed uncurled and retreated as well.
“You’re alright,” he murmured, curling a brittle lock of her hair around two fingers instead. Deft, practiced—and remarkably gentle, as if he’d done it before. “You’re alive, my love.”
Those talons in her mind must have been holding her tattered edges together, because her panic surged higher. Higher and higher and higher, roaring in her ears until all she could see behind her clenched-shut eyelids was a jeering crowd, until all she could feel was mud squelching beneath thin boots, a fiery grate crushing her, the handle of an ash dagger clenched in her bloodless hand—
Until a pair of strong arms banded around her shoulders and the back of her knees. She might have made some kind of noise, high and anxious, because Rhysand shushed her as he lifted her out of her coffin with such care that her heart stopped battering itself against her breastbone and slowed to a throbbing ache instead. He held her tightly, as if she might return to little more than dust and ashes and bones if he let her go.
A dizzying sense of deja vu seized her.
“Get off of me,” she croaked, shoving at her captor until he deposited her on the floor beside her grave.
The floor was solid beneath her, smooth, polished stone, but her body still trembled, her ribcage too small for her lungs. She clutched at her chest, monitoring him from her periphery.
“Breathe, Feyre.”
Feyre responded with a single finger. “I’m trying.”
Rhys laughed again, soft and amused this time, and shoved his hands into his pockets.
“I suppose you are a bit out of practice.”
Fuck you, she thought as loudly as she could.
Her legs were just as unpracticed as her lungs. They shook unsteadily beneath her, but she refused to reach out to him to anchor her.
Instead, she planted her hands on the lip of her final resting place and stared into it.
It wasn’t a coffin at all, but an elegant, open-faced sarcophagus hewn from what must have once been a massive boulder of obsidian. Inlaid deposits of silver around the rim flickered in the low faelight, reflecting artificial starshine back into the—
Oh, hell, the crypt she found herself in.
Feyre swallowed hard, beating back the panic scrabbling at the back of her mind. She focused on the black silk and velvet lining inside the sarcophagus instead. It was thick, luxurious, and far nicer than any corpse deserved.
Much less one with so much innocent blood on her hands. She could see it in her mind’s eye, drip-drip-dripping from her fingertips and into the sarcophagus until it overflowed, sloshing over the sides. Maybe she would lay down and drown in it, choking on her sins…
A brown hand reached for her, Rhysand's voice suddenly rough and thick as he said, “Don’t even think—”
Feyre jerked away, and Rhysand dropped his hand like he’d been burned.
“Shut up,” she warned him, unclenching her fingers from her sarcophagus and curling her arms around herself. Softness met the undersides of her arms, and she looked down with a wave of fresh dread.
Even her clothes were different.
The tattered hunting leathers she had worn to Amarantha’s final trial were gone, replaced by a gown crafted from stars. The material was not unlike the ribbons the shadowy twins had dressed her in to attend court Under the Mountain—just as gossamer-thin and still heaven to the touch. There was much more of it now, though, clinging to her arms and flowing around her hips, pooling at her feet. Instead of a golden belt, shards of diamonds formed starbursts around her hips.
Her skin wasn’t painted with swirling indigo either—a small relief until she glanced at the skin bared by the low neckline of the gown. It plunged to her navel, revealing black sigils tattooed over her heart.
Her gorge rose at the sight of them, at the feeling of them, beating against her skin like a second pulse.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, it was all wrong.
“Where’s Tamlin?” she asked sharply, glancing around herself—avoiding Rhysand’s suddenly cold gaze. His face was unreadable, his lips pressed together, but Feyre didn't care. Her dress was wholly Night Court, her new tattoos a sick deviation of the bargain ink on her left arm, and her surroundings…
They were not something that belonged in a land of rebirth and beginnings, either. They were not of the Spring Court.
This crypt was no memorial of her life.
It was a monument to her death.
Instead of flowers, candles dyed in violent shades of black and violet formed a circle around her sarcophagus. Their wicks still smoked, glittering with dying silver embers, as if some ghostly breath had snuffed their flames before she could set eyes on their unholy light. Bronze bowls filled with dried herbs and salts and a viscous liquid too dark to be anything but blood formed the points of a star within them; four more perched on each corner of her resting place. Runes identical to the sigils inked into her skin were etched into the floor, and as she examined them, they seemed to crawl along the tile, creeping closer and closer, reaching for her until she tore her eyes away from them.
A small niche carved into the wall, just large enough for one mourner, was draped in the same black silk and velvet that lined her sarcophagus.
"Where is he?" she asked again, harder this time.
“Tamlin?” Rhysand shrugged an insouciant shoulder. “What do you last remember of him?”
Feyre ground her teeth at the infuriating non-answer. Aged or not, Rhysand was still Rhysand, apparently.
That thought inspired another spiral into panic. If he looked so much older, then how long had she been dead? He hadn’t seemed any older than thirty by human standards when they had first met, but now he appeared closer to fifty.
How long did it take one of the High Fae—one of their powerful High Lords—to show signs of aging?
“Where’s Tamlin?” she grit out again, shoving that thought down.
She couldn’t imagine Tam would leave her here with Rhysand for so long. Even in death, she knew he would come for her. He loved her.
He loved her.
But, a wicked voice whispered into her mind, what of all those months he left you to Rhysand’s whims during your trials…
“Humor me, Feyre,” Rhys’s voice cracked through the icy chill creeping up on her. She glanced at him, and he stared back at her with an intensity that frightened her. It was a look that might have turned castles to rubble and leveled battlefields. A gentle talon stroked that thought, and her fear abated, chastened like an unruly child. “What do you last remember seeing of Tamlin?”
Feyre glared, but thought back, scraping at her dim memory. He had been on his knees, begging Amarantha for her life as her bones snapped and organs collapsed and she choked on blood…
No.
No, that hadn’t been the last time she’d seen him.
Her neck had snapped. The sound ricocheted through her skull. Pain fled, and peace seeped in as the safe, warm blackness of Death embraced her.
Then, she was far away but still seeing—seeing through eyes that weren ’t her own, eyes attached to a person who slowly rose from his position on a cracked, bloodied floor. Eyes that watched Tamlin’s still-masked face twist into something truly lupine as he raised his eyes to the bloody queen that murdered her and snarled.
Eyes that watched the beast slaughter the queen without sparing a single glance at his champion ’s body.
Rhysand ’s eyes.
And finally, only after Tamlin thrust a sword through Amarantha ’s skull and tore out her throat did the beast disappear as the High Lord of Spring slammed to his knees beside Feyre’s corpse.
He scooped up her limp, broken body, cradling it to his chest. He hadn ’t removed his mask, but she saw the tears that fell onto her filthy tunic, heard the shuddering sobs that broke from him as he rocked her, stroking her hair.
The brown-haired High Lord of Autumn approached with a clenched fist, and Tamlin snarled, still half-feral, snapping his fangs in warning …
And then, with a flash of sunshine and gust of sweet, rosebud-scented wind, he was gone, and so was she.
No, no, no! her soul shrieked as her body was torn away.
She was too young to die. She had too much to atone for, and she needed to get back to Tamlin. She hadn ’t fought for him just to die before she could have him. She hadn’t saved him just to abandon him.
The darkness threatened to overwhelm her, thick and inky and welcoming, but she clung stubbornly to the golden tether that tied her to Rhysand. In the far-off distance, she could see that it tapered off, disappearing behind foreboding walls of black adamant, but that did not deter her.
She held on, watching in horror through his eyes as he stared and stared and stared at the spot where her body had lain.
And she felt it as something within him snapped, forever altered.
As he discovered her presence lurking at the edges of his mind.
As a scaled beast emerged from those impenetrable walls shielding him and dragged her inside.
“Remembering now?” A life-warm arm wound around her waist, weaving between her crossed arms to lay a flat hand on her stomach. The scent of citrus and sea salt and sulfur engulfed her as surely as Rhysand’s mental claws sank back into her mind. Lips grazed her ear. “Or maybe you need a little something extra to jog your memory, hm?”
A glass casket glittered in a shard of moonlight. A garden of bouquets lay at her feet, the sickly sweet scent of rotting flowers hanging syrupy thick in the air.
Inside the casket, Feyre ’s body lay stiff and pale and on display. Buried beneath a mound of white lace, it looked like nothing so much as a wilted orchid in a terrarium. Her skin was waxy, her eyes sunken, and garish pink powder coated her cheeks to give her the cheap illusion of life.
And Rhysand was here for her.
“Sickening, isn’t it?” Rhysand’s fingers tapped out a quick, irritated rhythm. One dipped beneath the low neckline of her dress, idly stroking at her ribs. “Feyre Cursebreaker, lying in state so the worshipful masses could give thanks from dawn to dusk every day, with the most irritating priestess blowing incense in your face every hour on the hour.”
Feyre swallowed her horror and elbowed the male who still held her instead. She skewered him with a look over her shoulder as she raised her tattooed hand. “The bargain was only for the rest of my life.”
Rhys grinned and didn’t let go. If anything, his grip on her tightened as he rested his chin on her shoulder, his warm breath ghosting over her cheeks. It smelled of ashes and brimstone. “Tamlin and I didn’t shuffle your corpse around for a week every month, if that’s what you’re thinking. I had to do some good old-fashioned graverobbing to get you, Feyre.”
Her spine stiffened, and she looked away. Prick!
A hotter breath tickled the shell of her ear as he crooned, “Lucky you.”
A blade of darkness sliced through the dimly lit temple. Easy, unhurried steps brought him closer and closer to his mate, and a flick of his fingers banished the hideous offerings that dared to keep them apart.
A single thought turned the glass coffin into sparkling dust and metal shavings.
For a long while, Rhysand stared at her. He had fought Amarantha for this human girl, had crawled on his knees for her, had broken into the minds of almost every damned High Lord of Prythian for her …
And it still hadn ’t been enough.
He had spent three months hating himself for not starting by soothing Tamlin ’s frenzied thoughts, for letting the coward winnow away before she could be Made, for damning this girl’s body to endure Ianthe’s self-indulgent bloviating before he could return for her.
But now that his court had been put back to rights, countless fires doused and insurgents slaughtered, he was here to make it right.
His hand hovered over her body, a pool of midnight gathering in his cupped palm, and he tipped it into her mouth.
For what you gave, he told the spirit in his mind, claws grazing her disembodied presence. She had been curled against his shields since the moment he found her clinging to the scraps of their mating bond, too lethargic and weak to do more than rest.
He rejoiced as his power woke something within her, strengthening her spirit just enough to stir.
His heart squeezed when she startled, though. She tried to shriek as they stared at her body together. She tried to writhe. To tear herself from his mind and flee back to hers. But her strength had been sapped by the immense effort it took to exist in the murky realm between life and death.
A single thought from him soothed her, and then he bent, lifting her precious body into his arms.
Hold on, darling. This is not your end, he whispered to the phantom mate in his mind.
Feyre sucked in a chilled breath.
Now that she knew where to look, she beheld the golden cord throbbing between them, bridging their souls. Dark satisfaction flowed down it as Rhysand ended the memory of their journey from the Spring Court before he left the temple. From the chaos and gore she glimpsed beyond the open doors, she got the sense that he’d killed the irritating priestess as part of his good old-fashioned graverobbing.
He must have heard that thought because he smiled, and the sharp blade of his teeth glistened in her periphery like a threat fulfilled.
She glanced back at him. “Where am I, Rhys?”
