You can start this dark erotic romance with episode 1 right here: Episode 1.
Also, all the trigger warnings! All of them.
No one wants a birthday party with the woman who imprisoned you for two years, who broke your father, who stole your inheritance and stripped you of every tear you’ll ever cry.
But this party wasn’t mine. It was hers; only she didn’t know it.
Delilah grabbed me by the hand, her skin like the rare silks from the Tribal Lands, just as the doors swept open and the full force of the bassline hit me. The place was packed, loud, and I felt immediately claustrophobic, but on we went, the crowd parting like a school of fish when a shark swims up. Cameras flashed and heads turned, but Delilah shooed them away as easily as she swatted a fly. We settled at a cozy hightop in a dark corner, exactly the one I’d ensured would be empty.
Gold is grease, they say in Esteria, and I’d learned that lesson well during my time in the tower. A web connection, hours wiling away on a private browser with a royal’s access to everything can get a girl any information she needs. Any connections. That and gold could get anything arranged.
They call it Glass Dust on the street — a careful mixture of crushed sirenroot, pixie resin extract, and dreamshade. A few cloves of lustwort. A pinch of finely-ground enchanted glass. Add a few grams of fairy dust and a touch of years-long anxiety and you can forge a tincture nearly invisible to the human eye and absolutely undetectable in a tall flute of glitterwine.
Delilah raised her glass, and I followed suit, my heart thudding in my chest, trying my best to conjure up my usually lacking smile as she leaned over to offer a toast. “To my daughter on her Coming of Age day. I wish your father could have been here to see this moment, but as your loving mother, I am here for you.”
I swallowed, beating back tears and a broiling rage that grew with every mention of my father, or her insistence in calling herself my mother. This bitch — but she knew what she was doing, and so did I. Tomorrow was Inheritance Day — the day after your 18th in Esteria, and within the week, the lawyers would be at the tower. Everything was at stake, and I would lose everything if I didn’t follow through.
I nodded my head and tipped my glass to my lips, my eyes locked on her as she downed the whole glass in a gulp and tossed the glass onto the floor, where it shattered. A young man rushed up, his eyes wide, his white button-up dark around the pits, and he contemplated the glass a moment before my wicked stepmother barked at him.
“Quickly, fool. I need a new glass. We’re toasting to my daughter’s future.” She waited a beat, while he considered leaving the broken glass on the floor, then she aimed her iciest voice in his direction, and I knew I’d made the right decision. “Move, you little shit. We’re having fun tonight, and I’ll not have it spoiled by a low-born like you. Bring the bottle, or you’ll spend the rest of your days in darkness.”
I caught a glance from him, a look of sheer terror on his face before he rushed back into the crowd for another glass. And then I turned back to Delilah, President of Esteria’s Total Cunt Club, and smiled, feeling the warmth of the wine, the cool flow of silent rage stealing through my veins. My heart skipped a beat and settled into an easy rhythm, and the fear began to fade away.
There was Delilah, my stepmother, in her seething glory, turning my way, the mask slipping, the flush of warmth rising into her face. Her eyes narrowed and then fluttered as the Glass Dust invaded her system like a virus. Her lips parted, and I caught a whiff of burnt glass. I breathed it in, luxuriating in the moment’s sweetness.
“What was I…?” Her words fell away, and she looked at me in wonder. “I don’t…, um, is there more wine? My glass.” Her eyes searched the table, one shaky hand reaching out for a glass that wasn’t there.
“Should we go to the bar?” I offered, standing, rounding the little table. I met her before she could rise, leaned in close, testing, watching, feeling the heat of her skin, the rapid pulse in her neck. “Are you well, mother?” Closer, my lips brushing her earlobe. She shuddered and clutched my wrist. “Let’s get you up and somewhere quiet. Out of the way. Let me take care of you, my dear.”
She teetered on her heels — limp and pliable, dazed and confused, her mouth working without sound — and I guided her down a long, shadow-drenched corridor. It stretched out from the heart of the club, pulling us away from the pulsing bass and glittering decay of the main floor. It led to a wing of private rooms whispered about in noble circles but forbidden to all but the crown-touched and power-drunk. Three sentinels stood guard in silence, their gazes sliding over us as if we were smoke or shadow.
The private chamber opened like a secret mouth—swallowing us into crimson velvet and perfume-sweet air, thick with sweat and anticipation. Candlelight licked the walls, casting long shadows that flickered like bodies intertwined.
Delilah was breathless, pupils wide, already adrift on the first bloom of dust. But the second—ah, the second would unmoor her completely.
I drew her close, my lips brushing her ear. “You’re burning,” I whispered, and I wasn’t wrong—her skin was flushed, pulse fluttering beneath the soft sweep of her neck.
I let my hand trail down her thigh, then up, fingers dipping beneath the silk hem of her Imperial sheath. She gasped, a sound like silk tearing when I slid two fingers inside her cunt. She nearly buckled, but I held her close, upright, my breasts pressing against hers, my lips teasing. She didn’t know, couldn’t know, that the dust clinging to my fingertips was far more than fairy magic now — brewed in bitterness, obsession, and powdered obedience. A recipe, honed over the last two years, designed just for her.
