Chapter 16: Take My Heart
The change, Charlotte was discovering, was not a single hammer blow but a slow, relentless erosion. It seeped into the cracks of her day, a whispered distraction beneath every action.
In the castle’s west library, a cavernous room smelling of parchment and beeswax, she tried to focus. A heavy, leather-bound tome on dhampir lineage lay open before her, its dense script a blur. Her fingers, usually steady, tapped a frantic rhythm on the vellum.The words meant nothing. All she could feel was the rasp of the paper under her fingertips, amplified, every fiber a tiny earthquake. The distant drip of a water clock in the hall echoed like a drumbeat in her skull.
It was the silence of the castle that afternoon that was the worst.It wasn’t true silence. It was a canvas upon which every minute sound was painted in garish detail. The scuttle of a mouse within the wall three rooms away. The low murmur of two guards exchanging gossip at the far end of the corridor, their words, though indistinct, carried on a current of air she could suddenly taste. The steady, slow thrum of a heart.That was the most insidious urge.The blood. Not just the scent, but the sound of it. The kitchen maid who brought her a cup of tea had a pulse that shouted from the delicate blue vein in her throat. Charlotte had stared, a hollow ache forming behind her own teeth, until the girl curtsied and fled, unsettled.
She shoved away from the desk, the chair legs screeching on the stone floor. Pacing the length of the library, her own heartbeat a frantic counter-rhythm, did nothing.The restless energy was a live wire under her skin. It wasn’t only blood.It was a comprehensive, degrading greed. She wanted the velvet drapes against her bare skin.She wanted to taste the smoke from the hearth. She wanted to hear Lucian’s low voice issuing a decree, not for its content, but for the vibration of it in her bones.She wanted Sebastian’s laugh, loud and sudden, to startle her.
Vanity, too, had sharpened its claws. Passing a polished suit of armor, she didn’t see a distorted reflection; she saw the wild tumble of her chocolate curls, freed from their usual severe knot, the heightened color in her cheeks, the strange, dark light in her own storm-gray eyes.A part of her, the old pragmatic Charlotte, recoiled.The new creature preened.
She made it to the evening.
Dinner was a private affair in their solar, a small round table laden with food she couldn’t eat and goblets of blood wine that made her mouth water painfully. Lucian was a bastion of calm, discussing boundary disputes with neighboring fae lords as if she weren’t sitting there vibrating with need.Sebastian, the bastard, watched her. His emerald eyes tracked the nervous flutter of her fingers, the way she clenched her jaw, the slight, involuntary cant of her body towards any sound or movement.
“You’re quiet tonight, Charlotte,” Sebastian remarked, swirling the dark liquid in his glass.
“I’m thinking,” she bit out, focusing on the grain of the oak table.“Dangerous pastime,” he grinned. “You should try feeling instead. It’s less headache.”
Lucian shot him a look, but said nothing.He was allowing this.Testing her.
After the meal, Lucian was called away to resolve some minor crisis in the lower halls. “Don’t wait up,” he’d said, his hand pausing on her shoulder, a brief, grounding weight that vanished too soon, leaving her skin screaming for more.
She retreated to the royal apartments, to the bedroom that was becoming more hers than the maid’s quarters she still technically owned. The cavernous space felt both too large and too small.She tried to read by the fire.The words swam. She tried to mend a tear in one of Sebastian’s tunics. The needle felt clumsy, the fabric unbearably soft.She dropped it.The fire cracked.A log shifted.
Her every nerve was strung taut.The door opened and Sebastian strode in, shedding his ceremonial jacket. The scent of night air and his own unique spice—ember and leather—flooded the room. He glanced at her, at the abandoned mending, at the tense line of her shoulders.
“Still thinking?” he asked, his tone deliberately light, prodding.“Stop it,” she hissed, not looking at him.
“Stop what?”
“Talking.Breathing. Existing so loudly.”
He laughed, the sound rich and infuriating.“My existence bothers you?That’s new. Usually, it’s my charm that does it.”
She whirled on him. “It’s not funny, Sebastian!I feel like I’m going to crawl out of my own skin. I can hear the dust settling.I can smell the soap on your fucking hands from across the room. It’s too much.”
He stilled, the humor fading from his eyes, replaced by something hotter, more intent.“So don’t think.Don’t fight it. What do you want right now?Not later.Right now.”
Her gaze locked on his mouth. On the sharp curve of his canine where it pressed against his lower lip.Her own breath hitched. The ache between her legs, a constant companion all day, pulsed into a throbbing demand. The careful walls she’d rebuilt since morning crumbled to ash.
“You,” she said, the word raw and ragged.A slow, predatory smile spread across his face. “Me what?”
