My Fated Mate Was a Lie, Now the Alpha King Wants the Truth novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Price of Staying

Fired and cast out by morning, Idony bargains with the King for the authority to free false bonds, reads his dying mark, and finds she cannot stop touching him.

He did not let go of me all the way to his study.

He walked me out through the side door of the Moon Hall with my wrist in his fist.

Four hundred people watched the King of Orrenmoor haul a fired clerk past the High Registrar.

Tull bowed as we passed.

His smile hadn't moved.

The study was a long room with a fire and a desk the size of a cart.

One sagging leather sofa sat in front of the fire, and it did not belong in a palace.

A stout woman with iron-grey hair under a plain cap was standing at the window with a bag at her feet.

"Sit," she said to the King.

"Hester," he said.

"Sit, or I'll have you sat."

He sat.

He still held my wrist, so I sat too.

The woman looked at our joined hands, then at his face, and her mouth went thin.

"Hester Penrhyn," she told me. "I keep him alive. He doesn't enjoy it."

"Three years," said Cassian. "Hester, it's quiet."

"What is?"

"All of it."

She put two fingers to his throat and counted.

I watched her face go from sour to something else.

"Don't move your hand, girl," she said to me. "Not an inch. I'll fetch tea."

She left, and the door shut, and I was alone with a king.

I should have been afraid.

I was too angry to be afraid.

A page knocked and handed me a folded note on Registry paper.

It said my position was terminated for cause and my rooms in the dormitory had been cleared.

A second note came behind it, from my uncle, the Alpha of the Wrexham hold.

He had raised me after my parents died.

It was three lines long.

The Wrexham hold had struck my name from the hearth-book, he wrote, and would not know me.

I read it twice.

The first time I felt nothing.

The second time my hand started to shake and Cassian's closed over it.

"They did that in an hour," I said. "They had it written before I opened my mouth."

"Yes," he said.

"They knew I'd say it."

"Or they were ready for anyone who did."

He had a low voice that didn't waste anything.

"Tell me what you saw on that certificate," he said.

I told him.

When I finished, he was quiet for a long time.

"My investigators have looked for the woman I'm bound to for two years," he said.

"The Registry says she's real. Every one of them came back and said she never lived."

He pulled his collar open with his free hand.

Over his heart there was a silver crescent the size of my palm.

Black lines ran out from it across his ribs.

"The physicians give me until winter," he said.

"Stay in the palace. I'll give you the archive keys and guards to keep you breathing. Find the woman the Registry swore was mine."

"No," I said.

His eyebrow, the one with the scar through it, went up.

"I'll find your queen," I said.

"In return I want a writ in your hand, under the royal seal."

"For what?"

"Authority to investigate any bond I think is bought, and to free anyone caught in one. Nobody at the Registry gets to stop me."

"You're asking for a great deal."

"You're asking me to risk the only thing I have left, which is being right."

He laughed, once.

He crossed to the desk, wrote, sanded and sealed it, and held it out.

I read every word of it.

Then I put my free hand flat on his mark.

I had never touched a mark without a glove.

Registry rules.

His skin was hot, with a thin raised ridge where the crescent lay.

Underneath it I heard a man's voice, young and not yet tired, say, "I will keep them safe."

Under that there was a hum.

I felt him go still.

"What did you hear?" he said.

"Your vow. The one you made at the crowning." I swallowed. "There's something under it. It's not a woman. It's not anyone."

I took my hand back and looked at the inside of my left wrist.

The little silver crescent had been there since I was twenty-three.

"Touch it," I said.

He closed his hand over it, and I listened.

Nothing.

No vow, no voice, no one.

Three years of being told the Moon had chosen me, and the mark under his thumb was a drawing.

I made a sound I'd been holding in all day.

Then I was crying with my face in his collar.

He didn't say a word.

He just pulled me against his chest where the mark was.

His hand went into my hair.

His heart was going hard under my cheek.

"I'm sorry," I said, and I wasn't sure for what.

"Don't be."

"I haven't been held in three years."

"Neither have I," Cassian said. "Not without it burning them."

I lifted my head.

He was very close, and his eyes were black in the firelight.

I could smell him, cedar and smoke and something under it that made my knees go loose.

Omega, I thought.

Of course.

I didn't care.

I put my hand on his jaw, and I kissed him.

His mouth was hot and he didn't kiss like a king.

He kissed like a man who had been drowning and had just found air.

His hand was in my hair, and the other one was still around my wrist, holding on.

I made a sound against his lips and climbed into his lap without asking.

My ruined white gown bunched up around my thighs.

His hands found the bare skin, and I felt him jerk under me.

"Idony."

My name.

He said it like he was testing whether it was allowed.

"Say it again," I said.

"Idony." His voice cracked on the second syllable. "Three years. Three years since anyone's touched me without screaming."

"I'm not screaming."

"You're shaking."

"So are you."

I rolled my hips down, and the hard length of him pressed against me through his trousers and my thin silk.

He was thick, and hot even through the layers, and my cunt clenched around nothing.

I wanted him inside me so badly it was a pain.

"Gods," he said into my mouth. "You have no idea what you're doing to me."

"I know exactly what I'm doing to you."

I ground down again, slow, and watched his jaw go tight.

His fingers dug into my hips, and he pulled me harder against him, and I let my head fall back.

"Good," he said. "Like that. Take what you want."

I rode his clothed cock with my thighs shaking, my clit catching on the seam of his trousers with every roll.

The friction was rough and not nearly enough and perfect.

I was so wet I could feel it slicking my inner thighs.

His mouth went to my throat, and I felt his teeth graze the skin where my pulse hammered.

I turned my head to give it to him.

I wanted his bite, his mark, his teeth in me, and I didn't care that my own mark was a lie.

He stopped.

His forehead came down against my collarbone, and he was breathing like he'd run a mile.

"No," he said.

"Cassian."

"Not yet."

His hands were still on my hips, holding me against his cock, and I felt it twitch.

"Not until it's yours to give."

"It is mine."

"Not tonight." He lifted his head, and his eyes were black and wild. "Tonight I'd take too much."

I wanted him to.

I wanted him to take everything.

I kissed him again, and he let me.

I ground down on him hard, chasing the heat building low in my belly.

His hands slid up under my gown, over my bare thighs.

One thumb found the wet center of me through the silk.

"Fuck," he said against my mouth. "You're soaked."

"For you."

"Idony."

I came with my mouth on his shoulder to muffle the sound.

I came from his thumb and his cock and the way he said my name, shaking apart in his lap while he held me through it.

His fingers dug in, and I felt him pulse against me.

He made a sound like a man being broken open.

I slid off his lap.

My legs didn't want to hold me.

I stood there with his shirt in my fists, breathing hard, my gown rucked up around my waist and my thighs slick.

He looked up at me from the sofa, and his chest was heaving, and his mark was glowing faint and silver.

"It hums when you touch it," he said. "Not quiet. Humming."

I looked at my hands.

"That's not nearly enough," I said.

"No." His voice was rough. "It isn't."

He walked me to a guest room afterward without another word, and he did not touch me again.

At the door he said, "Midnight."

"What happens at midnight?"

"The mark wakes up." He looked at my hands. "I'd like those in the vault with me when it does."

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