“The catacombs,” Rhysand murmured. Heart-clenching sorrow panged down that golden bridge. Down the mating bond. “Beneath the Hewn City.”
“The hewn… city?”
His hand stilled, lifting off of her stomach—releasing her.
“The Hewn City, yes. The seat of power in the Night Court.”
Feyre bit her lip. He must have jogged some hidden recess of memories, because more vague recollections filtered back, other moments she had witnessed from her refuge inside his mind: a horrible throne of carved beasts, an assembly of vile courtiers bowing and scraping at his feet, a cold-faced male with batlike wings dragging a would-be assassin to the dungeons in the belly of this mountain.
It looked like hell on earth. Amarantha’s court had been little more than a pale fragment of the magnificent, festering pit that existed under Rhysand's rule, where each and every one of his scheming courtiers were truly wicked and depraved.
“Tamlin didn’t come for me?” Feyre asked, her voice small and hurt.
Rhys cleared his throat, his eyes shuttering as he took a step backward.
“He looked,” he said coldly. There was a cruel glint in his violet eyes. “He never found you, though.”
Another flash of memory: the same winged male reporting that whispers from the Spring Court suggested the body of Prythian’s savior had been stolen. Spring’s High Lord, already grieving and half-mad, ordering a stop to reconstruction efforts so every able hand could search for her. More whispers, more rumors—a party from Hybern was snuck onto Spring’s western shore not long afterward. Somehow, a mad human general had been resurrected, even madder now than before, and Tamlin had struck a bargain to do the same with her once he found the remains of his beloved.
Feyre’s stomach turned.
Rhysand shoved his fists back into his pockets as he dragged the tip of a polished black boot through one of the creeping sigils on the ground. “What else do you remember?”
This time, Feyre barely had to try. She saw her sisters’ manor below the wall. Elain, sobbing wretchedly over the news of her death as Nesta turned to a block of ice beside her—and Feyre, bashing at the walls of Rhys’s mind, if only to speak with them one last time. Infuriating meetings with human queens and High Lords. Cruel books that whispered and taunted. A Cauldron, dumping out two pale females.
Winged legions and pitched battles.
Endless nights alone in a commander’s tent, curled up inside of Rhysand’s weary mind as he fought for just ten minutes of peace, ten minutes of sleep. Nightmares filled with snapping necks. Heartsick, hopeless wishes for his mate, his mate, his Feyre, his mate when he finally shoved aside thoughts of sleep and studied the taboo magics in the ancient grimoires he kept hidden in the deepest reaches of his pocket realms instead.
The war was won. The Cauldron shattered, and the destruction of worlds was contained only by a web of magic woven with the power of every High Lord.
Then, Feyre had woken to watch the diplomatic summit afterward, when four little vials of power were covertly pressed into Rhysand’s hand—buttery sunshine, the renewal of dawn, an icy kiss of snow, and salty seaside air. Months later, a final vial, one that felt like chilled mornings and warm firesides, given in exchange for a magical dagger, a treacherous alliance, and aid with an assassination.
Each vial had been poured into her unresponsive mouth, but with one left, Rhysand had stopped.
He had stopped.
The candles’ silver embers finally burned out, and darkness blanketed Feyre’s crypt.
“I would have broken into Tamlin’s mind to get that final seed of power, but I thought better of tainting you with that rot,” Rhys told her, watching her with shrewd eyes. “He still spends most of his time as a slavering beast. I didn’t know what effect it might have on you.”
Feyre looked at him, and then back to the shadowed remnants of the forbidden ritual he had performed. Her heartbeat and the pulsing of the runes carved into her flesh echoed in her ears as she followed the line of the sigils, circling her coffin as she read them—read them, because so many hours spent staring out of Rhysand’s tired, burning eyes accustomed her not just to reading the common tongue, but to deciphering these horrible forms of archaic sorcery too.
The marble floor was cold beneath her bare feet as she came to a stop in front of him, in front of the rune he had altered from life to love with the tip of his boot. “So you became some kind of dark necromancer instead?”
He tipped his head thoughtfully. “Romantic, isn’t it?”
“You’re obsessed with me.” Feyre meant for the words to be daggers, to wound him, but they were breathless, fascinated.
“Utterly,” Rhysand agreed, reaching up to twirl a lock of hair around her finger again, as if he couldn’t resist touching her. “I don’t know how you forgot.”
Neither could Feyre.
Every second that passed brought back something new—long walks in a city painted every color of the rainbow, where Rhys pointed out everything he thought her tired soul might want to see. Glimpses of tables set for family dinners, of Nesta and Elain glowing with immortal health; he always took an extra bite of dessert just so she could savor the way the chocolate melted on his tongue. With his help, she had grown stronger, more powerful—more alive.
There were more nightmares of red hair and sharp nails and Wyrms and ash daggers, followed by more long nights hunched over his books while Feyre tried to untangle the snarled knots in his mind. The longest nights were spent in this crypt, surrounded by pungent obsidian salts that called her out of her grave and into a circle on this floor, into a form as insubstantial as a breeze.
Night after night after night, lounging together in this catacomb, trapped just out of reach on either side of the veil that separated the living from the dead. Endless years passing as he asked the ghost of a mortal girl for her opinion on art and trade and diplomacy. She was still an ephemeral slip of a soul, tied to the mortal plane by a single golden thread and a few drops of power, but she was awake. She was talking and learning and laughing.
Her mouth watered at the memory of the way he’d lounged in that niche across from her sarcophagus one too many nights, clad only in soft sleeping pants as he dozed off to the sound of her voice…
Gods, had she always wanted so badly to touch him?
“Careful…” Rhysand’s voice was a low rumble. His expression shifted to something hungry and wicked.
Feyre ducked her head. If she looked at him from a certain angle, in a certain light, his eyes looked like black pits, swirling deep and dangerous. She almost wanted to fall into them, to lose herself in the stained remnants of his soul, because it had been stained for her.
And then he opened his arrogant, smirking mouth. “It’s so interesting you should remember those nights so quickly, darling.”
“I remember everything,” she bluffed, ignoring the heat in her cheeks. She thought harder, until her head hurt, trying to summon up more memories. One of the early salt-circle summonings stood out—a shoe flying across the crypt, hitting Rhysand square in the forehead as a furious gust of wind blew apart the salt circle that had summoned her and severed their connection.
His low laugh settled on her skin like a caress, and pleasure coiled low in her belly. She marveled at it, even as it mortified her.
Had her body been this sensitive around him the last time she was alive? This responsive?
“That’s when I knew,” he murmured, hooking his fingers into the topmost layer of her skirt.
She stifled a gasp when she saw that his hands were stained too, as if he had held them over a fire until the skin charred. She didn’t have to know much about magic to know that no amount of healing would ever erase that darkness, the indelible mark of the hellish rituals he’d cast to steal those nights with her.
“Knew what?” she breathed.
Rhys didn’t care about his stained hands; he simply used his grip on her dress to pull her closer. Then he angled his body toward hers, and his voice dipped to an intimate murmur, heartbreaking and enamored, “That the human girl who told me to go to hell when I offered to heal her arm was still in there somewhere, and I could bring her back.”
“So you did.”
His lips brushed her temple, and her insides turned molten. “Not without a little resistance.”
“You were an ass Under the Mountain,” Feyre teased. Beneath her dress, her knees had gone wobbly. Her breasts were heavy, suddenly, as she became hyper-aware of her body, of every graze of silk against skin threatening to send her up in flames. “You needed to prove how much you wanted me back.”
Because the night she had torn the shoes from her corpse to throw them at Rhys had been the night Feyre learned she didn’t have to obey his summons. She was tired, her soul shredded, and she just wanted to rest. So the next time he found enough rare salt and drew that damned circle—after she had spent an entire week watching him charm a pretty Summer Court princess—she had resisted its siren song, watching through his eyes as he panicked when she didn’t appear.
“Haunt me!” he had hissed, furious tendrils of night scattering his audience of candles and spellbooks. “Come back and fucking haunt me!”
Rhys winced, and the claws in her mind dug a little deeper.
She had haunted him. Cresseida had been so alive, perched in Rhysand’s lap, and Feyre had suddenly become so angry at her death, angry at the injustice of it, angry that the High Lord she’d thought she loved had left her to rot in a glass coffin when this one kept disturbing what should have been her final, eternal sleep. So she had harnessed the seed of dark power Rhys had given her to snuff the ritual candles he lit for her, to blind every female who looked at him for a moment too long…
And to gag Tamlin with a thick band of midnight darkness, when he dared to accuse Rhysand of desecrating her remains during a meeting of the High Lords.
“And have I?” Amused, unhinged heat glittered in the stars in Rhys’s eyes. “Proven myself?”
“I suppose you must have, since I’m here now.” Feyre pinched his side, but left her hand at his waist, testing the firmness of it beneath her palm. “How long have I been dead?”
A couple decades, she guessed. A century, at most.
The lines on Rhys’s face deepened, and for a moment, he looked like Feyre had punched a sword through his gut—not asked a simple question.
His throat bobbed. He swallowed, answering slowly, “Nearly five hundred years.”
“Five hundred…” Her hand curled into itself at his side, suddenly uncertain.
Five hundred years.
It was unfathomable to her, that endless stretch of time—and unimaginable that Rhys hadn’t taken another lover while she lay cold and moldering in her grave.
But Rhys’s hand slid into her hair, cradling her skull with tenderness she had never felt before and baring his teeth as if the mere thought offended him. “There has been no one else.”
Then he released her, gripping the hand at his waist instead. He drew it to his chest, laying her palm flat over his heart. His inky lashes fluttered, his breath shuddering as if he truly hadn’t been touched in half a millennium. His heart raced beneath her hand, and it was wrong, perhaps, to feel a sense of ownership, but after all the years she’d spent as a silent, unseen observer in Rhys’s mind, Feyre felt she had a right to it.
Rhys clearly agreed; he placed his hand over hers, his thumb stroking the pulse in her wrist like he meant to weld them together in that position for an eternity.
“I'm yours, Feyre Archeron, body and soul. Only yours.”
Mine. The thought awakened something bestial inside her.
Rhys grinned.
“Now tell me, since you remember everything…” His warm hand followed the line of her arm upward, tracing her shoulder, and curled around the back of her neck. Rhys’s lips tipped into a smile laced with promise, a breath fanning over her face as he turned her toward him. “How did I promise to kiss you when you woke up, darling?”
Oh, Mother above. Her thighs hit the cold edge of her sarcophagus. She didn’t realize they had been moving, but in a single, fluid motion, the strong hand that Rhys had been using to toy with her dress cupped her backside instead, lifting her and perching her on that ledge.
“You’ve been in love with a ghost,” she said faintly—unsure if it was a statement or question. “For five hundred years.”
“With you, Feyre. I fell in love with you, and I would have torn apart the heavens and the earth to get you back,” Rhys vowed, his gaze searing into her.
Feyre suspected there was truth to his words, considering the foul, ancient magic still pulsing between them, right alongside their mating bond. He held her to him as if she were as essential as air or water. As if, should she pull away, he would die from a lack of her.
His head bent toward hers. “I waited five centuries for you the first time. I waited another five to resurrect you. If you need time, I’ll wait again—”
“Kiss me,” she ordered.
