“Look at me,” he commanded, startling her, his voice part cold and lethal, part nonchalant and mocking. She whipped her head up, her gaze crashing into his deceptively stoic blue eyes.

This man would kill her with a smile on his face. She shuddered at the thought.

Keeping his thick-fringed eyes on her, he lowered his head, laved her nipple, and then licked a path to where two bruises had already sat on her gleaming breast.

He opened his mouth and bit, not giving her any warning. She threw her head back as every part of her felt the sting of his teeth. With her clutching both his shoulders now, he used only the power in his thighs. He speared her pussy with the length of his cock, sinking into the dam of wetness inside her, reaching the point where her virginity had laid just moments before.

He forced her gaze to remain on his as he… as he fucked her. In and out. Deeper and harder until she bobbed on his lap, red-faced with humiliation, that she had an audience witnessing this primal part of her.

She didn’t know which was worse. The green-eyed man and the grey-eyed man telling her to touch herself or this. No, there was no comparison. They each equally trampled on her pride and sent her a message loud and clear.

They were in chains, but they were still superior to her. Her body curled around the cock; she wished she would drown out the sound of him thrusting in and out of her. Her muscles quaked. Her nerves were on fire. She was going to come, just like this.

Tears of mortification dripped down her face, and still, he forced her to keep her eyes on him. An orgasm, rife with greed and wonder—the culmination of each of them—ripped from her and sent her hurtling into an abyss.

The strong contractions of her wall against his thickness squeezed against him, her body giving into instinct and milking him, forcing every last drop from him.

The last grain of sand passed through the hourglass. She scrambled off his lap as if she had come out of a trance into the harsh bite of reality.

Two strong and sturdy priestesses were instantly at her side, holding her by the arms as they escorted her to the slab of stone beneath the head of a Swan.

She was made to lie down. Two other priestesses lifted her gown off her thighs and bundled it around her waist. Two more priestesses gripped her ankles and forced her legs apart, exposing her to the three men who had just come inside her.

The High Priestess placed a white cloth beneath her to collect her blood and their seed so she could show it to the council. Then she placed a gold swan between her legs, and suddenly fire roared from three dragon heads on the stone wall above the three men’s heads. Alexandria could feel the heat of the fire on her limbs, warming her pussy.

She didn’t need to see them to know the three men hadn’t looked away from her laying on a Swan altar, her legs open, their cum inside her, some of it dripping down her folds.

Under the light of fire, they could see everything. Her virgin blood. Her shame. Her sadness.

Melle had told her this part of the ritual was as important as the first part. The fire above their heads would carry their hatred, their fury, their wrath, their power, their intelligence, their prowess, their beauty, and the essence of their lives to the little golden swan between her legs, and the swan would carry those traits into her body and latch onto their seed.

Her son would be perfect because he would have all the qualities of a Dragon but the grace of a Swan, the cunningness, and the shrewdness would make the Swan family the greatest of the four main families in the world.

Everything about it was wrong, and nothing pained her more than knowing she had been born into this family.

She closed her eyes, tears dripping down the sides of her face. She wasn’t sure if her tears were of relief that the ritual was over and she had done her part as best as she could so they would believe she was an authentic player, as petrified as she had been, or fear that all her plans to remove Rhea and Cara from the family would be in vain if they failed.

And when she did everything in her power to help release these men, would they believe her that she couldn’t be pregnant? That she was escaping, too. Or would they kill her before she drew her first breath?

Everything about them told her the latter would be true.

Chapter Eight

No matter how hard Alexandria tried to sleep, all she could manage were bouts of tossing and turning between short blitzes of slumber. Her mind remained fixed on them; certain they would live in her head forever. Until the day she died.

Her intrigue with them persisted in her mind without a reprieve. She so desperately wanted to put a name to their faces. But why did they haunt her every thought, awake or asleep, since the first moment she had set her eyes on them?

Her obsession—the word frightened her—with them seemed to scale her boundaries. In other circumstances, she realized she would have been as intrigued as she was now with them. But once she helped them escape unscathed, she would never set eyes on them again as it was meant to be.

But their nearness—what they made her body do without actually touching her, just with their cocks—consumed her mind. What were the chances that her silent pleas and disloyalty to her family got through to them? Who was she kidding? It was a moot point, considering she would be the first person they killed if they were ever released.

She’d asked that question countless times, though. What was going to happen to them afterward? What did Swan House council plan to do with them afterward? Her parents told her it was not her concern, and Melle had remained tight-lipped, telling her it was best she didn't know such things.

Would they be killed if she couldn’t find a way to release them without compromising Rhea’s, Cara’s, and her own safety? The surety with which she made that deduction turned her blood ice-cold. But she had to remain focused, except their escape plans became muddled in her head, and now she wasn’t sure they would get away in time.

Hidden doors and secret passages littered the house where Alexandria had grown up, leading either directly out of the house or to the dungeon below.

One such passageway was in Cara’s walk-in closet, where the tunnel took them past the dungeon and out onto the east side of the garden, a few feet away from their neighbors.