Page 140 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
The hinges of my jaw started to ache, and tears dripped from my eyes, but I was yearning to feel and taste more of them, so I refused to stop.
“You look so fucking good taking us at the same time like this,” Lucais purred.
He released my hair and slid his hand down the side of my neck. I felt the rigid muscles on his chest pressing into my back as he leaned closer, each thrust hitting a slightly higher spot, and the pinpricks of ecstasy began to build at the apex of my thighs, buried between my hips and disturbed with every divine movement he made.
“You’re going to be the death of me,” Lucais vowed, and then his hand was all the way around my throat, pulling my head away from Wrenlock, and I was pulsing around his length uncontrollably with barely a whimper escaping from my mouth.“I want to die with my cock buried inside you and my hand around your throat, Auralie. I want the last thing I hear to be my name on your lips.”
“Lucais—”
“Fuck.”
In an instant, the tension in the room snapped, and every single one of us was undone. Wrenlock’s eyes were on Lucais’s face, watching him coming inside of me as he gripped onto my throat and pressed his mouth to the back of my head, moaning so loud the foundations of reality might have quaked as I pulsated around him with a fanatical intensity. He fucked me the whole way through his orgasm, each thrust a little less than the last until I felt the sticky heat of his come spilling down my inner thighs. Barely a moment later, my hand found Wrenlock’s erection, pulling once, twice—and suddenly, his cock was jerking as he came, the thick heat of his orgasm dripping down the sides of my hands, and I was coming again as Lucais slipped out of me, replacing his dick with his fingers.
Fucking Elements,he swore into the bond, a split second of shock quickly replaced by greedy lust as he slipped his arm around my waist and slid his fingers back inside me.Ride my hand, bookworm. There you fucking go.He groaned, the sound echoing through the cavernous training room as I ground my clit against his palm.Give me one more. That’s my girl.
I felt like I was going to die, too.
When we were finished, and they’d collectively squeezed the very last drops of euphoria from my body, they worked together to clean me up and carry me back to Lucais’s bedroom, one bringing me some water while the other covered me with a blanket.
It dawned on me as I sipped my drink that I’d never seen them operating in sync before. Everything had always been disjointed with the identity swap creating a rift—except for whenthey were intimate with me. When we were all together in that way, they barely needed to exchange a word, both so dedicated to fairly inflicting pleasure, making me feel satisfied and special. It was the only time I caught a glimpse of the way they must have been as friends and colleagues before I’d come into their lives. It was strange, but there was no jealousy or competition. They were familiar with one another in the way of lifelong friends, only they had an element of trust on top of that—the kind that only two people who went through the same trauma and came out of it alive could claim.
Like the Gift War.
Like the loss of their family members to the Malum—Lucais had lost his parents, and Wrenlock had lost his sister.
I drifted off to sleep feeling safer than I ever had in my life, with a smouldering warmth in my heart and a comforting pressure against my rib cage. My last conscious thought haunted me through my dreams—that perhaps the best thing I had done, after the catastrophic lashings their friendship took while we were in the House, was to fall in love with both of them so irrevocably and unconditionally that I had forgotten how to hide it.
forty-eight
I Am Sick of This
Two days later, I sprawled across Batre’s throne of vines and tried to concentrate on what she was teaching me instead of the erotic things I’d done bent over the side of it.
It was all I’d been able to think about ever since it happened. Phantom echoes of Lucais and Wrenlock moaning resounded in my mind as I closed my eyes and kicked my feet, resting my head on the same arm of the throne that Lucais had positioned me over before he fucked me into the following week.
“Your baseline magic skills generally surface as a child, before you start to discover your abilities in line with your Element,” Batre was saying. “Once a faerie hits adolescence, they usually learn how to apply certain attributes of their Element to their existing magic. For example, I could summon a book when I was a child, but I couldn’t dothisuntil I was almost an adult.”
I opened my eyes, craning my head to watch as she directed her attention to one of the tall, arched windows in the training room, hand outstretched like she was trying to shield her face from the sunlight. The problem was that the fog had notrelented, so there was hardly any light, and I had no idea what she was doing beyond the glass.
Moments later, a collection of small plants appeared in a circle around her; a variety of flowers, succulents, ferns, and exotic carnivorous plants with long, curly roots and soil set in a slightly dishevelled cylindrical shape.
She’d taken them straight from someone’s garden—straight from someone’spots.
“Being an earth faerie, this side of my magic allows me to summon things that most other faeries can’t accomplish without our help,” she explained. “Anyone can summon mundane objects, but controlling flora is borderline impossible unless it’s your Element or you have the power of a ruler. A water faerie might be able to do what I just did, but the plants would come with their pots because a water faerie would have to focus on them as an item rather than a living element. The same way that I could summon a candle if it was already lit, but I can’t summon a naked flame.”
I swung my legs down off the side of the throne. “I’m supposed to start with the basic things, then? And once I’ve mastered those, the way to handle the dark Element is supposed to come naturally?”
“That’s the hope,” Batre agreed with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Truthfully, I didn’t blame her or her smile for that.
I spent the rest of the day trying to forget that I was meant to be a dark faerie, regardless of whether the Court of Darkness wanted me to become their evil leader, and instead listened to Morgoya and Batre talking me through magic they performed as effortlessly as breathing.
It was hours before I was ready to make another attempt on my own, and by then, I’d only made a small amount of progress in separating my ideas of magic from my experience with thevoice at my side. I’d never felt power when I was alone. The voice had always been there, curled around my wrists, whispering in my ears—even when the Little Folk visited me.
“Try to convince the pen to write on the page,” Batre entreated as I glared down at the notepad and pen in my lap with my hands firmly behind my back. “An enchantment is more about intent than it is impact, meaning that you don’t necessarily need the strongest set of magic if you have a strong, isolated desire. It does make them risky, so there are additional requirements for larger and more complex spells, but not for the basic ones like this.”
I blinked down at the blank page.
I AM SICK OF THIS.