So he did. His teeth snapped shut, his eyes went dark, and the hand at her nape angled her just the way he wanted her. His mouth met hers in an instant, though the first tentative brush lasted barely a second before hunger flared across the bond. Feyre moaned, and his tongue parted the seam of her lips. She was dimly aware of the press of his chest against hers as she opened herself to him, to the way he delved into her mouth, tasting her like he meant to consume her.
Like he missed sharing one body already.
She was breathless, but the burning in her lungs was little more than a reminder that she was alive and kissing him.
At the other end of the bond, the walls surrounding his mind opened, inviting her back inside the fortress that had been her home for longer than her own body. Feyre slipped inside, twining her thoughts with his. When he felt the ache at the apex of her thighs, he spread her legs wide enough to slot his hips between them, pressing into her until she whined into his mouth. Through the layers of her dress, she could feel the hard line of his arousal against her core—and in his mind, it was a perfect mirror of her own.
Finally, when she went dizzy from a lack of oxygen, he tore himself away from her.
“Everything I love is taken from me,” he panted. “I spent five hundred years damning myself because I refused to let fate add my mate to that list.”
Sharp teeth ripped at her bottom lip, licking away the pain that made Feyre gasp his name. He drew back just long enough for her to see the crimson droplets on his lips before his tongue—as black as his fingertips—darted out to catch them.
He tasted like blood and curses and poor decisions when he kissed her next. “My mate.”
“My living mate.” His hand slipped beneath her gown, finding her dripping and ready for him.
She locked her legs around him, and he groaned, the sound so low and ragged that it warmed her down to her bones. A bowl clattered, the displaced cloud of her skirt knocking it into her sarcophagus and spilling salt everywhere, and Feyre laughed.
Rhys pulled back only to raise a brow at her.
“You love me?” she asked, joy coating every word.
The devotion written onto every elegant line of his face was a beautiful, terrible thing to behold. “Yes.”
Feyre licked her fingers, dipped them into that small mound of black salt, and then tapped them against Rhys’s kiss-swollen lips.
“Then eat, mate.”
Notes:
Happy Halloween! 👻🎃 Do you think sealing a mating bond with summoning salts is a good idea or a bad one?
(Also, please note: the first flashback in italics is lifted from ACOTAR with only slight changes to set up the canon divergence!)
Chapter Text
Rhys didn’t pause to think it over. He didn’t give her a moment to reconsider her offer, he didn’t scan her face for any sign of hesitation, and he didn’t ask her if she was sure.
No, with unnatural speed, he shackled Feyre’s wrist in one strong hand and wrapped his lips around her fingers. His mouth was furnace hot, and every muscle in her body went taut as his tongue traced each dip and contour of her fingers, licking and sucking like he meant to consume not just the salt she’d offered him, but the tattoos he had inked into her skin as well.
His blackened thumb stroked the pulse point in her wrist with deceptive tenderness.
But Feyre knew better. She recognized the way the stars in his violet eyes burned at her—for her—like a million supernovas lit them from within. His gaze glowed, the overwhelming force of his power lighting the darkness between them, and she trembled beneath the intensity of it.
She had never known desire like the smoldering look on Rhys’s face or the cosmic fire roaring to life behind the walls of his mind. He watched her with the anticipatory, full-body focus of an apex predator—intent, but utterly assured of himself. Of his strength.
Of his claim.
With the unadulterated force of his attention focused solely on her, she imagined it would be all too easy to lose herself in him.
As if their mating bond was as attuned to her mind as he was, the thread linking their souls tugged, reeling her closer and closer until they were chest-to-chest, heart-to-heart. Until her lips were on his jaw, kissing and tasting and trying to steal a bit of him for herself. He tasted of salt and skin and something unnameable—something not of their world.
Feyre didn’t care. Unending want streamed down the bond, erasing the fear she should have felt in favor of heightening the urgency of her desire for him. She was acutely aware of the hollow ache between her legs, but when she tried to press them together, Rhys’s infuriatingly thick thighs were in her way.
Too-sharp teeth nipped at her knuckles in reproach. She tore herself away from him to watch as Rhys’s lips edged upward, forming a cocky grin around her fingers.
Don’t rush me, mate, he warned her mind-to-mind.
The thought echoed between them—matematematemate. Feyre forgot herself as she succumbed to smug, territorial instinct and sank her teeth into a curling tattoo above his collar in return.
Her mate. Hers.
But her mate was cruel. He took advantage of her momentary distraction to grind the thick line of his cock against her. Feyre groaned as the endless layers of fabric caught between them muted the pleasant friction. Her precarious perch on a stone wall no thicker than the width of her hand meant she couldn’t press closer without toppling back into her grave.
Not that Rhys would let her. Between the hand tangled in her hair and his iron grip on her wrist, she was going nowhere unless he willed it.
She tried to huff, but the sound that came out was more like a desperate whimper. “Stop teasing!”
A cool laugh slithered along her skin, raising chills in its wake as the shadows in the crypt lengthened. Once the darkness of a hundred thousand nights had embraced them, Rhys finally released her fingers with a quiet pop.
“Do you have any clue how long you have teased me, love?” His voice was rough, thick with disbelief.
A gentle pull on her mind teased out a new memory: her High Lord, lounging on the black cushions in his alcove across the crypt. His head was thrown back, and he stroked himself while her spirit watched, enraptured, from her salt circle prison.
He was beautiful. His tattooed chest heaved with every harsh breath he took, his fist twisting around the dark head of his cock. Had she been alive, Feyre’s hands would have itched to take the place of his. Her mouth would have watered with the temptation to taste the diamond-bright bead of liquid that gathered at its tip, to paint pleasure on his skin with nothing but her tongue.
In the present, Rhys’s shadowed presence lurking at the edges of that memory, watching her watch him. He waited for her to glance toward him before he drew forth his own recollection of that night, scraping a gentle phantom claw over her own memory before laying his atop it.
Like a glass, it sharpened her memory into focus.
The translucent slip of his mate was just as naked as he was, kneeling at the edge of the salt boundary that separated them. Her tattooed fingers plucked at her pretty nipples as she bit her lip while her other hand moved furiously between her thighs. In the back of his mind, across the precious tether that tied her to this life, he could feel her frustration mounting, hot and furious. Without a living body of her own, his pleasure was hers, and his eager little mate was far, far less patient than he.
No matter. He loved watching her squirm for him, and she had more than earned this punishment.
“I need to come, Rhys,” she whined, glaring at the fist pumping his cock at a leisurely pace. He slowed even further when she spoke, tipping his head thoughtfully at her.
Her lips drew back as she bared her teeth, and the hand at her breast curled over her unbeating heart before slamming against the barrier of the salt circle.
“Stop teasing!”
“I’m not teasing,” he reminded her evenly, gathering the precum welling in his slit on his fingers. He drew it down the underside of his length—just to let his artist see the way it shone in the dim light. Just to see the spark of curiosity and creativity in her eyes before she remembered her frustration. “I’m teaching you a lesson.”
He imagined he could hear her incorporeal teeth gnashing as she glared at him.
“About what?”
A shocked laugh cracked out of him.
It was almost as if Feyre didn ’t remember that her soul had woken during his meeting with the High Lord of the Day Court this morning. As if she hadn’t taken one look through his eyes at Helion’s thick, bare thighs and sighed, brazenly daydreaming of how firm they would be beneath Rhys’s hands until his cock was torturously hard against the fastening of his trousers. Until Helion had taken a deep breath, glanced downward, and lifted an intrigued brow.
As if, when Helion extended yet another grinning invitation to his bed, his mate hadn ’t begged him to accept.
Rhys pushed his hips upward, hissing as his cock slid through his fist, just so she could watch his thighs flex with the movement. He was close, his entire body zinging with the pleasure he denied them both, so he tightened his hand around the base of his shaft.
He wouldn ’t come before Feyre learned her lesson.
“About delayed gratification.”
“You’re going to regret this,” she swore, panting on a false breath.
Strong hands curved around her ass, snapping her out of the memory.
Rhys lifted her. For a moment, she was weightless, her heartbeat pounding in her throat as he crossed the room in just a few long strides; in the next, she tumbled into the dark alcove that he had occupied alone for so many years.
The velvet cushion broke her fall. It was plush, comfortably worn thanks to the endless hours he had spent torturing them both from it, but she barely glanced at it. Nor did she take the time to examine the shelves carved into one of the walls—filled to bursting with books, another bowl of salt, and jars of herbs and bones—before Rhys ducked beneath the curtains hanging around the gaping maw of the alcove to join her inside.
He followed her onto the bench, planting one knee between her legs with arrogant ease. Darkness fell from his broad shoulders—or perhaps he was just large enough to blot out what little light remained in her tomb—and he draped himself over her, licking his way up her throat. Feyre fought to keep her breathing steady, but that was easier said than done when she felt as if molten gold dripped into her veins wherever he touched her.
He loosed a possessive rumble when he reached her ear. “Do you need a remedial lesson, darling?”
“You’re sick.” Feyre wove a hand into his hair, desperate to know if it felt as soft as it looked. It did, like crushed velvet beneath her fingers, and she tugged at the black-and-silver strands. “Who pleasures themselves in their dead mate’s tomb?”
Rhys turned his head. His cool breath fanned across her face as he brushed the tip of his nose against her own. It was a move that was incongruently tender compared to the unyielding hands that grasped her waist, and her heart skipped a beat.
His eyes were the only source of light in the unnatural dark as he looked at her. “You loved it.”
“I loved you.”
Rhysand stilled, staring at her. Through her. Inside the walls of his mind, her haven for centuries, everything disappeared.
Everything but her, the sole guiding star shining out in midst of his endless night.
Feyre’s stomach tightened.
“I love you,” she repeated again, softer this time, out loud and into his mind. I love you. “Of course I love you, Rhys.”
His next breath was ragged. Wrecked. His fingers stroked her waist, his forehead pressed to hers, and heart-shattering relief barrelled down the bond.
“Feyre…”
He spoke her name like a prayer. No—like she was divine, a goddess in her own right who had condescended to answer the reverent pleading of a broken and undeserving male, her name the only two syllables he could muster through his awe.
So she hooked her fingers in his collar and dragged him to her. He followed willingly, easily, as if he weren’t a High Lord of Prythian and she wasn’t all that remained of a foolish, inconsequential mortal girl. His tongue flicked out to lick his lips almost nervously, revealing that it was black as his fingers, like the dark magic he’d wielded to bring her here had tainted him from the inside out.
She kissed him.
She knew it should be gentle; this first joining was supposed to be tender and sentimental, the stuff of storybooks with happy endings. Her desire burned like embers, low and warm at the base of her spine. The languorous slide of Rhys’s lips against hers confirmed that he would stoke that fire gently if that’s what she wanted. He would build it to a roaring blaze without letting it rage out of control, if that’s what she needed.
But twined together as they were physically, mentally, he could not conceal the frenzied need chipping away at his restraint. She felt it in his body, in the way his fingertips dug into her sides as he pulled her flush with his thigh. In the way he dragged her dripping cunt over fine fabric and tense, twitching muscle until she sighed against his mouth. In the way he reveled in that sigh, his tongue parting her lips to glide along her own until she shook with the same feverish need he felt for her.
This would not be tame, gentle lovemaking, but a quick, feral fuck to answer the primal call ringing down the bond that demanded they consummate it as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
Hearing her thoughts, Rhys ended the kiss with a pleased murmur, dragging his lips over her cheek.
