Page 17 of Raisa's Cursed Ravens
But I want her to come to me. Like Shade, I need her to choose us. It’s the only way we’ll ever be free.
She’s closer now than she’s ever been.
I go back to the bed and kneel again, waiting to hear her voice again. I already know it’ll be my name on her lips, mine and those of my brothers. She’s said them over and over again every night since she came to use outside the gates.
I hope she still says them the same way when she learns the truth.
But for now, this is enough.
I close my eyes and listen to her breathing, memorizing every sound, every scent, every hope.
I’m not a good man, but I’m hers. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been hers. And now, I finally know what it is to have felt her hands on me. We all do.
Heat boils inside me—low and brutal—at the reminder.
I slide my hand down to my cock and squeeze. It’s already hard and leaking, desperate. I work it in rough, slow pulls, just the way I like. The sound is obscene in the quiet, but Raisa doesn’t wake.
I watch her lips part, see the delicate thread of saliva on her tongue, the pink tip of it wetting her mouth as she breathes.
My hips jerk.
I imagine her waking up, finding me here, seeing what I am, what I’ve become for her. I imagine the way her breath would hitch—not from fear, but from the same need that’s got me burning alive.
She’d want it when I crawled on top of her. She’d want me to ruin her.
I stroke my cock harder, my vision going dark at the edges.
The room fades, replaced by another—the throne room, nineteen years ago, when Gallagher Morganstern called us in to watch him ruin everything.
The memory is a blade, sharp and unkind.
“Come here, boys.” The king sat on his throne, flanked by the queen, who looked at us with the kind of pity that could kill a man’s pride, as if she knew this was the beginning of the end for us and would spare us if she could.
We stood in a line, all seven of us, hands scrubbed, shirts too tight across our chests, Sable barely reaching the king’s knee.
“I’ve got news,” Morganstern said, his voice so soft we leaned forward to catch it. “You’re going to have a new sibling. The queen is pregnant.”
Bran smiled first, then the rest of us. We cheered.
We didn’t know it was the end of everything.
But less than three months later, he called us back.
This time, the queen was absent. The air reeked of incense and something darker, some primal evil we didn’t understand.
“The queen is dead,” the king said. “And so is the babe.”
My heart cracked then, and the guilt was worse than any pain I’d ever known.
“We didn’t mean to,” Sable had sobbed.
The king wasn’t moved by his tears.
He turned on us, beating us bloody. We screamed for mercy, all except Shade, who didn’t make a sound. There was no mercy to be found, not for us. The king knew before he ever called us to him what he planned to do, how he intended to punish us.
“You’ll know nothing but pain for what you’ve stolen,” he’d said. “You’ll never know peace or rest. You’ll never be whole. The world will forever see you for the foul, wicked things you are.”
I felt the first inklings of the curse flowing from his hands before my brothers. It was a heat in my spine, a tearing in my throat. It spread, my bones snapping and rearranging, my skin bubbling and splitting. Feathers punched through the cracks, sprouting from my arms and chest and face.
