prodigal had, and her resentment blazed within her whenever she encountered a masculine specimen who invariably failed to meet his queen’s exacting standards. Andrax had been a devastating lover, and memories of nights spent in toe-curling ecstasy with his cock feeding her core had ruined the appeal of regular men.
I give him too much power over me, and it has only grown during his long absence. It makes me weak. Minerva detested weakness, so she chose to deny the naked truth that she shunned whole men because the one she had lost placed all others in shadow. She desired the soft flesh of women too, but she felt no need to be submitted to the tyranny of any partner for longer than it took to come. There is only one whose tyranny I long for, and the time is growing near when he will be powerless to resist me. The man she loved and despised in equal measure was the reason she had unleashed rapture on Shadehaven, and the reason why she was rushing to Neora’s latest unveiling.
She was being led to the theaters of pain in the cold glare of morning, her thoughts on an appropriate punishment for Neora’s treachery. Last night’s memory of the bitch between her thighs gnawed at her. The changeling had even hesitated when she had screamed for Andrax’s mask at the height of her bliss, and an uneasy feeling had stirred in Minerva’s breast. Neora had been growing possessive of her queen’s affection lately, so Minerva had visited the Moonheart to see how much rapture the bitch had truly taken.
Lying cunt. She had procured enough of the essence to destroy Shadehaven and its Fay five times over. While Minerva had crafted adequate defenses to ensure her crimes could not be detected by the prying eyes of the Council, there were limits to her subterfuge. An overflow of rapture as large as the one Neora had unleashed would cause chaos in the balance of the weave that shielded the Fay from mortal eyes. The Negress was ever watchful for a sign of the fallen Fay, and she could sense disturbances in the weave that even the most powerful Council seers could overlook. And if Shadehaven was gone before the prodigal returned he would have no need to beg her mercy.
At the door to the theatres, she dismounted her carriage, walking on the stepped backs of the thralls who comprised her human stair. She could feel their hot skin and sharp bones beneath her icy feet as she descended, and she ordered them to await her return while a thin eunuch pulled open the door.
The theatres of pain were aptly named. High-ceilinged and cavernous, the huge space was divided into dozens of discrete viewing chambers. The theatres were stages cut into the marble floor with rows of wooden seats rising above them in ever widening circles. On any given morning, the lashings and punishments would be meted out in these pits, and crowds would cram the seats and marvel at the sights and sounds of the transforming flesh below them. Minerva found the loudest theatre, knowing that was where the changeling would be.
Neora had devised a new game. She lay naked on a smooth marble plinth, a pretty young girl with her hands tied behind her back kneeling to lick her clit. Clips in the shape of dogs’ heads were fastened to her nipples and the light blue ink under her skin pulsed visibly beneath the pinched flesh. Five clear tubes hovered above her face, which was dripping with perspiration in the stark light offered by a floating orb shaped like a crescent moon. The tubes rose vertically to the men hanging from the roof above her.
“Come on, boys! Do none of you want to win your freedom? Come, come, come!” Neora’s shouted command was quickly taken up by the crowd, and Minerva realized that the men were racing.
The five men suspended above her were violently masturbating, the skin of their backs stretched taut by the silver hooks that cut through their skin and connected them to the roof. The tubes were positioned beneath their crotches, where their swollen cocks were