“Breathe,” he reminded her, his tone laden with amusement, before biting down on her earlobe. A shiver rippled through her limbs, and she inhaled sharply as he chuckled. “We can have both, since I don’t intend to let you leave my bed for the next several years, at least. I certainly waited long enough for this.”
Greedy, she admonished shakily.
In response, his mind dipped into the most intimate parts of hers, licking and stroking.
Don’t tell me you thought I was selfless. He laughed against her lips when she moaned, tracing his teeth over the wound he’d opened. He coaxed another metallic drop of blood onto his tongue. I may make a good show of being a magnanimous High Lord these days, but all bets are off when it comes to you, my love.
Rhys …
His tongue retreated as he broke from her with a gasp, a glittering string of saliva connecting their lips. She followed him before it could break, licking back into the black, hellish void of his body.
Tell me what we want, Feyre.
Her hand sank deeper into his dark hair, the other exploring the hard muscle of his arm; she hitched her leg around his hip, pressing her core to the thick line of his arousal as she mapped the strange shapes of his teeth with the tip of her tongue.
I need you inside of me.
And that was it—that was all she could think to ask for. All she needed and wanted.
A beastly growl sent a fresh wave of chills skittering down her spine, and one of his clever hands shoved aside her skirts again so his deft fingers could trace the dripping seam of her body.
“Is that so?” Rhys tore himself away from her, flashing her a dangerous grin.
Feyre tipped her hips toward his hand, chasing his touch. “Yes.”
“Are you certain?” A single fingertip dipped into her and, before she could push closer, withdrew.
“Yes!”
“Hm.” Her mate watched her, his eyes narrowing. “You see, Feyre darling, I think you may need another lesson first.”
“What?”
“Oh, yes. I expected some disorientation when I woke you.” The heel of his palm glanced over her clit, sending sparks through her hips. “But I didn’t think you would have the gall to crawl out of your grave asking about another male.”
“Rhys,” she panted. “You’re not being—“
“What? I’m not being fair?” The wicked mockery in his voice did sinful things to her, but it was the flat of his hand coming down on her cunt with a muffled crack that made Feyre yelp and bow off the cushion. “I just told you I wouldn’t be selfless with you. You see, I can forgive the momentary confusion, but I think you need to learn about who really takes care of you before I give you what you need.”
Oh, gods.
Without waiting for a response, Rhys pushed off of her in a single fluid motion. He went to his knees between her legs, a careless bit of magic drawing back the curtains around the alcove. Then he hooked an arm behind her hips to drag her to the edge of her seat, and Feyre became little more than a knot of shock and lust as he bent forward over her, the sheer breadth of his body pinning her to the cushion.
She could see the plan as it formed in his mind: he was going to drink from her, to finally test the exquisite softness of her cunt on his tongue. The stone floor was cold and hard beneath his knees, but it faded to nothing as he bent his head to Feyre’s soft, warm breast. As her arousal dripped into his palm, slicking the way for him. A deep breath filled his lungs with her scent, sweet pear and lilacs cut with the headiness of lust, and his mouth watered as he kissed the beautiful black runes between her breasts.
He had etched them into her skin with painstaking care, marking his mate from the hollow of her throat to her navel with the incantation that would bring her back to life, and now his work was finally going to pay off.
But first…
First, Rhys laid his head on her sternum, listening to the unsteady beating of her heart through flesh and bone, more beautiful and wondrous than any symphony. How long had he waited and waited and waited to hear that precious sound again…
Feyre blinked and came back to herself, her mate’s thoughts receding like a tide.
Star-flecked eyes met hers as he sank two fingers into her to the knuckle. Immediately, he curled them upward, dragging a helpless gasp out of her throat. Again and again and again he moved inside of her, pumping and twisting and pulling until he knew exactly which combination of movements made her head fall back and her vision darken at the corners.
And then, when his name finally spilled from her lips as she reached the very edge of her climax, he placed one final kiss to her sternum, withdrew his fingers, and sat back on his heels.
“So nice to have an attentive pupil for once.”
Feyre gasped again, outraged and emptier than she had been before he touched her. Her mind was clouded by her unfulfilled fury; she barely registered the way he winked at her as he wound layer after layer of her gossamer skirts around his messy hand.
The jagged sound of fabric shredding split the air. Seams ripped and gemstones flew as one firm pull tore Feyre’s gown away from her body, the harsh tug against her waist and shoulders dragging her forcibly back into focus. Rhys shot her a careless, roguish grin, and gossamer slithered over her body as he drew her gown away. The darkness filling her crypt consumed the shredded husk that he fed it.
He tapped her bare thighs as if he hadn’t just destroyed the finest thing she had ever worn on a whim.
“Open up. I want to taste my mate’s perfect cunt before I fuck it.”
Feyre tried, but it was a wasted effort. Rhys didn’t wait for her to regain any semblance of control over her limbs; he spread her legs for her, bending them and propping her heels on the edge of the cushion with breathtaking gentleness before locking his hands around her ankles.
Chilled underground air kissed her exposed, overheated cunt, and a relieved sigh pushed out of her lungs.
A dark tendril radiating something like jealousy captured that small bit of pleasure as it danced down the mating bond toward him. Feyre might have laughed if Rhys didn’t lift a dark brow and bend his head to lick a broad stripe over her.
“Oh!”
His low sound of approval settled on her skin like a caress as he dipped his tongue into her folds. Fire lit up every nerve ending in her body, and then he was in her mind again, cataloging every response, every snap of the flames against her skin.
He didn’t waste time on tenderness, as promised. His teeth scraped her, his tongue fucked her, and whenever she got too close to tumbling over into her climax, he tore himself away from her to bite his mark into her thighs instead. The third or fourth time he denied her, a broken noise echoed off the walls of her crypt—the sound of pleasure turning to impatience and pain and frustration—so finally he wrapped his lips around her clit and sucked, lashing that oversensitive bundle of nerves with his tongue until she shattered.
She might have bucked beneath him, she might have shrieked, but her awareness of her body faded into nothing as dark talons took hold of the cresting wave of her orgasm. Just a few skilled thoughts manipulated her body’s response to him, amplifying it until she knew nothing but her climax and him.
Her mate alone could pleasure her like this. Her mate had shredded his soul so he could have the chance to do so. Her mate was the one holding onto her as the rip current of her pleasure dragged her under again and again and again, until she was utterly wrung out and limp beneath his tongue.
Her mate.
Her mate.
Her mate.
“Rhys… Rhys.” Her lips and tongue somehow formed the sound of his name when he finally let her go, but her mind had drifted away, lost in the calm, night-dark sea he’d finally created to quench the inferno of her orgasm.
The night-dark sea.
Feyre faltered as insidious, instinctual fear slithered into her veins.
It was dark. So dark, and so peaceful. Too dark, too untethered, too much like—
Panic overwrote pleasure as she reeled, groping blindly for the golden cord that bound them together.
Rhys!
Between one heartbeat and the next, the bond lit up. The scaled horror of her mate’s conscious mind latched onto her, and shields of adamant rose up around them. He drew her out of the water, blanketing her instead in the gentle, luxurious night that formed the foundations of their mind.
Their mind—they had never left their mind.
A relieved breath shuddered out of her as warm, solid hands settled on her waist, the cushion dipping as Rhys rejoined her in the alcove.
“I have you, my delicious little mate.”
His praise made her shiver almost as much as the damp kisses he trailed over her shoulder. Calloused fingers danced across her tattooed forearm, tracing the design, before twining with her own. The heat of his body enveloped her—smooth and silken and firm against her skin, not a stitch of fabric between them, and impossibly larger than before—and Feyre arched into his embrace.
“I’m never letting you go again,” Rhys soothed her, petting her body and her mind until her stiff limbs relaxed and her breathing calmed. Distantly, she made out the sound of leather unfurling, but the razor-tipped teeth her mate scraped over her breast before kissing away the sting distracted her.
She hooked her legs around his hips again. This time, finally, there was nothing between them to prevent the slick, teasing slide of his cock through her folds. The sound of it was obscene, wet and titillating, and she huffed as a ridge caught on her clit, wiggling her hips. “Give it to me.”
Rhys’s mouth ghosted over her cheek, and he purred, “Open your eyes for me first.”
Notes:
Yes, I know. I know. This was only supposed to be two chapters, but now it’s four. You all know how I am, right? I start overthinking the smut until it spirals out of control. (Also, someone said something about a Rhys POV epilogue, and who am I to say no to that?)
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little lesson on delayed gratification, and please mind the tags going into the next chapter!
Chapter 3: ain’t it exciting you, the rumble where you lay?
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
A beast of scales and spikes and fangs loomed large and black over Feyre.
Ice crackled through her veins and tensed the limbs that had just been rendered deliciously lax. Frigid terror warred with the desire that had turned her molten beneath her mate’s tongue, and base human instinct froze her body into place—the same that had once brought her eye-to-eye with a faerie wolf.
Fight or flight.
And, Cauldron fry her, she had never been one to choose flight.
“Rhys?”
“Yes, love?” the monster above her drawled—and Feyre saw what she didn’t before.
The familiar upward sweep of the beast’s cheekbones. The slant of the dark, slitted-pupil eyes. The elegant, regal line of his strange maw.
Each of us has a beast roaming beneath our skin, roaring to get out, Rhys had told her the day she spent cleaning lentils out of his hearth Under the Mountain, offering a glimpse of talons and shadowed wings while she brandished an iron poker at him. While your Tamlin prefers fur, I find wings and talons to be more entertaining.
Entertaining. Fucking hell, there was nothing entertaining about this horror in the slightest.
If she had any breath left in her lungs, she might have laughed hysterically and uncontrollably at herself. At the memory of the mortal girl who thought that a wolf, a Wyrm, and a half-transformed High Lord with only the dregs of his power were frightening. Those little spectacles had been nothing. Less than nothing.
Because now, above her? Rhys was terror given form, the primal fear at the heart of every nightmare in the flesh. He was a predator, built for rending limbs from bodies and tearing hearts from chests.
He was Winged Death.
Feyre swallowed, looking closer.
The golden brown skin she had waited centuries to touch was gone. All that remained now was a broad, massive body covered in layer after layer of rippling ebony scales. Ridged and almost featherlike, they blanketed him in impenetrable armor that stretched as far as Feyre could see. And where the scales ended, the massive, membranous wings of a demon began, jutting upward from his back—austere, violent things tipped in claws that glinted like daggers in the low light. The sharp, dark edges of them, of all of him, faded into the swarm of shadows that surrounded their alcove.
His shadows. The lethal camouflage of a male who bent the night to his will.
His hands curled around her waist, and she felt the razor-keen talons he had once leveled at Amarantha prick her sides. When she dared to glance downward, her eyes skimming his trim waist, she found that his even feet were transformed, replaced entirely by grotesque, clawed appendages she had no name for.
But that was of little importance once the rough, strange underside of his cock slid through her oversensitive, slick folds again. Made her suck in a sharp breath as the bond twinged and he lifted himself off of her so she could see that too.
Gods, he—
Her mouth went dry at her first glimpse of his considerable length, hanging heavy and hard over her stomach. It was the same midnight shade as the rest of him, her own wetness glistening like stars in the night along its length. But the coloring, the size, weren’t what snared her mind.
It was the ridges.
Her heartbeat accelerated to an uneven, excited patter in spite of herself.
