The Princess of Ash novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Bride Night

I bring the knife to his bed and cut him. He lets me, and the night goes somewhere I did not plan.

They put me in his bed at midnight, and I went in with a knife in my sleeve.

Four women had bathed me and dressed me in a red silk robe that tied at the waist with one cord.

I had kept the knife in the sash, and none of them had looked at it.

His chamber sat at the top of the tallest tower, a round room of black stone with one window over the volcano's glow.

There was a bed the size of a small boat, and a fire I did not need.

Auren stood at the window with his back to me.

He had changed out of the cloak into a loose black shirt, open at the throat.

He did not turn.

"Close the door," he said.

I closed it.

"Your hand," he said.

"Is it hurt?"

I looked down at my palm.

It was still clean, and I put it behind me.

"No."

"Strange."

"Is that why you've brought me up here?" I said.

"To ask about my hand?"

"I have brought you up here," he said, "because it is the night of our wedding, and the Council is listening at the door."

He turned then.

The firelight made his eyes darker, and a long scar of old burns ran down his throat into his collar.

I had wanted him to be an animal, something I could hate without looking.

He was a man who looked tired.

"They think this is a marriage," he said.

"Isn't it?"

"I think you came here to kill me."

I stood very still.

Behind me, the cord of my robe pressed against the knife.

"Do you?"

"I do."

He took a step toward me, and then another, with his hands open at his sides.

"So do it," he said.

I pulled the blade from my sash and struck.

I did not aim for his throat, because I did not trust my arm.

I drove it at his chest, under the ribs, the way Lord Hask had taught me.

Auren caught the blade in his bare hand.

The steel cut deep across his palm, and blood ran down his wrist, black in the firelight.

He did not let go.

He pulled me against him, my knife hand pinned between our bodies, and his blood soaked through the silk at my waist.

His skin burned.

"Plain steel," he said, low.

"Not the ash-root. You lost the good blade somewhere over the Ashmarch."

"I have another."

"You do not."

He was right.

I shoved at his chest, and he did not move.

I hit him with my free hand, hard, across the face, and the sound cracked in the room.

Something went through his eyes that was not anger.

"Again," he said.

I hit him again.

He caught my wrist this time and turned my palm up, the way he had turned it in the courtyard.

Then he put his mouth on it.

He kissed the center of my palm, where the fire had not touched.

I made a noise I had never made in my life.

"You wanted to hate me," he said against my skin.

"You still can."

I grabbed his shirt in both fists and pulled his mouth down onto mine.

It was not gentle.

His teeth caught my lip, and his tongue was hot, and the taste of blood was in both of us.

He walked me back until my shoulders hit the stone wall.

His hands found the cord at my waist and ripped it, and the silk fell open.

Nothing was under it but me.

He looked, and his eyes went orange.

"Hands up," he said.

I put them up against the wall, and he stood back one pace, watching me stand there for him.

"Higher."

I stretched until my fingers brushed the cold stone, and I was shaking, and not from fear.

He crossed the space and put his bleeding hand flat on my stomach.

He dragged it up between my breasts and left a dark red line.

Then he bent and closed his mouth on my nipple, hard, and I arched off the wall with a cry.

"Auren."

"Yes. Say it again."

"Auren, please."

He lifted me.

My legs went around his waist, and the back of my head met the stone, and his cock pressed against me through his breeches, thick and hot as a brand.

I ground down on it, and he swore.

He carried me to the bed and dropped me on the furs, and I came up on my elbows, naked, burning.

He pulled his shirt off over his head.

There was a scar across his back, and I would not understand it for days.

He stripped off the rest and stood over me, hard, huge, bleeding from the hand.

"Open your legs," he said.

I opened them.

He knelt between my thighs and put his mouth on my pussy, and I forgot every blade I owned.

His tongue worked over my clit in slow, hot circles, and he held my hips down when I bucked.

I fisted my hands in his hair and told him not to stop.

I told him I would kill him, and then I told him not to stop again.

I came with a sob, my thighs shaking around his head.

He rose over me, and his face was wet, and he was smiling.

"That was one," he said.

He pushed into me in a single slow thrust, and I screamed.

He was so thick that it hurt, a stretching burn that turned to something past pleasure when he started to move.

I wrapped my legs around his hips and met every stroke.

He drove deeper, rougher, his bleeding hand braced beside my head.

"You are mine now," he said into my ear.

"Say it."

"I'm yours."

"Again."

"I'm yours, you bastard, fuck me."

He growled and gave me what I asked for.

The bed hit the wall.

I clawed his shoulders, and I bit his neck, and I felt him tighten and swell inside me.

I came again, harder than the first time, with his name torn out of me.

He followed with a roar, spilling hot inside me, his whole body locked above mine.

Afterward we lay in the ruined furs, breathing, my head on his arm.

He turned my face toward him with two fingers.

Then he put the plain steel knife into my hand and closed my fingers around it.

His palm was already healing, the edges of the cut knitting shut.

"Try again tomorrow," said Auren Vask.

I looked at the blood on my thighs, which was his, and the knife, which was mine.

And I understood that I did not know who I was angry at anymore.

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