“Mm-hmm.” I drag my mouth across hers, slow, possessive. Not a kiss, not yet. Just a promise. “Notaprince. Not who you remember.Theprince. Say it.”
“The Prince of Thorns,” she breathes.
“That’s it, Princess. I will keep you like this forever.”
A gasp shudders out from between her lips.
“Do you want that, Rosalina?”
She nods.
“Say that too. Say you want to belong to me.”
Her leg hooks over my hip, drawing me deeper. “Yours. I want to belong to you.”
I believe her.
Because I know that is a part of her truth. A piece of her heart that is mine. I just have to make herallmine. Burn out all traces of her other mates.
She uses her leg to flip us, and I let her, simply because the sight of her body above mine is divine. I caress her breast, then drag a hand down, rubbing her clit. She moans, sighing into the touch. Her inner walls clutch around me.
“Yes, like that.” She presses a palm to my chest, right over where my heart should be.
“Caspian,” she whispers. Notmy prince.Notthe Prince of Thorns.JustCaspian. “Come back to me.”
I still.
The green fire snarls in my veins. The shadows twitch like agitated crows. Thorns break out from the ground and curl closer.
I could bind her wrists. Or better yet her mouth, so she stops saying such things.
Snarling, I grip her hips and rut harder into her. It doesn’t matter what she says. I need to make her forget everyone but me.
But she looks at me like I’ve already lost.
“This is who I was always meant to be,” I snarl, catching her wrist and pulling her flush against me. “The Green Flamefreedme. I will make you the queen he never could.”
“No,” she says, voice shaking. “Itchangedyou.”
She tries to pull away. I don’t let her. Vines of shadow lash out and circle her waist, not tightly yet. A warning.
“You will love this version of me,” I whisper, dragging my fingers up her arm. “You don’t have to fix me. You will join me.”
Her face twists into a glare, and I still my movement, save my cock twitching inside her.
“You are nothing but your father’s puppet,” she says. “Caspian was brave. I want the man who used to laugh. The one who told me his dreams. The one who kissed me like he wasn’t sure he deserved to.”
In the deepest dark of the Below, when I thought I would never see light again, all I could think of was you.
Something in me stutters.The flame inside flickers.
She sees something and dares to hope.
She places her hand over mine.
I want to tear it away.
I want to let it in.Save me, Rose.