Half a dozen thick ridges that marked Rhys’s length from the root all the way to the terrifying, angular point of his tip. And above the base, which was so thick that Feyre shifted in anticipation of the stretch of it, lay a row of raised, blunted scales marking his pelvis.
”I assume it’s to your liking,” Rhys rumbled, the quiet warning of thunder at midnight. The gentle promise of a coming storm.
The familiar, comforting sound of her mate’s voice, even as it issued from the nightmare’s mouth.
Feeling returned to her limbs, and every last crystallized shard of her fear melted as she stared at that inhuman cock. Desire blazed back to life brighter and hotter than ever before, and Feyre absentmindedly licked her lips as she stared and stared.
She didn’t care if it was wrong. If it broke some natural law or chafed against her mortal instincts to want him. He was hers, her mate, and she would have him.
She lay back against the cushion, spreading her legs wider around Rhys’s hips. “Perhaps.”
His next purring laugh rolled from his broad chest into hers. “Careful, darling, or I’ll have to teach you another lesson about baiting your beast.”
Her beast. Her mate.
He was hers, all hers. Her imagination ran rampant as she tried to predict what it might feel like once he was sheathed to the hilt in her. Hard? Rough? Would she be able to feel the ridges sliding into her, stretching her over and over again with every thrust? Would it hurt, or would he leave her deliciously sore, her nerves frayed?
Fuck.
Rhys’s end of the bond grew taut and strained, like a fist clenched to the point of pain. Her eyes snapped upward to his. A shade of relief flitted through her—the exquisite, familiar face she loved was back, though the scales creeping up his neck and spreading over the high, perfect line of his cheekbones hinted that his control over his transformation wouldn’t last for long.
She found she didn’t mind that though, and one word was enough to reveal the depth of her desire for him.
“Rhys.”
One ragged, breathless word as she reached for him across the bond, watching through her lashes as his stern mouth softened and turned upward into a feline smile just for her.
“Rhys.”
“Yes, darling?” His voice was strained—the sound of mountains shifting after an earthquake, of avalanches on the verge of crashing down, of the tallest peaks tearing into a dark, starless sky until the gods themselves were forced to flee.
In this form, his lips and chin were still glossy with her arousal. It was obscene, but the sight woke something possessive and hungry in Feyre, fanning the flames within her—though, whether she needed to capture that infuriating, shining grin on a canvas or to shove him onto his back and climb onto his face to add to it, she couldn’t tell.
“You can do both as soon as I’m done with you.” The equally starved look Rhys gave her stole her breath. One hand cupped her breast, deft fingers circling a pebbled nipple and sending sparks down her spine. Her heart and runes pounded as one when his other rose to her face, thumbing her bottom lip. “But you do owe me a self portrait first.”
“What?”
He traced the line of her arm down to her hand next, and a claw scraped over her tattooed palm. Over the mountains and stars inked where a cat’s eye had once been.
“The agreed-upon payment for your resurrection.” He lifted her palm to his mouth and pressed a messy kiss to it. “Something to hang in my study so you can haunt me always.”
”Sounds like a pretty bad deal,” Feyre breathed, glancing backwards. She couldn’t see the mess of salt and sigils strewn around her sarcophagus through the sepulchral gloom surrounding the alcove, but she imagined they were still just as terrible and sentient as before. “You did all this work just for a portrait?”
Rhys’s mouth tightened, and a pang echoed across the bridge between their souls. Whether it was grief or love or longing, she didn’t know. Perhaps all three were so inextricably linked for them that she would never know. Perhaps their mating bond would always be dogged by the phantom of five hundred missing years.
He bent to press his lips to hers, just because he could.
He drew back in time to let her watch his eyes darken, the pupils lengthening back into reptilian slits. “I’ve done far worse for far less.”
Her mate, as cruel as he was beautiful.
Her chest squeezed.
She might have stopped to examine the feeling, but a flicker in her peripheral vision distracted her. She tracked it downward, squinting through the darkness, and—
And sucked in a breath. Even in this form, tattoos marked his chest. But these… these were alive, moving ceaselessly over the scaled planes of his body like the writhing ribbons of darkness leaking into the air around him. Whorls of black ink twisted and curled over the hard curves of his arms. Runes danced over the span of his broad ribcage. As she watched, one tendril rose to the soft center of his throat—just where the collar of his jacket had been—and curled into itself as if marking a target for her, inviting her to leave a mark somewhere he couldn’t easily hide it.
Somewhere the scales could not protect him from her teeth and tongue.
Slowly, cautiously, she reached out a hand to trace the tattoo on his throat. Beneath his scales, muscles flexed and shuddered. Feyre traced a single nail through the grooves between defined lines of his neck and the infernal ink marking them, the sketch coming to life in her mind—vicious strokes of messy, smeared charcoal. A battle between her pristine paper and her mind, between Rhys’s beautiful face and the monster that resurrected her.
“I think I’d rather try to paint this.”
She followed the ridge of scales that had replaced his collarbone next. Curious—they were as soft as silk and hard as stone beneath her fingers. She curled her fingers, dragging her nails experimentally over the sharp edges of his scales until his wings rustled with the force of his shudder.
“I’ll sit for a dozen portraits,” a beast’s hand cuffed her wrist, guiding her tattooed palm to rest over her beating heart, “after I have your likeness on my wall.”
“Five hundred years and you never thought to commission a portrait?” Feyre teased, tapping her fingers over his heart. She tipped her head toward her sarcophagus, “You had a rather perfect subject.”
“No,” Rhys huffed. He bent, pressing his forehead to hers. “No, I didn’t trust myself not to mist the fool who failed to capture the full beauty of my mate.” Then, his weight was a wonderful burden atop her body once more, and his cock slid through the mess he’d made of her. “My patience is terribly thin when it comes to you these days, darling.”
The temptation of the ridges was too much, and Feyre wiggled her hips against his. “Give it to me.”
“Where are your manners?” He had the audacity to click his tongue at her. He let go of her wrist, tracing her lips instead—and then two of them pushed into her mouth, smearing the salty-sweet taste of her own cunt over her tongue. “You’re rather demanding for a dead woman, aren’t you?”
She moaned, and Rhys’s teeth glinted at her through the shadows. He pressed until she gagged, her eyes watering but unfaltering as she stared up at him.
“I can’t focus when you’re looking at me like that.” He withdrew his fingers, tapping them against her lips. Then, grinning, both of his large hands smoothed down her sides, and he gripped her hips.
The darkness of the alcove swirled and spun as he flipped her onto her stomach. The velvet cushion bit into her elbows as he lifted her onto her knees, and Feyre tried to scramble up onto her hands.
But her arms were still weak from her earlier orgasm, and she collapsed back onto the cushion the moment Rhys buried his cock inside her with one smooth stroke that punched the breath from her lungs.
“Ah!”
The stretch burned between her legs, splitting her open.
It was too much. He was too much.
It was perfection.
A firm hand stroked the space between her shoulder blades, steadying her as Rhys pulled out—and, yes, Feyre felt every one of those godsdamned ridges as he did.
“Oh, gods.”
He waited silently, teasing her sensitive entrance with short, cruel strokes. Feyre tried to push back, to sink onto his cock and feel those ridges drag against her again, but the hand on her back pressed harder.
Pinning her.
“Please!” she keened.
“That’s my girl.” His laughter made her cheeks burn. “Was that so hard for you, Feyre?”
With a grunt that shook her bones, Rhys drove back into her.
He set an unforgiving pace—but of course he did. He already knew the way Feyre wanted it, her mind inextricably tangled in his.
And he had spent centuries preparing for the moment he could have her body as well as her soul. He knew exactly how to angle each thrust so she felt every hard edge of his cock stretch her cunt, how to drape himself over her body until she could barely breathe, how to reach beneath them to roll the sensitive peaks of her breasts between his rough fingers before sinking lower to trace featherlight circles over her clit.
Her sounds of pleasure echoed off the cavernous walls of her crypt, shredding through the solemn silence that haunted Death’s domain. Every jarring slap of his hips against her ass punctuated her jagged keening of his name; every thrust kissed the deepest, tenderest parts of her body until she shook uncontrollably.
“Rhy-y-ys!”
“Fuck, Feyre.” The words were feral, scraping out of his throat and raking along her skin. “Who would have thought this pretty cunt could take me so well, hm? My poor, dead mate who went so long without getting properly fucked. My little human love, stretched so wide around my fae cock like you’ve been on it for half a millennium already…”
Feyre threw out a hand behind herself, her face hot as it dragged against the velvet cushion with every plunge of his cock, and scrabbling at the meat of his thigh.
The useless scrape of her nails against his scaled leg only drew a pleased growl from his chest.
His voice bore a hypnotic, horrible edge when he spoke next—the sort that paralyzed her as the Lord of Nightmares came out to play. “Can you feel it, Feyre? Can you feel how good you are around my cock?”
Feyre gasped, and the final shield between them—the barrier separating her from his deepest, most frenzied thoughts from her own—thinned.
And the beast bled into her.
Terrible, unquantifiable power coiled beneath his scales, rearing and snapping, preparing to strike an unseen target. His hands, one circling her needy clit and the other gripping the flesh of her hip so tightly that his talons dug into her skin, stung with pins and needles—with dangerous magic that was still precariously close to the surface after resurrecting his mate.
If it surged any higher, he would simply let it go.
Damn the consequences. Damn the Court of Nightmares in the mountain above them.
He couldn’t find it in himself to care whether the Hewn City survived this night or whether his hateful court was crushed beneath the rubble of their pleasure. No, he didn’t care right now, not when caring would distract him from the slick silk of his mate’s cunt as he sheathed himself in her again and again.
He drew himself off of her just enough to sit back on his haunches, to admire the way his cock disappeared into the sweet depths of her body. To withdraw slowly so he could see her shiver and whine. To trace a careful talon around her stretched little hole and gather up the glistening slick soaking them both, sucking it into his mouth for a taste of their shared arousal.
He did it again, but this time he drew a path upward, between the twin swells of her ass to the tight pucker hidden between them.
Feyre pulled in a strangled breath. Her hair glittered as she twisted as much as she could to peer over her shoulder at him, and through her eyes, he saw the beast’s face, ravenous and intent. Apprehension pulled the bond taut, and he laid the flat of his hand over the small of her back—a bit of false calm—and swirled his thumb over the sensitive furl of her ass.
“You’re mine, aren’t you, love?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
It was the answer he wanted, shaky, uncertain—but not fearful. She squirmed, and he pressed harder against her hole.
“All of you?”
Feyre blinked, her teeth scraping over her lip. Some of the haze in her eyes cleared, replaced by shrewd heat, and the hand clutching his thigh tightened. “Only if you’re all mine.”
Fuck. The mental image was crystal clear—their positions reversed, delicate hands braced on the strong joints Rhys’s wings as his mate’s lithe body pounded into him, taking what he only rarely gave all for herself.
Feyre’s cunt shivered around his cock, and he knew she had seen that fantasy too.
“It’s always a negotiation with you,” he grunted, seating himself fully inside her once more and grinding. “Are you sure you’re up for that, darling? Think you’re up for the challenge?”
“Mhm.” Every slow circle of his hips dulled the clarity in her expression, but a cocky grin turned up her pretty lips. He licked his fangs at the sight of it. “I know the— the things you like, mate. I-if you get all of me, I get all of— of you.”
He wanted it too much to play her games. Dammit, the thought alone made his balls tighten and his cock ache for release.
