Page 85 of Ulune's Daughter

“It isnotrape,” Law hisses. “She initiates it every time. I’ve never touched her first?—”

“She’sasleep, Law. She can’t consent.”

“I know she’s spoken to you about her desires. This is her kink. I’m her mate. I’m servicing her as I’m meant to. You’re human. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Being human or fae isn’t what’s at issue here, you giant asshole. Consent is consent is consent. She can’t consent to this because she’s notconscious.”

“You know nothing,” Law scoffs.

“I know she wouldn’t do this if she was awake. I know she wouldn’t agree to it. I’ll ask her when she’s awake and youwillrespect her answer.”

He bares his teeth at me but nods.

I push off the covers and roll out of bed. It takes me a while to find my jeans on the floor, forcing me to show more of my bare ass, and hard dick, to Law than I’d like, but he’s ... preoccupied anyway.

As I escape the bedroom, he calls quietly after me. “I’d have shared her with you this morning. She’s greedy.”

“Fuck you.” I close the bedroom door behind me harder than necessary.

Kells is such a deep sleeper, I bet even that doesn’t wake her up.

Chapter28

Cloud Shopping

KELLAN

“Alas, poor Yorick,” the museum curator’s voice startles me out of my contemplation of an enameled skull.

I look up into Freya’s soft brown eyes. I turn the skull around to face her. “Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs?”

She smiles at me, fiddling with the end of her long, white-gray braid. “How’s it going?”

It’s done. I raised and mounted the last of the totem heads this morning. The catalogue is approved and with the college’s ink mages for printing. The spells for the exhibit displays are cast, fixed, and tested. This skull needs a final polish before it goes on its pedestal. There are a couple of other pieces that could use a final buffing-up. But the exhibit’s essentially done.

“Kellan, don’t look so alarmed. It’s wonderful.”

I look around. It is wonderful. It’s everything I imagined when I first planned the exhibit. Bevington’s given me all the space I asked for and free reign in the exhibit’s construction. It’s also somehow sinister and terrifying. I thought I was inured to the loss of life, the horror of what happened to the Magi of the Mist.

I was wrong. It’s hit me in the last few days. Overwhelmed me. If not for my kitty, I wouldn’t have slept a wink since dinner with my parents. It doesn’t help that Rhodes has been acting strange since that night. We had sex and it was amazing and then he came storming into the museum the next day and interrogated me about wanting to fuck while I’m asleep and ... it felt all wrong.

It felt like he was judging me.

It’s not the first time I’ve horrified a prospective boyfriend with my kinks. Mitch called me “oversexed.” He loved that I gave him anal but freaked out when I wanted him to tie me up and gag me.

Rhodes hasn’t spent the night since. If I’m being fair, I haven’t invited him over and he was away at a swim meet one of the five nights and sulking the other because Yan fell apart and lost his races. But there’s nothing fair about how I’m feeling.

I know this feeling. Slightly out of breath. Sore like I’ve been punched in the chest. But it’s not my flesh and bone that are bruised. It’s a deeper organ.

“Have you got a dress for the V.I.P. opening?” Freya asks.

I shake my head. After Rhodes told me he couldn’t come, and I got an email from Rowan saying he was, the sparkle went out of it.

“Then put that down and come with me.” Freya plucks the skull out of my hands and sets it on its pedestal. She links her arm through mine. “We’re going shopping.”

A texted S.O.S. to Teddy and Rachel summons my girls and the four of us meet in the food court of the Mall in the Clouds, the biggest shopping center in the Unseen World.

It’s hovering somewhere over Maine today. An ocean of dark green pines and a few white peaks roll below us out of the observation windows.

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