Pleasure of a Dark Prince

Chapter 32

When Crom had asked Lucia to come with him and leave Valhalla, she’d eagerly agreed, though she’d known that once a Valkyrie left that plane, she could never return.

Lucia was sixteen and in love. Nothing, not her godparents’ warnings or Regin’s pleading, could dissuade her. She’d wedded Crom with no reservations, despite his strange customs—they couldn’t touch whatsoever until after they’d been married, and they had to wed in a bizarre stone temple with robed strangers all around.

At the altar, after they’d been joined forever, she’d turned to her beloved. And he’d vanished. In his place was one of the strangers with a raised club. He’d struck, knocking her unconscious.

Too late, Lucia had learned that Crom Cruach had never even been at the portal. Instead, he’d been trapped in a fetid lair in the earth, projecting the image of the fair-haired young man.

For as long as she’d been watching the sky, Cruach had been watching her. He’d needed a bride born of gods to beget heirs on, and like so many deities, he could project illusions for women he wanted to seduce.

When Lucia had awakened, she’d been trapped in his prison with her fair-haired man standing over her. Only then had Cruach unveiled his true self to her. His beautiful face had fallen away, revealing the Broken Bloody One.

A cloven-footed monster, Cruach clad himself in scraps of metal strung together, taken from his slaughtered victims’ proud shields or armor. On his massive head, stringy white hair hung sparsely around horns that jutted up like giant splayed fingers. His face was ghoulish, his eyes yellow, slitted with red and running with pus.

He was broken, his body misshapen, his bones having fractured and healed at odd angles. But even with his hunched form, he stood seven feet tall. He was bloody as well—his scaly snakelike skin seeped blood and was rotting away in places, exposing those fused bones beneath.

A line of drool had dripped from the corner of his gaping mouth when he’d smiled down at her.

Once she’d been able to scream no more, she’d learned the truth about all his lies. He had told her he’d make her mistress of his castle and shower her with gifts. His “castle” was a corpse-strewn tunnel in a seaside cliff, thick with maggots and stench.

The gifts? Dead bodies and parts of them—ragged limbs, heads with sightless eyes. He intended for her to… eat them.

The adoration he vowed? Each day, his Cromites had prepared her body with vile rituals, marking her skin with blood, drawing sinister marks from the black arts all over her.

There was no escaping him. Cromite swordsmen guarded the entrance to the lair and the tunnel ended in a cliff two hundred feet above the ocean.

Toward the end of her captivity, she’d been so starved, her stomach had cleaved to her spine. “You go hungry?” Cruach had said, waving at the pools of oily blood and gruesome limbs. “When I give you meat and wine, my love?”

Once she’d begun to sicken with fever, she’d heard someone calling her name from down at the base of the cliff and thought it a delirium.

But it was all too real. Young Regin—who’d sensed Cruach’s deception and had begged Lucia not to leave—had followed her out of Valhalla. Never to return, cast out forever. Lucia had wept to hear her sister’s plaintive cries for her.

“How do I reach you, Lucia? I don’t… I don’t know how to get up there!”

Never would she have let Regin enter that place—even before Lucia’s eventual wedding night….

As she weakly screamed, his followers laid her on his altar, holding her down. When he heaved himself above her, blood spilled from his mouth, from between gritted teeth, pouring over her face, into her eyes. His organ would rip her in two—she’d known he would kill her like this.

So long without food, with her heart racing with horror, she’d lost consciousness.

When she woke, he was roaring with fury, missing an eye. Beneath her claws were chunks of scaly skin. The Cromites had drawn their swords, leveling them at her.

With blood gushing down her thighs, she rolled off the altar into a pile of bodies. Flies erupted from the gore. She breathed them, hacking them from her lungs and mouth.

Somehow she made it to her feet, coughing, tears blinding her as she tried to stagger away through the line of Cromites. Knowing she was trapped, Cruach allowed her to go, snarling with rage at his pain, then laughing because he’d caused her more. “Do you think that was pain, wife? That was a mere hint! I’ll teach you what misery is!”

She followed the tunnel to the very end. At the cliff’s edge, she gazed out over the horizon, over the ocean. The first clean air she’d breathed in days.

Pure peace awaited her…. He couldn’t pass this barrier, could never follow her down. When he yelled for her, she closed her eyes, and she leapt—

Hands snatched her shoulders, jerking her back.

No, no! That’s not how it happened! She’d gotten free. Now he had her again!

She swiped out with her claws, desperate to jump… to die.