I can see the relief on her face the moment I say the words, and I know it has been weighing on her more than she was saying. I take her in my arms and kiss her until we are both breathless.
“You are beautiful, Cassandra,” I say with reverence. “No, you are spectacular.”
“Flattery?” she asks with a raised brow.
“Is it flattery if it’s true?” I grin with a wink, trying to alleviate the tension.
She laughs freely for the first time in days, and I lose myself in the sound. My lips meet hers again but this time with passion. I kiss her until she is writhing against my body, my erection already begging to be set free.
I push her back onto the bed, following her. I raise on my elbows, smiling down at her.
“Before I met you, I was afraid to choose a Consort.” She frowns, so I continue. “I thought I would end up with someone I had nothing in common with, a vapid woman who was only after the crown. But now...” I kiss her hard. “Now I know my future is filled with so much more.”
She cups my cheek. “You make me feel more alive than I ever have before.”
We don’t share any more declarations of love or the future. We lose ourselves in each other. Hands, lips, skin-on-skin contact. My cock is buried deep inside her, her breasts trembling with every thrust of my hips. A blush blooms across her chest and cheeks as she crashes into an orgasm.
She moans my name loudly, scratching her nails down my back as I reach my own peak and pump her full of my seed. If I’m lucky, she will be pregnant before we even formally merge.
Chapter Eleven
The Weight of a Prophecy
Cassandra
They said I would be powerful. They didn’t say I would feel haunted.
I sit alone in the royal garden, barefoot with my knees hugged to my chest, surrounded by glowing flowers that pulse with gentle magik. The world here is too alive. And I can’t escape the way the magik follows me now. It’s in every leaf that turns toward me, every gust of wind that shifts direction when I breathe.
Runic is watching me. And something else is watching through it.
I close my eyes, trying to slow my breathing, and the scent of the garden fades into something older. The memory surges unbidden, like magik finally uncoiling.
I was sixteen the first time I met her. The Oracle.
It was after my initiation ceremony, when the coven elders thought I was asleep. Arabella woke me in the middle of the night, her eyes strangely distant.
“She’s called for you,” she’d whispered.
Arabella took me through the root-path beneath the mountain chapel, into a part of the coven grounds I didn’t know existed. There, in a circular stone chamber with no windows, a woman waited.
She wasn’t old and that shocked me. Her skin was dark and smooth, her eyes cloudy but ageless. Her body was draped in vines and bones that clinked softly as she moved.
She didn’t speak at first. She just stared at me with those silver, sightless eyes.
Then she said, “You’re the one they will all lie to.”
I blinked. “What?”
“They’ll say you were meant for one realm,” she continued like I hadn’t just spoken, “but you are a child of three. You bleed with Alluvium, you breathe with Runic, and your soul was touched by Quietus before you ever drew your first breath.”
I backed away. “That’s not possible.”
She tilted her head, as if listening to something I couldn’t hear. “You’ll fall in love with a king, and you’ll become a queen. But you will never be just his. The realms will want you, curse you, praise you ... or burn you.”
I wanted to run. I remember that clearly. I wanted to scream, to tell Arabella we had to leave, to curse at her for brining me here. But then the Oracle took my hand, and I saw it. The eclipse. The fire. The blood. A blade made of shadow and a child with eyes like stars.
“You’ll change everything,” she whispered. “But only if you choose to do so. You are not fate’s servant, Cassandra. You are its sword.”
