I drive into her hard, sending her sprawling onto the cracked black stone. She catches herself on hands and forearms, shoulders hunched, and I feel the dark bloom of anger roll through her—more than frustration. Something older and worse and hungrier.
She pushes up on all fours and stares at me. Her voice, when it comes, is quiet and absolute. “Kneel.”
The word is a blade. It cuts the sound from the air.
My body betrays me. Muscles lock, knees folding beneath me like someone yanked the floor from under my spine. I fight it, jaw clenched, because Ido notkneel. I do not submit. But an invisible pressure coils around my legs and presses me down. Bastion curses and collapses to one knee, fists scraping stone as he claws to resist. Cassiel—always the exception—drops immediately to both knees and bows his head; the look on his face is not of defeat so much as the sudden acceptance of a fact too long avoided.
We are all on our knees beneath her.
Lillien walks among us, the authority in her stride a physical thing. She inspects us with detached curiosity, pleased and hungry and terrible all at once. Watching Bastion thrash against it—his golden eyes bright with furious shame—is its own dark joy. Cassiel’s stillness is worse: his shame makes him small and exquisitely human.
She crouches before me and tilts my chin up with a single sharp claw the way I have done to her a dozen times. Up close I can see the small, savage delight tugging at her mouth.
“You love it, don’t you?” she whispers, silk and sin threaded together.
I growl. My whole body hums with the effort to reclaim sovereignty. When she releases the command the hold snaps away and I surge upright. Bastion lashes to his feet with a roar and paces, muscles quivering as he shakes off the aftertaste. Cassiel exhales and remains, stunned and chastened.
I stand ahead of them all, towering, reminding the air of who I am. Anger and something darker curl warm and bright in my gut.
She only smirks.
“My turn,” I tell her. My voice is low and a promise.
She does not flinch. She smirks back. The challenge is made and answered in a glance. I will ruin her for that. I will break and build and own every ferrule of that new hunger until the memory of making us kneel is permanent in her bones. And the prospect tastes like victory.
FORTY-THREE
They kneel before me. All three of them. Deimos. Bastion. Cassiel.
Something electric uncoils inside my chest. Power thrums through my veins like a live wire, thick and heady, filling me until the world narrows to the taste of it. This is what I was made for. The truth lands inside me: they are older, sharper, remade by things I will never fully understand. And yet they kneel. For me.
Deimos moves first, the world blurring into him. He grabs my waist and slams me flat as if the ground were the kind of answer you cannot deny. His mouth finds mine with a claim that steals the breath from my lungs; every kiss is an edict. He cages my wrists overhead and his weight is a sentence. “You’re getting a little too comfortable with that power, Lustling,” he rasps, teeth ghosting down my throat.
Heat pools and lashes between my legs with a ferocity that laughs at restraint. “And?” I spit, breath hot.
“And I think youlikeforgetting who owns you.” His grin is a thing with edges.
I tease him, roll my hips, try to make the cage his problem. Heat pools low in my stomach as I taunt him. “I don’t belong to anyone.”
His grip tightens, a low growl reverberating in his chest. "Wrong."
“Then prove it."
He lets me dangle on the edge and the denial lights a slow, cruel hunger in me. When he pulls away it makes something in me flare. He walks off like a god who has changed his mind about mercy. “Not yet.”
Bastion’s shadow falls next, immense and immediate. Before I can brace, he hauls me onto my knees with hands that mean to possess. He does not ask. He does not wait. He knows without permission; I know without shame. His mouth finds the skin at my throat, his hands drag.
“You think you can play with us, Hellcat?” he growls, voice thick with possession. “Think you can push and pull and not pay for it?”
The heat spreads lower, between my thighs as I tilt my head up in defiance. “I don’t owe you anything.”
“Oh, but you do.” He answers with the certainty of a verdict.
Then, he flips me onto my back, his massive body covering mine. The sound I let out is half gasp, half moan, something ragged and true. Deimos and Cassiel watch with the stillness of predators—silent, unmoving. Their presence presses in like a heat I can taste. They don’t stop it. They want it this way.
Bastion pins my wrists above my head with one large hand, his other sliding down my body, gripping my thigh, spreading me wider beneath him. His lips drag along my throat, his breath hot against my skin.
“You’re soaked, Hellcat,” he murmurs, his fingers teasing, slipping between my thighs. “And I’ve barely touched you.”