His magic snapped free, Feyre gasped, and ink blossomed along the length of her right arm as the beast bared his teeth in an eager snarl. “Deal.”
He had just enough presence of mind to retract his talon before he sank his thumb into her.
The beast let out a hard breath as Feyre tightened around the shaft of his cock and the silk of her ass fluttered around his thumb. The mountain above them quaked, the first wave crackling energy slipping its leash, ancient stone rendered as fragile as a tower of wine glasses.
Her stunned moan reached his ears, and he plunged back into her, angling his cock just where she needed it most. The muscles in her thighs began to tremble, her toes curling.
“So greedy,” he gritted out, bending to scrape his teeth over her neck. To breathe her in and smell no fear at his proximity—just sweet, heady arousal. “Is this what you needed? You needed your mate to play with both of these holes?”
Feyre’s intake of breath was ragged. “Rhy—”
His free hand was back at her mouth in an instant, two fingers hooking into it, stroking her tongue with the tips of his claws. “Or maybe all three?” He laughed darkly, taunting, “I think you should come for me. Just like this.”
“Ah—”
“Do it, Feyre. Come.”
His obedient little mate tensed beneath him. Her legs shook, her sweet hand slipping off of his thigh, and she came with a clench and a muffled cry that reordered his world.
His entire territory could have cleaved in two at that moment, and the beast would have paid it no mind—would have welcomed the chaos and the feasting that would follow. His Feyre was folded prettily beneath him, shaking and milking his cock and gasping something that might have been his name. The pounding beat of her heart echoed in his ears, stuttering and beautiful.
And she was everything.
His Feyre.
His mate.
His love.
His life.
His.
Alive and gasping and his.
He slowed his pace. He let her broken breaths guide each of his deep, hard thrusts, dragging her orgasm out. He savored the aftershocks that seized her each time he seated himself in her cunt, the wet, tawdry squelch of every movement. She practically glowed with pleasure, and he slipped his hand out of her mouth to knot it in her hair instead, pulling until he revealed the fucked-out bliss on her face to his devouring eyes.
One more thrust and her legs locked, hips tilting away, away, away. The beast growled.
“Too much! It’s too much,” she panted, her words slurred and thready. Her feet kicked uselessly at the cushion, at his calves. “Rhys, Rhys, please!”
As if the sound of his name beat back the monster, Rhys’s shields strengthened again. Feyre tumbled back into her own mind and body—stretched more than she ever had been before around his monstrous cock and his finger—as he stilled against her back.
“You can give me more,” came the primal rumble of his voice behind her. The syllables were indistinct, and Feyre sucked in a breath as a lipless, fanged mouth dragged across her shoulder. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end, and the beast of her mate purred, “My good little mate.”
A long, forked tongue flickered in her periphery, snakelike.
Feyre whimpered.
The older hunters in her village once told her to be wary when the adders that lived at the edge of the wood tasted the air with their awful tongues, scenting for prey.
Rhys used her surprise as a distraction, sweeping back into her mind on a midnight wind. His hot laugh danced over her sweat-damp skin, and a thought from him dulled the jagged edge of pain and overstimulation that intruded on her pleasure.
“I’ll eat your sweet cunt again, if that’s what you want.” His terrible tongue swept over her shoulder, and he rocked his hips forward. Feyre’s nails dug into the velvet beneath her. “But I think you like it more when I fill you up, don’t you?”
”Arrogant bastard,” she choked out. She was lightheaded enough that it had no bite; she was drunk on him, on the lax warmth in her limbs and the haze of love flowing freely down the bond.
Rhys drew back, as if he truly meant to end this, and the chill of the crypt rushed in. Feyre shivered, her nipples pebbling. A flare of concern over the bridge between their souls warmed her, and then he engulfed her once more in the hellfire heat his body put off. He licked his way up the notches of her spine to the nape of her neck—the closest, she supposed, he could get to a kiss in this form—but when his mouth descended to do the same to the other side, he paused.
Teeth sank into the side of her neck, hard enough to draw blood.
She cried out as his fangs pierced her flesh, her body tensing on instinct—squeezing around the cock still filling her. The guttural sound of a demon’s hunger filled her ear as Rhys lapped up the mess he made of her, pushing the taste of her own blood into her mind. Molten arousal consumed Feyre again—though they were once more so entangled that she couldn’t tell if the feeling was his or hers—and filled the space between her legs.
Proof of life, the selfish predator curled around her mind rumbled. She huffed, and Rhys lifted his head to press his maw to her lips in a strange kiss that tasted like copper and satisfaction.
Like her.
“I’ve slapped High Lords for less,” she gasped against his horrible fangs.
Rhys pulled back just enough to let her see the amusement in his eyes. Amused indignation rose up beneath the rip current of lust sweeping her away, and Rhys chuffed.
“So slap me,” he hissed, sibilant and serpentine and smug.
His cock ground into her again, the ridges teasing her entrance.
The cushion tore beneath Feyre’s nails, and her tattooed fingers sank into the woolen stuffing.
“I didn’t think so.” Rhys pounded into her, still gripping her by the hair. He was close. She could feel it in the way his rhythm faltered, and she used was little strength she had left to meet his thrusts. “I know you won’t leave me wanting, darling. Not when I have such plans for you. Not when you know the consequences when you don’t listen.”
“Pl…” Feyre gulped. “Plans?”
“Oh, yes, love.” He stroked his thumb into her ass once and then withdrew, sliding that hand around to her front until he found the soft, subtle curve of her belly between her hips. Their minds swirled together. “There’s more than one way to get proof of life from your sweet body.”
Breed her.
Rhys’s voice was incongruently smooth, entirely unlike the snarling, slavering monster in their mind, when he bent his head to her ear to murmur, “After all, what’s more alive than a female round and glowing with new life?”
A mortifying sound issued from Feyre’s throat, and a fresh burst of slick slipped down the inside of her thigh. The hand on her stomach flexed; the length within her twitched.
“Well, Feyre?”
Language was beyond her. The hand on her belly burned, her mind narrowing to the five sharp points of contact marking each talon and the sudden, primal ache of her body beneath them. The need flaring to life, the too-empty clench of her stomach. She made a garbled noise that made the beast laugh, and then—
Dust fell around them as the mountain rumbled, and Rhys used his grip on Feyre’s hair to draw her off of her elbows until their bodies were aligned, the furnace of his body pressed against her back.
And then he was rutting into her mercilessly, guided entirely by the all-consuming instinct of the creature he was no longer holding at bay.
Breed her.
He released her hair once her head lolled onto his shoulder, and that scaled hand snaked in front of her, gathering her wrists in his large palm.
“Feyre, Feyre,” he chanted, pinning her to him. His hands were strong, unshakable from their places on her wrists and stomach. “My Feyre, fuck, Feyre.”
In this position, he felt bigger inside of her, stretching her to the breaking point even as her pleasure wound tighter and tighter around the base of her spine. His maw dragged a line up her throat, nuzzling the broken skin where his fangs had torn into her. They were large enough to rip her throat out in one swift jerk, but she knew he wouldn’t, knew he only wanted a taste as his tongue lathed the skin there.
She couldn’t breathe. Gods, fuck, it was too much, and she couldn’t breathe— Familiar, floating blackness pressed in at the edges of her vision, and Feyre fought to suck in air, but it was useless. She would die again before she got her release. She couldn’t breathe— She couldn’t breathe—
“Oh no, Feyre,” the monstrous voice of her mate growled in her ear. His breath was hot as hellfire, whetting her appetite for him into a keen, deadly edge. “Not again.”
A mental hand, insubstantial as a phantom but powerful nonetheless, gripped her throat—his mind overtaking hers, commanding her lungs to breathe.
“As flattering as it would be to fuck you unconscious,” he growled, “I’ve waited too long for this.”
Air flooded into her, but it was barely a relief; Feyre used it to cry out, needing more, more, more.
He answered her. A long tongue licked a strip of fire across her throat, banding around it, lapping relentlessly at the pulse pounding on either side of her airway. Every thrust was crueler than the last, but her body was made to take her mate, made to be filled by him, made to—
Take it, Feyre.
The next slam of his cock into her threw her over the edge into pleasure so deep, so depraved and all-consuming that it might cleave the earth and unleash the horrors that Rhys had to the surface called to revive her.
Release ripped through her, and she saw it all, then—her resurrection. The gentle way he had coaxed her spirit to sleep in his mind, so she wouldn’t have to witness the depths of his devotion. His obsession. The demons he had summoned, interrogated, from other worlds. The ancient minds he had carved into, seeking the secrets of life and death—sometimes with help, sometimes on his own. The blood spilled, the innocents slaughtered, the lines crossed.
You’re mine. It was Rhys’s voice inside her head, but it echoed in the shared space of their minds until Feyre couldn’t remember who thought it first—the most fundamental truth of their bond.
Mine.
She was under no impression that Rhysand had ever been anything approaching honorable; she was only here because he had twisted her arm to force a faerie bargain onto her and then stole her from her grave to fulfill it.
She had seen through his eyes as he turned entire armies to mist with a single thought and felt the breathless, exhilarated high that always followed. Felt the teasing thoughts that arose whenever he felt her interested mind press closer when he did, surveying the carnage that drifted in his wake.
She loved him for all of it.
Let the horrors come, Feyre decided as he carried her through her climax. Let him unleash it all. They were life and death and rebirth; they had conquered the natural order to be here. They were—as that damned book had called them when it sensed Feyre’s spirit clinging to Rhys like a shroud all those centuries ago—Death Incarnate and the Princess of Carrion.
Damn the world if it meant her mate felt even a moment’s pleasure.
“Rhys,” Feyre begged. “RhysRhysRhysRhys.”
Leather rustled and his wings flared around them—Rhys’s mighty, black wings tipped with demonic claws, scraping lines in the fine stone of the alcove. He roared, a vicious sound, slamming into her one last time.
His hand on her stomach gripped her so tightly to him, so bruisingly, so intently, that Feyre moaned. Warmth flooded the bond, flooded her beneath his hand, spilling out of her.
Her head fell back onto his shoulder. Drunk on her mate’s satisfaction, she tipped her face toward him, committing the shattered bliss on his dragonlike face to memory.
He drew her hands to his maw, peppering kisses over her tattooed fingers, her palms, her wrists. Feyre’s heart squeezed—and lights flickered.
No, not lights. It was her. Her skin glowed wherever Rhys kissed her, as if lit from within by stars, beating back the shadows haunting her crypt.
Raw devotion shone in his starry eyes, and he turned one of her hands so he could kiss to a swirl of ink on the inside of her wrist, lingering over her pounding pulse.
“My Feyre.”
An hour later, Feyre floated in a steaming bath suspended over snow-kissed mountain range, curled around her mate.
His damp skin was soft beneath her cheek and between her thighs, and the shadows in the crook of his neck were darker than they should be, shielding her new eyes from the dawning sun. She almost wanted open them, to brave the light and survey the handsome line of his jaw and miles of brown skin that now belonged to her. She wanted to see the way the light refracted off of the silver in his hair and deepened the shadows in the lines around his eyes.
He felt the impulse come to life inside her. A careful mental claw gentled it.
“Greedy,” he teased once she melted into him again, stroking a comb through her hair.
It was becoming a common refrain already, but Feyre couldn’t help it. She had far too much time to make up for. Centuries upon centuries of it.
