Page 137 of Elysian

She jumped, causing her breasts to bounce.

I pressed my quill between the pages and slapped the book shut. How could I . . . want this mortal? With her thin bones and frail skin?

She stood, studying me with her too intelligent eyes. She seemed to see things despite how I tried to mask them. I grasped her hip, bringing her closer, her back toward me. Relief. If she had not, I might falter and fuck her on my desk. The ties of the corset had been done halfway. Her warm skin seemed to radiate sunshine. She shuffled foot to foot.

“Stop moving around,” I snapped. The harshness in my voice was spurred by the inescapable desire she stoked.

Saints. She may undo my centuries-long resolve.

Then him watching me sleep.

Such beauty would only be stained by me.

The short memory wove into a different one.

Amara lay unconscious.

I tugged the fur higher on her shoulders. Her mouth puckered with pain. It crippled me. How easily I had lost myself to jealousy. Her hand upon that boy’s chest. My hand trembled where I held it to her cheek.

This pressure expanding in my chest—the breathlessness I could not help but feel—it was love. I loved a redblood woman.

The visions began to shift.

Hunger cramped my belly.

“Out, you urchin bastard! Your mother will not be back for you!” a woman shouted at him, shooing him away from the only home he had ever known.

If I was not here, how would mother find me?

Then another and another. Flashes of sleeping on the cold, hard ground. Him hungry and begging for scraps at the door of the bread maker in his village. It wove into a slower memory.

Him arriving at the Citadel.

“She will ensure your needs,” a blonde, waifish woman claimed, waving to the youthful girl at her side. Since arriving at the Kingdom, the blonde had seen to all my needs being met. If I required a specific kind of fur, she had it brought. If I wanted parchment, food—anything, she ensured it. With a curtsy, she left the girl behind. The girl went to the tub and turned the spout. I had yet to bathe since being brought to the Citadel, which the council claimed to be mine because ‘I was chosen’. The entire situation seemed mad, but if they were feeding me and offering me such luxuries, I would not refuse.

The girl stepped back from the steaming tub. I had not seen so much clean water in one place. And warm. After only bathing in ponds or lakes, this would feel different.

The girl approached and reached for my pants. I stepped back from her reach.

“Leave,” I ordered.

She shuffled away, quickly and frightened. I disrobed in the silence of my own company. I stepped into the tub and sank into it with a moan. Warmth engulfed my body, a floral smell wafting up. Dirt stained most of my limbs. I swiped my hand over my arm and the dirt lifted, exposing clean skin underneath. I had not seen my flesh so clean. When the council claimed I was the chosen monarch, I did not believe it, but I would make it so. I would be what was necessary.

I scrubbed my skin harder and harder until blue blood welled.

I would never return to having nothing.

Then I got to meet Volcan.

“Cassiel!” A bellow turned me to find Volcan shoving into my study. He strode toward me, a swagger in his stride. We had both become Warlords mere dawnlight rotations away, and he had been gone most of it. Meanwhile, I remained at the Citadel.

“You are much too dour.” Volcan slapped the top of the page of the book in my hand. A riveting tale of Saint lore. “I heard you snarled and snapped at all the women sent to please you.” He wiggled a brow. “You are frightening them.”

I grunted, shutting my book. Volcan seemed on a mission, and he wasn’t easy to ignore.

“I am not interested in their simpering,” I said, resting my book on the desk. Volcan fell onto the seat across from me, slamming his dirty boots on the surface. I contained my snarl.

“But they simper so well.” He shivered. “I had six, one after the other. Some at the same time. And I visited the brothel in the Kingdom Village.” He sighed. “Being chosen has its advantages.”