Filed To Story: Spit or Swallow: Kiss Of The Basilisk
It was progress.
“Caspen told me I was a hybreed.”
“A hybreed?”
“Half human, half basilisk.”
“How did he know?”
Tem raised her hands, showing Leo the freckles on her palms. “These,” she said as he looked at them. “My father has the same ones. He passed them on to me.”
Leo pressed his lips to the freckles.
“And he could talk to me using his mind,” she said. “That capability is only between basilisks.”
They were silent for a long time. Tem simply breathed Leo in, smelling the way his cologne mixed with his skin, feeling the way his body felt against hers. She brushed her fingers up his chest, to his shoulders, then around the back of his neck. She paused.
There was a ridge there-a firm line of scar tissue. When Tem touched it, Leo flinched.
He pulled away. Tem pulled him back.
“Leo,” she said. “Turn around.”
He shook his head. “No.”
Tem sat up, and so did he.
“Leo,” she said again. “Now.”
To her surprise, after a pause, Leo obliged.
He turned slowly, kneeling on the bed so his back was to her. The moment the firelight hit his skin, Tem reached for him.
There were four ridges, she saw now, each about three inches long, two on either side of his spine. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed them before.
“What happened to you?” Tem whispered.
“Carriage accident,” he said quietly.
Of course it was a lie. He’d said that about the scar under his chin, but that one was jagged and irregular, befitting an accidental injury. The scars on his back were purposeful, almost surgical, and they looked like they had been administered fairly recently.
“Leo,” she said. “Tell me.”
“It’s nothing, Tem.”
She brushed her fingertips over the scars, and he shuddered. “It doesn’t look like nothing.” Without thinking, she leaned forward, pressing her lips to each scar. She turned her head, resting her cheek on the back of his neck and wrapping her arms around his torso. They sat like that for a long time, until finally, Leo spoke.
“They’re traditional,” he answered. “My father has them too. His father gave them to him, and so on.”
Four raised scars, perfectly identical. She thought of the statue in the maze: King Maximus III. Leo would be the fourth king in his line.
Father and son.
“But why?”
Leo’s shoulders rose, then fell. “Why does my family do any of the idiotic things we do? It’s like any other ceremony. The Passing of the Crown, the Cutting-it’s all the same. Yet another opportunity to mark the progression of power. My family has always been this way.”
The Cutting. More tradition.
Tem thought of that time at the Horseman-how Gabriel had asked about Leo’s golden teeth. Leo had answered: The men in my family get them when we turn twenty, among other gifts.
Some gifts.
She thought then of the freckles on her hands-a gift from her own father, but not one that had made her bleed. Leo bore the marks of his family in the same way she did, but his were administered with a blade. She imagined Leo doing this to his own son someday, cutting into his skin and leaving a scar. She couldn’t picture it.
Tem relinquished her grip on his back, crawling around so she was facing him.
“Are you going to do it to your child?” she whispered.
Leo twirled one of her curls around his finger. “I would prefer that my son not hate me, Tem.”
It took her a good long moment to understand what he was saying. “You…hate your father?”
“Trust me.” He smiled sadly. “The feeling is mutual.”
He said it so bluntly that Tem felt a sudden rush of sympathy for Leo. She couldn’t imagine what it was like for him to grow up in this castle with a father who hated him. Maximus’s contempt for her was scathing. No doubt it was tenfold for his own son.
A healed wound still bears a scar.
She took his face in her hands and looked him straight in the eye. “Maximus was wrong for doing this to you.”
Leo shrugged. “It’s all he knows.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
The prince had no rebuttal for that. Instead, he kissed her, and she let him.
When they pulled apart, Leo whispered, “I know you won’t end things with Caspen.”
Tem nestled herself more securely into his arms. “How do you know that?”
Leo gave her a sad smile. “He’s your Evelyn.”
Tem did not reply, because she realized it was true.
“I don’t want to talk about Caspen,” she whispered.
His hand brushed slowly down the curve of her waist before slipping between her legs. “Then we won’t talk,” he murmured as he slid his fingers inside her.
He touched her slowly, kissing her while he did it. Tem spread her legs for him, letting him go deeper, letting him touch everything he had earned the right to touch.
Eventually, she asked for all of him, and he gave it to her.
By the time they had finished with each other, night was falling. The sky outside Leo’s window was rapidly turning black, and Tem knew they couldn’t stay here forever.
“If you want to meet with him,” she said, her lips still on his, “we should go tonight.”
Leo sighed. He propped himself up on his hands, looking down at her. For a moment, Tem wondered if he would go back on his word-if everything that had just happened wouldn’t be enough.
Then Leo nodded. “Very well.”
New Book: Returned To Make Them Pay
On her wedding anniversary, Alicia is drugged and stumbles into the wrong room—straight into the arms of the powerful Caden Ward, a man rumored never to touch women. Their night of passion shocks even him, especially when he discovers she’s still a virgin after two years of marriage to Joshua Yates.