Love, they said, is a lie, but vengeance is a truth. And I needed no fairy godmother to feel that truth — the truth of who she was and would be forevermore.
I kissed her slow and deep, sealing the second dose with a sigh from her lips. Her legs gave out as the poison flooded her cunt, and she clung to me, not out of desire — no, not yet — but because her body had ceased to obey her. The mixture was coursing through her now, and I could feel her need. When I pulled my fingers away, they were glistening.
I turned, and two figures stepped from the shadows, silent and swift. Men she would’ve never allowed near her in another life. Men who’d spent a lifetime watching royals surrender themselves to debauchery and forbidden delights. Men who’d been paid their weight in gold for what was about to happen. They hesitated, eyes on me, and I nodded.
“This is her.”
Delilah tried to speak as they undid the fine clasp at her shoulder, but her mouth betrayed her—forming only soft, dazed whimpers as the black cloth slipped down her body without a sound. It puddled around her feet as she stepped out of her glass slippers. And when she looked up at me, naked and finally undone, her eyes flashed with recognition, and a single tear rolled down her cheek.
I held her chin, kept her eyes on mine. “I will miss you, Delilah,” I murmured. Another lie, one of many I’d told her over the years after my father had passed. A lie she deserved. A lie she would come to forget, just as she would forget her name. She was about to disinherit me and cast me out. I’d watched her let my father waste away and die, and I wasn’t going to be next.
She shivered when the collar appeared. Gilded. Black-lacquered. Forged by an expert hand in exchange for the largest emerald in the family vault. Before Delilah even registered it, I’d fastened it around her throat like a gift. A second later, it clicked shut with a note of finality.
She gasped.
“Welcome to your new life, Mother.”
I weighed the silver in my hand. Three silver moons bearing the crest of the King of Esteria. Pale orbs to buy a night of survival in the market, or one precise act of ruin.
I stepped back, watching the man from the South unbuckle his robes, his shoulders blackened from a history of desert suns, his body carved from obsidian granite, yet with a gold signet ring that betrayed his station. I’d discovered the world behind the panels against my will, but once I understood how power moved in Esteria, I knew this would be my theater. Her altar. My revenge.
He looked at me, and I nodded — three moons for any hole. I dropped them on the divan next to Delilah’s face and knelt there next to her, drawing the hair out of her eyes like I was revealing a secret. Dust shimmered in her pupils like fallen stars, as wide as the night sky. A tremor of recognition when I pressed my lips to hers, and then she groaned as the Southerner entered her.
A single tear cut down her cheek. I traced its path with my tongue, then sat back, sliding my fingers into hers, feeling the divan shudder underneath us as he fucked her ass. Two nights ago, she would never have allowed such an act. Tonight, she’d earned fifteen silver coins from men passing in the night. Three silver moons to plunder the Grand Duchess of Esteria’s treasures. Three silver moons to baptize her in salt. In sweat. In cum. Step forward and let her submit to her new god.
Only three silver moons.
They came in shifts. Captains from the docks with salt still in their beards, warriors who smelled of steel and sweat, pale merchants with fingers soft from counting gold. All of them came to her, drawn by the whisper that the Grand Duchess could be had for the price of a loaf of bread and a cup of ale.
I watched from the shadows, wine in hand. I kept count, as any merchant does, marking each hour, each gasp, each clink of silver.
First, the Southerner — slow and deliberate, as though carving his name into her. Then a lean youth from a great house, who kissed her like he’d been starving for years. A knight with graying temples followed, hands calloused from the sword, yet trembling as he gripped her throat and pushed his spear home.
Each man was a line in my poem. Each thrust, a day of my imprisonment undone.
She whimpered, she gasped, she moaned, until the sounds no longer belonged to a woman afraid, but a woman in need. Her hair tangled, her skin flushed, the dust in her eyes dimming with every offering of silver. Her body — once guarded like a vault — became a public fountain, overflowing and defiled with a litany of cocks and a deluge of cum.
When she faltered, they lifted her. When she sagged, they took another hole. When she wept, in those quiet moments when the room stood as still as the earth, I licked her tears as if they were nectar.
By dawn, she lay spread across the divan like a palace ruin, the offerings pocketed, her worshippers gone. Her collar gleamed in the candlelight, the little silver tag inscribed with her new name.
She blinked up at me as I stood over her, the silver heavy in my palm, and smiled.
“Just for me, Thorn. All for me.”
Author’s Notes: And we’ve only just begun. If the Grand Duchess can be had for three silver moons, where else is there to go but down, down, deep down into the darkness.
But why? We’ll learn soon enough, my lovelies. Stay tuned. It’s a long way down.
I love the language in this. The first sentence grabbed me and I was hooked
Phew! Just as good as the first episode- classy erotica with revenge thrown in. 🙌