Chapter 105

Ruby

The feast goes on for some time longer, well into the night. Some of the guests begin to go home, leaving gifts for Atwood and I, while many others stay and continue to party.

“Feasts are always like this,” Atwood says, swirling his champagne around in his glass with one hand and poking at his cake with his fork with his other hand. “On a few different occasions, we’ve had to escort partygoers out of the castle because they simply wanted to party all night.”

“It’s refreshing,” I respond, taking a bite of cake. The cake is moist and not too sweet, with buttercream frosting. It practically melts in my mouth. “I’m happy to see people dancing and having fun, especially after what happened at my birthday party.”

Admittedly, however, I’m starting to get tired -- and Atwood can tell.

“Come on,” he says, standing from his chair and holding his hand out for me. “Let’s sneak out the back here. Everyone is too drunk to notice. I’m getting tired of all the noise.”

I nod and take his hand. We slip behind the thrones and sneak out the back door into the dark corridor that servants normally only use, laughing with each other as we run away.

At the first wedding, I was running through the woods in my wedding gown to get away from the man who I was supposed to marry.

Now, I’m running with that same man through the empty castle corridors, hand in hand with a smile on my face.

We run up the spiral steps that lead to one of the many hidden passageways in the castle, but about halfway up, I trip on my skirt and cringe when I hear a bit of fabric rip under my shoe.

Atwood stops and smirks as I attempt to wrestle the heel of my shoe out from the mountain of underskirts. Before I can finish, however, he practically pounces on me and pins me roughly against the wall, kissing me deeply. His lips and tongue travel down my neck and collar bone, causing me to whimper a bit at his touch.

“Not here,” I whisper, although I’m smiling. “Someone could find us.”

“So what?” Atwood says playfully. “It’s our castle.”

Our castle. I never thought I would hear those words.

Just a few months ago, I lived in a dilapidated house at the edge of my village. My sister and I took cold baths and scraped together hardly enough money for a single meal a day, and now I’m married to the Lycan King. I’m no longer a poor girl living in the forest; I’m the Princess.

With a growl, I kiss Atwood back passionately and let him slide his hand up under my wedding dress to stroke my thighs. He lets his hand linger between them for a few minutes, touching me in ways that send waves of shivers down my spine, finally culminating into a loud moan escaping my lips and echoing through the stairway as he helps me finish.

When he’s done, he removes his hand and pulls me up the stairs after him -- although my knees are so weak that I feel as though I can barely climb the stairs.

We finally arrive at my room -- I suppose it’s our room, now -- and before we enter, Atwood picks me up and kicks the door open to carry me over the threshold.

He carries me inside the dark room, kissing me the entire way and leaning against the door to shut it behind us. Even up here, I can still hear the sounds of the party downstairs. My head spins from the alcohol, but I don’t care. I only care about Atwood right now.

After flicking on the lamp, Atwood sets me down and circles around me once to get a good look at me.

“This dress is even more beautiful than your last,” he says, his finger tracing the top of my bodice where my breasts spill out. “And I’m glad to see it intact and not ripped and covered in mud.”

I blush a bit at his words.

“I won’t run every again,” I say. “I’m here to stay now.”

“Good.”

Atwood’s voice is firm and sultry, which makes me wet again. He walks around behind me and helps me to unlace my corset, then slips the dress off over my head. I’m wearing a lacy white bra and panties with a garter belt and thigh high stockings; something that Nancy helped me pick out specifically for this.

When he looks at me, I can see his erection strain against his pants.

With a soft growl, he pushes me down on the bed.

We don’t just make love once, but twice; once in the bed, then once in the bath afterwards. The castle is quiet now. The guests have long since gone home, and with the quietness comes a wave of exhaustion from the events of the day.

“I’m going to take you on a honeymoon,” Atwood says as we lay together in bed in the dark room. Only the full moon outside illuminates the room, casting us in a blue glow. “Once it’s safer to travel in the spring, I’m going to take you abroad; somewhere warm and sunny, where we can swim in the ocean. We’ll stay for a whole month, or even more. We’ll stay as long as you want, even if you never want to come back. How does that sound?”

A smile plays at the corners of my tired lips as I trace circles on Atwood’s chest with my finger.

“That sounds perfect,” I respond sleepily.

Soon after I say those words, I find myself drifting off into sleep in the Lycan King’s arms.

The castle is dark. Atwood sleeps next to me peacefully, but I’ve awoken by instinct.

There is a baby crying.

My baby.

I quietly slip out of bed, putting on my robe with a yawn. I’ve gotten used to the late night feedings -- Lycan babies are particularly ravenous, so the wet nurse told me -- and now I don’t mind waking up like this. It’s instinctual to care for my baby.

There’s a beautiful nursery that we built connected to our chambers. I designed it myself. It has large windows that let in the sunlight during the day and the moonlight during the night. Just like myself, my daughter loves to look at the sky.

I quietly open the door to the nursery and shut it behind me, but when I do, the sickening realization hits me.

My baby’s cries aren’t cries of hunger. They’re cries of fear, and she isn’t in the crib.

She’s in the arms of the shadow figure.

I’m frozen in place, completely unable to move, as the shadow figure stares at me. It still has no eyes, but it’s grown a grinning mouth since I last saw it. I haven’t seen it since before Atwood and I married. Why is it here now? Why is it holding my daughter? Why has it evolved?

I try to reach for my baby, try to call out her name -- Vivian -- but my body is frozen. My throat is closed. I can barely breathe.

As the shadow figure disappears into the darkness with my baby, all I can do is watch.

I wake up to the sound of my own screaming and Atwood yelling my name.

“Ruby! What’s wrong?!” he says, flicking on the lamp and looking at me with a shocked expression on his face. There are tears caked on my cheeks and my heart races.

“M-My baby,” I respond, barely able to form a coherent sentence. “It t-took her-”

“Ruby, there is no baby,” Atwood says, wrapping his arms around me. “You just had a nightmare. That’s all.”

Just a nightmare, he says.

But it wasn’t. I know it wasn’t.

It was a vision.