Page 15 of Knotting Sleeping Beauty

“Good answer.” She rolls on her stomach and props her chin on her fists. “What’s your kingdom like?”

“Cold. Mountains. Lots of forest, lots of rain. And we make the best smoked game you’ll ever taste.”

Her eyes light up. “I’ve never had smoked game.”

“Rose.”

“Yes?”

“The list of things you’ve never had is going to take a lifetime to work through, and I am looking forward to every single item.”

She bites her lip, her eyes go hazy, and her scent thickens, thighs pressing together.

“Again?” she asks, already half gone.

“Come here,” I rasp out.

She crawls across the bed toward me. I catch her lush hips, pull her into my lap, and she sinks into me with a sound that echoes off the walls…

Eleven

ROSE

The next day, the thorns begin to thin. Sunlight, not the dim glow that filtered through the thorn-covered windows, streams across the bed and hits my face, and I realize I haven’t seen the sun in fucking years.

I cry, and Kael holds me through it. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t try to fix it. He just wraps his enormous body around mine and lets me sob into his warm chest while the sun moves across the floor of my tower room for the first time in decades.

And I feel his fury at the curse, at the years stolen from me, at the parents who locked me away, at the woman whose jealousy cost me such a large part of my life. It’s a cold anger. The anger of a man who’s already calculating how to make sure nothing ever hurts me again.

“I want to go outside,” I finally say when the crying stops.

“Your heat…”

“Is calming down. I can feel it. The waves are getting further apart.” I press my hand flat against his chest. I push the truth of my words to him, the heat loosening its grip, its desperate need cooling to a warm ache. “Kael, I want to see the sky.”

He looks at me for a long moment. Then he gets up, finds his trousers, and holds out his hand.

“Then let’s go see the sky.”

We go down the tower together. His hand dwarfing mine, fingers threaded through mine, steady and warm. I’m wearing his shirt; it hangs to my knees, smells like him, and I’m never giving it back.

The thorns have retreated from the doorway. What’s left of them is shriveled and gray, pulling back into the earth like they were never even there to begin with. And beyond, everything has gone back to green. There’s grass, trees, open air, and a sky so blue, so vast that I stop on the threshold and can’t freaking move any further.

“Rose?”

I shake my head. “Just give me a second, Alpha.”

I step outside. The grass is cool and damp under my bare feet. The air smells like pine, earth and morning. Birds are singing, the sun heats my skin, and I close my eyes, tilt my face up, and just breathe.

Behind me, I hear voices. Ronan’s I recognize from yesterday. “Your Majesty, King Alaric is…”

“Here.”

And that’s my father’s voice. He sounds older than I remember, rougher, a bit cracked.

I turn.

He’s standing twenty feet away. His hair is all white. It was ebony when I fell asleep and now it’s white… he’s thinner, his face is lined, he looks like he’s aged a hundred years, not a couple of decades, and my heart shatters.