She couldn’t care less for the dusky lavender peaks of the mountains stretching as far as the eye could see or the watercolor dawn bleeding into the sky above it; she had seen them all ten thousand times from the safety of Rhys’s mind. She had lived a dozen mortal lifetimes with him, but never before had she been able to touch him like this.
“You won’t get it all done in one night,” he said, and she could hear the smug smile in his voice. An image floated into her mind—her newly tattooed right hand, now a twin to her left.“I’d rather give you some time to remember how to use your body before I call in our bargain.”
Prick.
His chest vibrated with a laugh, and she loved the strange feeling of it against her body. Had she ever felt this way before her death? Had she ever been gifted such easy intimacy? She couldn’t remember.
“Just rest, darling. Let me take care of you.”
Warm water poured over her scalp. Rhys’s fingers spread it through her hair and followed the rivulets down her spine, drawing small circles at the small of her back.
Feyre shivered, clenching around the length buried inside of her.
“What was it you said about baiting the beast again?” she mumbled against his shoulder, trailing her right hand between their bodies. She pressed her lips to his throat and, once he let out a sharp breath, drew them back to scrape her teeth over his skin.
He stiffened, and her fingers trailed through her folds—relearning her own body. She marveled shamelessly at the feeling of herself split open around his cock.
Rhys cursed, low and filthy, and Feyre laughed.
Notes:
This is unbeta'd, so please be gentle with me. 💕
Update: The epilogue will be posted on 8/13/24 or 8/14/24.
Chapter 4: as the shrike to your sharp and glorious thorn
Notes:
Did anyone ask for a little tooth-rotting fluff from Rhys POV for the epilogue?
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The chattering of Rhys’s family drowned out the nib of his pen scratching across a spare bit of parchment.
He was slow to join them as a matter of habit, so used to taking cover behind the fortress of his mahogany desk that the thought of squeezing onto one of the long leather couches that dominated his study with them hardly crossed his mind. Set apart from them, he preferred to listen, skimming the reports handed to him at the top of the hour rather than taking part in the easy conversation that usually followed their weekly meetings.
It was easier this way.
It… had been easier this way.
It had been easier because, eons ago, he had learned that he could only appreciate the wicked gleam in Nesta’s cool blue eyes or the gentle slope of Elain’s smile from a safe distance. He’d never managed to dull the knife of envy that sank between his ribs whenever Cassian pressed a kiss to his mate’s temple. Whenever he sat behind this desk late into the night, studying ancient manuscripts and steadfastly ignoring the pair of shadows escaping to the furthest reaches of the garden—the midnight rendezvouses that Elain thought were a well-kept secret.
It cut too deeply, looking into the Archeron sisters’ happy faces and catching a glimpse of—
He shook his head, clearing away those maudlin thoughts.
It had been easier, but it wasn’t like that anymore.
He let out a measured breath and glanced up from his paperwork.
And there she was.
In the small crowd that made up their family, she cut an unassuming figure—a slender, pale form perched on the middle of the couch nearest to his desk, hardly more substantial than the slip of moonlight pouring in through the tall windows that lined the back wall of the study.
Feyre.
His body and soul seemed to gasp her name whenever he laid eyes on her these days, collapsing into a state of astonished, breathless reverence.
Six months had come and gone since her resurrection, but time hadn’t inured Rhys to the sight of her. Quite the opposite: every glimpse he got—Feyre, perched on a stool in front of her easel; Feyre, laughing with her new friends from the Rainbow; Feyre, crossing the street in the rain; Feyre, scrunching her freckled nose in concentration as she buttered her toast every morning—made him hungrier for the next.
As always, his heart battered his ribs at the sight of his mate, reaching for her. Irrational jealousy writhed through its chambers, snakelike and possessive, as the moonbeams kissed the amused crinkle of her nose and silvered the spill of hair over her sweater-clad shoulder.
He watched her closely, captivated.
Her head tipped back as Cassian spread his thick arms wide, gesturing wildly at the chagrined scowl on Amren’s face as he recounted some unflattering story. To Cassian’s left, Azriel sat stone-faced, but his shadows twitched and trembled with amusement in time to Feyre’s laughter. To his right, Mor’s cool cracked when Amren cut her a sharp look, and she hid an inelegant snort behind a hand.
“She did not!” Rhys heard Feyre gasp, the corner of his mouth lifting at the sight of her swallowing another laugh. When Amren huffed, Feyre closed her eyes, struggling to compose herself. “You’re lying.”
Tears of mirth sparkled in the corners of her eyes when she opened them again, but she managed to shoot a stern look at Cassian for just a second before it wavered and dissolved into poorly-concealed giggles. Rhys’s heart melted at her valiant attempt at diplomacy.
“I swear it,” Cassian vowed, his eyes bright. His hands rose to his face, and he spread them as if they were a wide, gaping maw, illustrating his point. “Like she was trying to unhinge her jaw and swallow the entire thing whole. She spent Mother knows how many millennia watching us lesser beings eat, and she didn’t even realize she needed to chew.”
Feyre’s hard-won composure disappeared in an instant.
“I’m sorry!” she swore through her howling laughter at Amren, her body trembling with the force of it. “It’s not funny, really,” she insisted, burying her face in her hands. “It’s not!”
“No. It wasn’t,” Nesta cut in from her seat beside Feyre. She stared down the elegant line of her nose at her little sister and waited until Feyre glanced upward through her tattooed fingers.
The room quieted, the silence growing heavy, and Feyre finally sobered as she looked at her sister, her shoulders stiffening.
Cassian shifted in his seat. “Nes…”
Nesta slashed a look at him and lifted a perfectly groomed brow. “It was fucking hilarious.”
Feyre’s eyes went wide, and the lightning-bolt shock of her surprise electrified the bond. Nesta kept her face perfectly straight until Azriel threw his head back, his deep laugh rumbling through the room, making the thin line of her pursed lips twitch.
Rhys grinned to himself. Nesta was the only one who could get that laugh out of Azriel, the pair having long since grown close over their odd alliance to save Cassian from his more reckless impulses. It happened often, now that Nesta Archeron had finally shed her armor and settled into herself. She liked Azriel, and Azriel, more than anyone, was taken with the crass sense of humor she kept secreted away behind her refined facade.
Rhys was grateful for it. For her, in a way he’d never expected to be when he’d shown up on her doorstep all those centuries ago.
It was an oversight on his part—his assumption that Feyre’s frigid sister cared little for her dead kin. But it had been Nesta who had first requested—demanded—to be taken to her sister’s crypt, during the difficult days after the Archeron sisters were Made.
Nesta, who had wobbled unsteadily on her feet at the sight of the little figure in the sarcophagus and forced him out of the room with a burst of silver fire.
She had exited hours later with red, swollen eyes, dull with the numb sort of grief that Rhys had come to know well after the day he and his men had found a pair of boxes floating in a river.
Rhys hadn’t said anything; he knew that there was nothing that could be said.
But Nesta had looked at him with silver eyes that saw too much and, when she finally broke the silence, she lanced him through the heart with the same words that haunted his sleepless nights, My little sister is dead.
As if she hadn’t believed Rhys when he’d delivered the news during that first, awful visit below the wall.
He wasn’t sure if it was fear or empathy that drove him, but Rhys had kept Nesta close after that. He’d studied her, watched her, trained her. Taught her how to fight a war with politics as much as weapons—how to hone the weapon Feyre’s mother had crafted her into all those years before. Taught her precisely how much liquor would numb the worst of the agony and how much would only make it worse. Taught her how to harness the terrifying power that lingered alongside her soul, how to throw away his money at the Palace of Thread and Jewels for a hit of happiness rather than at the gambling dens, how to schedule an appointment with the mind-healers in the Library.
So she had been the first to figure out his plan, centuries later. She’d watched him back, closely enough that she was the first to uncover the slippery hints of black magic he had tried to hide.
And it was Nesta who had elbowed her way into this study with a withering glare not a day later and dropped the Dread Trove onto his desk with a careless clatter, planted her fists on her hips, and snapped out, “Well? Are you going to stand gaping like a fish, or are we going to do this?”
It was the sort of scathing irreverence that only a mortal-turned-minor-death-god could have, and Rhys had almost sunk into himself with relief, spared the task of asking his sister-in-law for help tampering with Feyre’s remains. The Mother only knew how Nesta had known what the darkness staining the tips of his fingers or the new lines around his eyes meant as he channeled more and more of himself into strengthening Feyre’s untethered spirit—whether it was some small, innate talent he hadn’t realized she had wrested from the Cauldron or a warning sign that she spent too much time unsupervised in his study. Rhys didn’t care, and so it began—years and years of the pair of them, heads bent over age-cracked tomes and faded sheepskin scrolls, theorizing and experimenting and with various death magics.
For years, Nesta had been the only one privy to Rhys’s plans. It was, in the end, much easier to resurrect the dead with help of Lady Death anyway.
His grin softened at the sight of the blatant pride that shone on Nesta’s face as she looked at her sisters, at the gentle way Elain patted Feyre’s thigh, leaning toward them both—
Only for Amren to bristle and bite out, “Unlike you lot, I had evolved beyond choking down rotting flesh and leaves before my death.”
And with a look of placid, undisturbed calm, Elain merely tipped her head in mild agreement, “Indeed. I suppose we should all count ourselves lucky that Feyre didn’t give us an encore performance on her first night back among the living.” She paused and glanced at Amren, her nose wrinkling. “Even all these years later, I find ignorance is bliss when it comes to the many ways one can eat an Illyrian sausage roll.”
Cassian choked into the glass of whiskey he’d raised to his mouth, and Mor cackled.
With a quiet snort and a subtle flick of his fingers, the parchment in front of Rhys rolled itself into a minuscule scroll and disappeared into the ether with his pen.
He chuckled at Feyre’s startled twitch when the slip reappeared in front of her eyes. Looking back at him again, she shot him a bemused look, and Rhys tilted his head toward the note.
Come here.
After she scanned the message, he felt the curious knock of her mind against his mental shields.
Ah, ah, he crooned, crossing the bridge between their souls. He trailed a talon over her unshielded mind, watching her shiver. She was too exposed—too used to being safeguarded inside the fortress of his own mind. None of that. Shields up, love.
Stubborn consternation colored Feyre’s expression. Rhys leaned back in his chair, unbothered, propping an ankle on his knee.
Nesta took advantage of the distracted glaze in her sister’s eye to peer over Feyre’s shoulder at the note, scoffing. Elain, smiling sweetly, ignored the jostle of the cushion as Feyre returned to herself, building up her shields with a frown and an elbow jabbed into Nesta’s slender side.
Unlike the sisters seated on the couch beside her, Feyre’s body was unchanged, her Making unfinished. Where Nesta and Elain were lithe and long-limbed, Feyre was petite, softened by the remaining kernel of her mortality. The arch of her brow was softer, her ears gently rounded rather than tipped with points.
But, Rhys reflected, she was anything but human.
She was something else.
Something unnameable—unnerving and other in the way Amren had once been.
Jealous Death still clung to Feyre like a tightly sewn shroud. A film glazed her eyes, leaving them as pale as they had been the moment she reopened them. Her skin was a stubborn, unnaturally wan shade of alabaster. When her hair had starting growing, entire fistfuls had come in blindingly white—and although Feyre had laughed it off with a kiss and a quip about matching sets, the corners of her eyes had been tight with anxiety.
Feyre simply wasn’t alive in the way most other beings were.
