Chapter 845: Strange Addictions
Not far from where the girls and the two devastatingly beautiful mature women had been sitting, two others remained in hushed silence.
Their beauty alone should have commanded the room.
Between them there was enough presence to thin the oxygen in any lounge on any island — beauty that simply existed, the way gravity existed and expected the world to adjust accordingly.
And yet...
Maddie Whitmore and her court had swallowed the entire space so completely, so cheerfully, so without effort, that these two women had been rendered — for the first time in either of their lives — mere backdrop. Furniture with cheekbones if you might like some scenery that happened to breathe.
The Princesses’ presence had settled across the lounge like a tide that did not know or care what it covered.
From the looks of it, Abigail and Eleanor did not particularly mind being unseen.
For Abigail, it was a strange sensation of being a backdrop — and it made her smile...
...Or what would have passed for a smile, had it not looked so dangerous.
The expression that sat on her face was like the way a blade sits in a sheath: technically contained, decorative, and yet unmistakably lethal if drawn.
It had been her birthright, always — since birth and since the Price bloodline first decided what its women were permitted to be — to command every room she entered without effort, without intention, without the tedious labour of trying.
She had never, in the entirety of her carefully curated existence, been the backdrop.
Maddie had been her first.
And the strange part that did not fit in who she was supposed to be — was that she liked it; the anonymity and the weightlessness of being, for one idle afternoon, nobody’s target and nobody’s sovereign and nobody’s carefully calibrated threat.
It was addictive in a way she had no intention of examining too closely, because if she was a Price who enjoyed irrelevance she might as well be with a structural defect:
And structural defects, in her family, were not repaired.
They were removed.
And Maddie, of course, did not give a single solitary fuck about Abigail.
She had seen her but acknowledged her with one nod, civil, clipped, the precise minimum gesture a sovereign extends to a foreign dignitary whose name she has been briefed on and whose presence she has elected not to find interesting — and then returned, without pause, to whatever magnificent chaos she was currently orchestrating among her girls.
Abigail’s smile widened.
Because the nod had told her everything:
Maddie Whitmore moved through a room the way a force of nature moved through a landscape — not with disrespect, not with cruelty, not with the deliberate slight of someone who had weighed Abigail’s worth and found it wanting.
It was something more unsettling than that;
’Serene indifference.’
And that indifference was as far as Abigail knew was of someone who simply occupied a different atmosphere entirely, who breathed at an altitude where the politics of who outranked whom had long since ceased to be relevant.
Women beneath that altitude were not diminished by this...
...They were simply not considered, the way a storm does not consider the architecture beneath it, the way the sea does not consider the depth of the harbor before it obliterates it into smitten.
And considering who Maddie truly was beyond the chaotic gremlin of Phei Ryujin Tiamat — that ancient, unfathomable presence wearing the Whitmore princess was, the terror that moved through the world with the serene indifference of something that had already ended civilisations and simply hadn’t bothered to announce it yet — Abigail did not feel offended.
She felt, if anything, recognized?
’Curious.’
One predator acknowledging another across a clearing, and both choosing, for now, to drink from different ends of the river.
Eleanor, on the other hand, had her own problems.
Problems, actually, beyond Abigail’s feeling and beyond the circle of young princesses holding court twenty feet away.
Eleanor had already accepted her own fate and had swallowed it whole like medicine she knows will not cure the disease but will, at least, delay the dying...
That acceptance sat in her chest like a stone she had stopped trying to dislodge.
So there was room, now, for something else.
Something that had crept into the vacancy her acceptance left behind and taken up residence with the quiet, insistent persistence like a habit she had not consented to forming:
A strange addiction — stranger than Abigail’s, and considerably less dignified.
Because Eleanor’s addiction had a name, and a face, and amethyst eyes she had met face-face exactly once:
Phei Ryujin Tiamat.
From the moment she had bumped into his back at Sovereign Tower — literally, physically, her shoulder connecting with the plane of muscle between his shoulder blades with enough force to make her stumble and enough proximity to make her breath catch — her nights had become something she no longer controlled.
He was everything like the Phei in those dreams, except his powers were world-ending, civilization-collapsing, the kind of cosmic authority that bent the sky and made the ground apologize for existing beneath him.
And she — she — was just as powerful, a witch of devastating magnitude standing beside him, matching him, and in every single dream; without exception she was his woman.
’No. That isn’t quite right.’
She was always his woman from the start. The dreams never showed the becoming — only the being his woman already. She was already his, already claimed and belonging to him in some fundamental way the dream-logic did not bother to explain.
And the endings of those dreams were always — always — something she could not think about without her entire face turning the specific shade of red that a Witchbourne woman was, by approximately six centuries of domestic policy, never permitted to display in public.
The shame of having such dreams should have been enough to stop her.:
It wasn’t.
’Because the dreams do not feel like dreams anymore.’
They felt like something was reaching into her mind while she slept and rewriting her from the inside out. They felt like violation dressed in velvet; like pleasure she had never agreed to feel, and yet her body responded to it with a hunger that terrified her.
Every night she woke gasping, thighs wet from leaking love juice, heart pounding with a mixture of horror and something far more damning — longing.
She told herself on the second night that it was just a phase; a temporary madness brought on by proximity to power she was not meant to touch and told herself it would fade.
She was lying.
