Page 8 of Crowned By the Fae King

I was like a tiger pacing in her cage, restlessness thrumming under my skin. I needed to escape—needed an escape; wanted to have anything to think of other than the trap I was caught in. It was like being at the end of a double shift, watching the minutes tick away, desperate to clock out and sleep, just rest—

Every nerve in my body came alight with pleasure.

I staggered and moaned, grabbing onto the nearest thing – a tree branch – to keep from falling over. Heat thudded between my legs, everything going tingling and tight. "Fuck," I gasped out—

—sprawled in bed, his head thrown back, left hand gripping his cock and the fingers of his right hand digging so hard into his inner thigh that I could feel it—

"—oh, you motherfucker," I said in a groan.

I shoved my hand down my pants and flopped back against the tree, because there was nothing I could do but ride out the wave of arousal. Tension coiled inside of me. I chased it, rubbing my fingers hard against my clit, driving myself towards the pleasure that sang for me, just out of reach.

"Oh, fuck, Cass, c'mon," I moaned. I didn't think he could hear me. I didn't think he even knew how much his Court loved me.

Pleasure spiked in my core. I had one moment of eyes-wide, blinding need, and then ecstasy crashed into me with the force of a sledgehammer. My vision whited out. My pussy clenched, over and over, the waves of pleasure leaving me limp and whimpering. Everything shook, hot and swimmy.

I slid down to the ground, my legs going wobbly and refusing to hold me up. Bliss sank into my bones, the first truly good feeling I'd had since I'd been stupid enough to charge into a burning building. I dropped my head back against the tree, taking careful breaths. The sensation of being unable to sleep drifted away as I sat there—as he let himself sleep at last, with orgasmic release as his lullaby.

Xarcassah was a person. A fae person. A fae man.

That beating heart had to be his. But the Court was also him, somehow. All the land around me, which caught me with such ease, was as much him as the body I could sense when I focused on the person of the Court.

"Who are you?" I whispered to the velvet darkness of the night, shaken. It wasn't only the Court. It was him, a man I didn't know at all, my body reacting to everything that happened to him, and to everything he did.

The fae King was dying, I remembered suddenly, with a sinking sense of dread. The King of the Court was dying, which was why the whole operation at the mine had been so rushed and haphazard. The King's ability to magically influence the Court was as weak as it would ever be. No one was paying attention to the wilderness, but it wouldn't last forever.

Someone's paying attention now, I thought, my expression grim as I remembered the focus of the Court. Dark eyes, looking into mine, and trees responding with pleasure to the touch of my hands. A man bound to the Court. A man bound to me.

I didn't think it went both ways. He was affecting the Court, and the Court was affecting me, leaving me on the receiving end of his emotions, like a glass at the bottom of a champagne waterfall. I had no idea why that would be, but I could only think of one reason why someone new would be changing the Court:

The old King was dead.

Long live the King.

Odyssey

It would have been nice if Cass waking up meant that someone was going to come rescue me, but I didn't get the same sense of being seen that I had when the forest had been actively re-growing. He obviously hadn't gotten the memo about his Court being infatuated with some woman. Whatever he was doing – whatever newly-minted fae Kings did – didn't include looking for someone like me.

Knowing he was a real person didn't change anything about my situation. I was still on my own, in a great big wilderness, with only one point of reference to the world. It just so happened that the point of reference was the nexus of power he represented.

Of course, ‌I also had no food, my thin leather shoes were in rough shape, and I still had no fucking clue where I was. The landscape wasn't even that different. A little rockier, maybe?

At least the Court didn't seem inclined to let me die. Yippee.

The next few weeks were a trial in patience. Cass apparently had no idea about the effect he was having on me (and who knew how many other people—but definitely on me), and he didn't do anything to mediate his behavior accordingly.

His sleep schedule was a dumpster fire. The man swung wildly between staying up for days and sleeping at weird hours, and I didn't get any warning of which game we were playing. I was unable to sleep when he was purposefully staying awake; at least when he was in his weird-hours moods, I could sleep when I wanted to.

He also had a healthy sex drive, which drove me up the wall. It wasn't like he was doing anything out of the ordinary. Most men probably jerked it on the daily. But I wasn't getting all the physical effects of most men jerking it. I was getting jerked around, so to speak, by one very specific man.

It felt incredible, but it would have been more convenient if he'd been impotent. Or, like, a monk.

When he was exercising, I got sweaty, and my whole body felt loose and awesome, with all the endorphins of exercise coursing through me. When he was stressed – which was most of the time – my shoulders were tight and I kept catching myself grinding my teeth or clenching my hands.

From time to time, something made him jerk reflexively. I knew, because I also jumped, including, on one memorable occasion, right off a small cliff.

Luckily, the Court's magic kept maintaining my physical health, because (even ignoring the cliff-jumping) I would have been in bad shape. I ran out of food within a week, and after that point I was almost entirely reliant on Court magic to keep from starving to death. I knew how to do a little urban foraging, but that was in southern California, and I didn't recognize anything out here in Faery. On occasion, I ran into things that looked maybe-edible, and I ate them and didn't die, but I knew I wasn't getting nearly enough calories to keep from starving to death.

Maybe I could have tried to use whatever spooky sense of the land around me I had to find something edible, but any time I tried to focus on that sensation, I got caught up in the Court. Since I wasn't actively dying, it didn't seem worth the risk.

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