How are these getting so much worse? And how is he making them still sound somewhat sexy?
“Gloomy goddess, Shadow Queen?”
If this jungle kitty gets any closer, he’ll find out I have no problems smacking him on the snout.
Still, my body instinctually wants to recoil at his approach. It knows exactly what he could do to me.
Yet there is another part that requests something else he could do to my body altogether.
No. No, we arenotinterested in the slutty playboy.
“Does that mean I get to call you slut muffin?” I bat my eyes at him.
He tilts his head as if considering it. “Perhaps best not to let that out in polite society, but in private? You can call me anything you want.” This time a real smirk blooms and his skin tears, causing red to stream over his bottom lip. He licks it up without even a wince. I suppress an involuntary shiver.
Because of how sensual he makes that one little gesture? Or because I’m reminded that he subsists on blood to live?
Fear and arousal mix inside of me. Fearousal.
If it hasn’t been a thing before, I’m making it a thing now.
“You know what I’d love to hear you call me?” His voice drops into a low confession.
I don’t trust myself to speak.
The way he says it, the way his scent of leather and icy pine surrounds me, it threatens to drown me.
“Kai.” It comes out in a rough husk.
Oh fuck. What is happening to my insides? Heat kicks up at the bottom of my gut, like a pile of burning coals.
I thank god this castle is so cold, as I break out into a sweat. Even so, I refuse to let him see he’s gotten to me.
“I think I’ll stick with Your Majesty,” I mock, just to get his goat. Because he’s got mine—by the throat.
His eyes bore into mine as if he sees through all my walls and into the depths of my being. It's a look he's given me since we were kids—an enigmatic gaze that always has me questioning what he sees in me.
My skin itches and shrinks under his focus.
“Why don’t you like my kind?” he asks, switching the topic so fast I almost get whiplash.
“Apart from the fact bloodsucking fairies have a superiority complex and old-fashioned racist sensibilities?”
“Of course, aside from that.” He easily concedes the point which only makes him more likeable—damn him.
I tap my teeth, my black nail clicking against my very human canine.
The humor halfway drains from his face. “I wouldn’t bite you, Cinder.”
“You’ll have to excuse my inability to trust or believe you.” The words are flat and cold. Though the memory of him telling the other kids how disgusting it would be to drink my blood returns to me in high definition.
I believed him then. Why won’t I believe him now?
Because my trust was shattered after my father, and it’s limped along like an animal with a broken leg ever since then. Only able to minimally function because of the life and the friends I made in the Common World after what happened.
He shakes his head. “We drink ethically sourced blood, donated by familiars.”
I knew that. My father had a never-ending supply of dedicated groupies who followed him in the Common World, and he’d persuaded hundreds to cross the border and take the vow to be a familiar. It was the reason my father had such a close relationship with the king. His artistic fame and notoriety brought in a lot of new blood to the Midnight Kingdom—literally.