She crossed the space between them in three swift strides.There was no grace, no coy seduction. It was pure, unadulterated need. She grabbed the front of his shirt, fisting the fine linen, and yanked him down to her level, crushing her mouth to his.
It was a clash, not a kiss.A claiming. Her teeth scraped his lip, and she tasted the faintest coppery hint of his blood.The sensation was electric, a shock that went straight to her core. She moaned into his mouth, a sound of pure desperation.
Sebastian met her fire with his own. His arms banded around her, one hand tangling in her curls, the other splaying possessively on the small of her back, pulling her flush against him. She could feel the hard ridge of his cock already straining against his trousers, pressing into her belly.
“Fuck, Charlotte,” he growled against her lips, his voice thick.“That’s it. Take it.”
She was pulling at his clothes, her fingers clumsy with urgency.The shirt ripped at the seam. He didn’t care. He backed her towards the enormous bed, the black silk sheets a promised abyss.When her knees hit the edge, he broke the kiss, his eyes blazing.
“Tell me,” he commanded, breathing hard.“Use those filthy, perfect words. What do you want me to do?”
The boldness, the vanity, the raw hunger coalesced into a single, sharp point.“I want you inside me,” she said, her voice low and dripping with want. “I want you to fuck me until I can’t remember my own name. I want to scream so loud they hear it in the mortal city.”
A dark, pleased chuckle rumbled in his chest.“Your Majesty’s wish is my command.”
He pushed her down onto the silk. It was cool against her feverish skin. He didn’t undress her fully, just shoved her skirts up around her waist, tore her smallclothes aside with a shredding sound. He fumbled with his own falls, freeing himself, and then he was over her, the hard, hot length of him pressing against her dripping entrance.
He paused, just for a second, his eyes searching hers.A final, silent question.
In answer, she hooked a leg around his hips, arching up, and took him in with a single, brutal roll of her own.
He sank into her with a deep, stretching fullness that made her cry out. There was no gentleness, no careful build.It was exactly what she’d demanded. He withdrew almost completely and plunged back in, setting a punishing, immediate rhythm.“Yes! God, yes, just like that,” she babbled, her head thrashing on the sheets. Every drag of his cock was a strike against the unbearable tension inside her.It wasn’t enough.She needed more.
“Harder,” she gasped, nails digging into the sculpted muscles of his back.
Sebastian obliged, his hips snapping forward with a force that drove the breath from her lungs. The bed began to rock, the ancient frame groaning in protest. Each thrust was a punctuation mark in the frantic, wordless sentence of her need. She could feel her own wetness coating them both, the lewd, slick sounds of their joining impossibly loud in the room.
“You feel so fucking good,” he grunted, his control fraying.“So tight and hot and mine. Taking my cock like you were made for it.Fucking perfect.”
His words, crude and possessive, fanned the flames higher. She met him thrust for thrust, her hips rising off the bed to take him deeper. The coiled spring inside her wound tighter, tighter, threatening to snap.
“Sebastian, I’m— I can’t—”
“Let go,” he snarled, his pace becoming erratic, brutal. “Come for me.Come all over my fucking cock. Do it.”
The command, the sheer dominance in his voice, shattered her.The orgasm ripped through her with violent, catastrophic force. Her back arched off the bed, a ragged scream tearing from her throat as pleasure, white-hot and total, consumed every nerve ending.She clenched around him, milking him, the pulsations endless.
It tipped him over the edge. With a guttural roar, he drove into her one last, deep time and went still, his own release flooding her as he buried his face in the curve of her neck, his whole body trembling.
For long minutes, the only sounds were their ragged breaths and the crackle of the fire. The overwhelming static in her blood had quieted, replaced by a heavy, blissful lassitude.
Sebastian eventually shifted his weight, rolling onto his side but keeping her close, his fingers tracing idle patterns on her damp stomach.
“Well,” he said, his voice husky with satisfaction, “that was a definitive end to the thinking portion of the evening.”
A weak, breathless laugh escaped her.She felt wrecked. Gloriously, perfectly wrecked.The door opened quietly.Lucian stood in the threshold, having returned without a sound. His golden eyes took in the scene: the torn clothing, the disheveled sheets, the two of them intertwined and spent. His expression was unreadable, but a slow, deep warmth kindled in his gaze as it settled on Charlotte’s sated face.
“I see,” he said softly, “that you found a suitable outlet for your studies.”
Sebastian grinned, nuzzling Charlotte’s hair. “She’s a quick learner.”
Charlotte met Lucian’s eyes across the shadowed room, no shame left, only a weary, victorious acceptance. The need was banked, for now. But as Lucian began to slowly remove his own coat, his movements deliberate, she felt the embers inside her stir once more. The lesson, it seemed, was far from over.