And with the power of six High Lords laying coiled like a serpent beneath her pale limbs, just waiting to be provoked, most faeries instinctually cringed away whenever Feyre entered a room.
“Ghastly,” one foolish Hewn City lordling had hissed about her shortly before his untimely and untidy death.
Rhys pressed the tip of his tongue to the sharp point of one of his canines. Feyre glanced over her shoulder at him, undoubtedly feeling the thrum of the bloodlust he couldn’t quite shake these days across the bond, and he smiled serenely back at her.
Her lips quirked in response, and she took up the pen, settling the scrap on her knee to jot out a response. When she finished, she crumpled the parchment into a small ball and threw it at Rhys’s head.
It fell a few inches short of hitting him, tumbling anticlimactically into a pile of paperwork instead.
His smile grew, and she mimed throwing the pen like a javelin and taking out an eye next.
So Rhys did what any smart male would do when faced with an armed Feyre Archeron: he winked with the eye she had designated as her target, snapped up the ball, and spun his chair to face the wall of bookshelves behind his desk.
He worked the ball out of its tight knot with deft fingers, tracing the tips over Feyre’s shaky penmanship. Although his artistic mate loathed the unpracticed loops and lines of her letters, Rhys would mourn the day she perfected them. The sight of her messy scrawl made something sticky and sweet drip into the chambers of his heart.
No. You stop being unsociable and come relax with us.
He reached out a hand and stole the pen right out of his mate’s hand with a small crackle of magic. With the threat neutralized, he turned back to his desk and scrawled a cramped, bawdy reply at the edge of the scrap and sent it back to Feyre—this time without the pen.
As charming as she was when she was trying to commit grievous bodily harm, Rhys didn’t think that she would appreciate it if he ended up stealing Lucien Vanserra’s signature look.
He didn’t bother to watch Feyre unfold it. Instead, he stretched, threading his hands together behind his neck and gazing upward, counting the little painted chips of gilded stars that decorated the study’s vaulted ceiling, waiting.
Listening.
It didn’t take long. His lips curled into a feline grin at the sound of her quiet gasp, the hurried crumple of the paper as Nesta undoubtedly tried to read this one, too.
Perhaps I’m being unsociable because I was planning to spend the evening ravishing my mate on top of this desk until she screams my name loud enough for the entire city to hear.
But unfortunately, she decided to invite half of Prythian to stay for a drink.
It only took an instant for the siren song of her lust to call to him, though it was muted with their shields firmly in place. Rhys breathed deeply, savoring the anticipation drawing their mating bond taut.
Scoundrel, she admonished him weakly.
He stayed silent, letting his eyes drift toward hers. An image escaped her mind—one of him at that very moment, spread out behind his desk, gazing at her with dark, intent eyes—and Rhysand’s lips quirked as the ember of Feyre’s desire grew hotter. His own body responded easily to her, his cock aching with it.
He cracked open the walls around his mind, teasing, You do so love to watch, darling. Shall I start my show now? That might encourage them to leave us be.
Feyre glanced at the people seated around her, shifting in her seat. Rhys…
Rhys almost groaned. It took all of his concentration to stay as he was, lazy and langorous, showcasing the long, toned lines of his body best for his mate. The picture of indolent grace—the tableau that had never failed to make Feyre’s creative mind spark with inspiration.
Careful, Feyre, or you’ll embarrass us both.
Stiffly, with a narrow-eyed look tossed over her shoulder, Feyre pushed herself up from her seat and excused herself with a murmur as she brushed past Elain’s skirts. She crossed the room with a grace that belied her mortal form.
Rhys lifted a brow at her as she rounded the far end of his desk, pushing back his seat to make space for her between the splay of his legs and the edge of the tabletop. If we’re making it a double act, we ought to charge admission.
Don’t be cruel. With a little hop, his mate perched herself on the edge of his desk, aiming the tip of a sock-clad foot at his shin.
Rhys caught her by the ankle.
I’m the cruel one? he asked, thumbing the delicate bones. She was so responsive—little bumps rose on the small sliver of bared skin between the top of her sock and the hem of her leggings. He followed the trail they’d made for him upward, drinking in the subtle shiver that rippled down Feyre’s spine when he tucked a fingertip beneath soft cotton and stroked her silken skin. My mate is trying to do me grievous bodily harm, and I’m the cruel one?
Her glazed eyes went unfocused, and Rhys grinned.
His free hand curved around her hip for only a moment to ensure she was safely settled on his desk before slipping beneath the soft cloud of her sweater, finding the subtle swell between her hips with ease. He cradled the little bump—the slightest tell of babe growing in her belly—beneath his palm, splaying his fingers wide.
Yes. Her breath hitched, her legs tensing on either side of his torso. You are the cruel one.
Hm. We’ll have to ask an unbiased third party to be the judge of that, I think.
He cast out the net of his mind, searching… Seeking…
And there it was. The delicate, unformed consciousness of their babe brushed against his mind, little more than a loose bundle of awareness and sensation.
A ripple in a stream.
A feather in the breeze.
With painstaking care, he stroked the back of a mental talon across that small mind, delighting in the way it lit up in recognition. A little flutter of magic caressed the palm of his hand; at Feyre’s sharp intake of breath, it gentled into a soft, barely-there stroke against his skin.
Rhys chuckled, lifting his eyes to Feyre’s. An apology for startling his mother. Come, darling, feel.
He took her hand, grinning when the babe’s magic clung to his fingers—a tiny hand grasping at its father already—and guided it to her stomach. He pressed his atop hers, twining their fingers, and reached forward with his mind to tickle their child’s little mind again.
And watched as awe lit up Feyre’s expression, her teeth sinking into her lip as she felt his magic brush against her hand.
“That never gets old,” she murmured with a smile.
“No,” Rhys agreed, flexing his hand over hers. “No, I don’t think it ever will.”
Feyre smiled down at their hands, at their child, concealed by the bulk of her sweater, and Rhys’s heart ached with love for them both. There was no telling what a union between an undead mortal and a High Lord might bring forth, but whatever their offspring might become—living or undead or something in between—he was precious. He was loved.
And easily tired. The babe’s little pulses of magic began to weaken with every soft touch of Rhys’s mind against his, coming softer and slower each time, so Rhys fell away, ending his careful exploration of their child’s mind with one last caress of a thought—sweet dreams, son.
“Was this all a ruse to get me over here so you could play with your son?” Feyre teased.
Her voice was thick with emotion, and her cold fingers brushed a lock of hair off of his forehead. Rhys wondered if she could feel the way the easy comfort in that touch commanded his body even through their shields. How the gentle spirals her nails traced across his scalp threatened to unravel him.
He glanced up at Feyre through heavy-lidded eyes, watching until her pale cheeks pinked.
“A ruse?” Rhys asked absently, half-distracted. I would never make light of my plans to ravish my m—
Feyre tipped her head to one side, studying him with a twinkle in her milky gaze. “Mhmm. Because I think you’re worried about running after a toddler with your creaky knees.”
Rhys chuckled, letting his eyes shut for a moment as he listened to the song of Feyre’s pulse and the quick, quiet flutter of their child’s heart. As he felt for the gentle lure of the runes on her chest calling to their creator, twining his magic with hers, as inextricably tangled as their souls were by the mating bond.
And when she was thoroughly convinced that he was complacent, he nipped at her unprotected wrist, laughing again at her indignant little yelp.
“I’m more worried about the consequences of giving life to yet another Archeron,” he lobbed back, pressing his hand more firmly to that small, perfect bump.
Feyre’s brow creased, her fingers stilling on a pass through the silver lock at his temple.
Rhys shook his head at the guilt in her eyes, opening his mind to her. A few aching joints are more than worth it, if it means we get this. It’s a price I would pay a thousand times over.
Her filmy gaze softened, and she combed her fingers through his hair again.
You do look dashing like this, she thought, twining her mind with his and leaning down to rub the tip of her nose against his. My hero.
My salvation, Rhys responded, stealing a shameless kiss even as someone on the couches made a playful sound of disgust in protest. You’re spry enough for both of us, anyway. You give chase to the babe, and I’ll take over when he is able to sit still long enough for his lessons.
A familiar thrill of excitement electrified him at the thought, and he dared a glance at his orrery over Feyre’s shoulder; it was a fine piece, but it needed expanding if he was to share the full wonder of the cosmos with his boy. Rhys always conjured the stars himself when he wanted to study the placement of the constellations relative to any given planet in their galaxy, but if the child were to embark on any sort of independent study before his own magic was fully stable—
And how long will it be exactly until our son is old enough to learn how to divine a cure for insomnia from the position of the stars? Feyre interrupted, dry mortal skepticism bleeding into her thoughts.
Oh, only a century or so. And you were glad I managed to puzzle that mystery out, if I recall correctly. Rhys shifted his hand, poking Feyre in her side until she squirmed, slapping it away. According to the sixth house in your birth chart, he grinned when Feyre groaned aloud, drawing curious stares, which represents health and wellness, you have had more than enough rest for several mortal lifetimes, and you’ll sleep again in a few centuries. But until then, my darling Lady of Night will remain stubbornly nocturnal.
Feyre rolled her eyes, but bent to kiss him again. Fine, but if the babe comes out with scales and a taste for raw meat, you’re taking over the midnight feedings, creaky joints or no.
Rhys, lovesick, tried to deepen the kiss, but Feyre drew back with a puff of laughter at the first touch of his tongue against the silk of her mouth.
“Come on. The ravishing can wait for a few hours,” she whispered, leaning over him. The curtain of her hair concealed the silly grin on her face as she tipped her head in the direction of the small crowd on the couches. “I want us to spend time with our family.”
The reminder of their audience was unsubtle, but Rhys didn’t care if they were watched. He took hold of Feyre’s wrist again, tracing the blackened pad of his thumb over the delicate webbing of veins and tendons beneath her tattoo. He pressed a soft kiss to that spot, closing his eyes and cherishing the slow beat of her pulse beneath his lips.
“In a moment,” he murmured, his throat tight. He opened his mental shields wider, reaching across the bond for his mate. Drawing her into the refuge of his innermost self, just as he had all those years ago. I just need a moment.
A moment would never be enough for him—not one, not a thousand. But he would take them as they came; he would spend the rest of his life filling the yawning chasm of grief in his soul with them. After so many centuries spent standing at its precipice, feeling every change in his plans—every threat and unknown he’d encountered on the path to Feyre’s resurrection—shift beneath his feet like so many loose rocks, threatening to send him tumbling over the edge, it was strange to finally feel the solid ground beneath him. Beneath them both.
How many sleepless nights had he spent beneath the stars, praying, pleading, begging them for this? How many dawns had seen him on his knees in front of her sarcophagus after her lethargic spirit retreated to the quieter corners of his mind, bartering with any god that might listen?
It was almost laughable now, how little he cared for the mountains and stars on his knees. They were nothing—magical ink for a magical vow that he would uphold out of duty, if nothing else. But the stains on his hands, the marks on her breast… Those meant far more to him now, proof that he toiled and bespoiled himself to save his mate.
His mate.
His living mate.
The mother of his child. His darling poltergeist.
He loved her to the rotten marrow of his bones.
Notes:
This fic will be a year old on Friday, but I am far too excited to post this epilogue to wait until then. So happy birthday to Poltergeist Darling, thank you all for indulging me and my silly fic, and happy (early!) Halloween!
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Last Edited Sat 28 Oct 2023 03:41AM UTC
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