The Five Kings

Lyria

Kael reached the cage first.

The other four spread out behind him, forming a wall of expensive coats, powerful bodies, and eyes that made my skin crawl. The entire room behind them went quiet in a way it never did during the bidding. Up close, they were nothing like the men I watched sitting on that platform. They were bigger. More dangerous. Too much for the space around them. Heat rolled off the dragon strongly enough that I could feel it from inside the cage.

The vampire did not blink, not even once. The witch’s rings tapped softly against each other. The demon smiled with too many teeth and stared at my mouth like he already knew exactly what kind of sound he wanted to hear from it.

I shoved myself backward until the bars dug into my spine. My hands stayed exactly where they had been, one covering my breasts and the other pressed between my thighs. It barely helped. I knew they could still see most of me.

“Don’t,” I warned them. My voice shook, and I fucking hated that they could hear it. “Don’t come any closer.”

Kael stopped with one hand resting on the iron bars. Up close, his gold eyes were even more unsettling, and the scar cutting through his eyebrow made him look like a man who had survived things other people did not. He looked at my face first instead of my naked body. Somehow, that felt worse because it meant he was deliberately choosing where to put his eyes.

“Lyria Hale,” he said.

“I didn’t tell you my name.”

“The card did.”

Lucius Mercer came down the steps carrying a key attached to a black ribbon, still talking about me as though I were a fucking crate he had just sold. “Transfer is clean. Four billion received. Assets logged. The ceasefire draft is with your men. The house releases Lot One into the Five Kingdom Alliance as of the hammer. Feeding, housing, and breeding rights now sit with the buyers. Any injury sustained during transport is no longer our responsibility.”

“I’m not going anywhere with them.”

The words came out louder than I expected. A few men still sitting at the tables laughed. One of them still had a hand between his thighs, apparently not even embarrassed enough to hide what he was doing. I refused to look at him. Instead, I stared straight at Lucius.

“You read details about my body to a room full of strangers,” I snapped. “You let these sick bastards sit there touching themselves while I was locked naked in a cage. And now you think I’m going to calmly walk out of here because you have a key?” I shook my head. “Fuck you. I’m not inventory. Open that door, and I’ll bite the first hand that touches me.”

Lucius sighed as though I were the one being unreasonable. His voice was almost kind when he answered. “You don’t get a say, Miss Hale. You stopped getting a say when your blood held.”

The key turned in the lock. The cage door swung open.

I fucking ran.

One step. Two. My bare feet slapped against the freezing stone as cold air hit every inch of my naked body. For half a second, I actually believed I might make it. There was darkness at the side of the hall. A doorway. Maybe another corridor. I did not know where it led, and I did not fucking care. Anywhere was better than here. I was almost there when a powerful arm suddenly closed around my waist.

It was Kael.

My back slammed against his chest. His coat was warm against my bare skin. One huge hand spread across my naked stomach while his other caught my wrist before my nails could reach his face. It was the first time one of them had touched me. It should have been nothing more than that, a man stopping a naked woman from escaping.

It was not.

Something moved beneath my skin where his palm touched me. It wasn’t pain.

Something else.

A pull started low inside me, deep and completely fucking wrong, like my blood had suddenly recognized him even though I had not. My body reacted so quickly that it humiliated me, heat rushing through me before I could stop it, and a sound escaped my mouth before I could swallow it back.

His body reacted too.

I felt the tension in him before I understood what it meant. His whole body went rigid behind me, and his breath caught against my hair. The arm around my waist locked for half a second.

Then he dropped me.

He did not shove me. He simply released me like touching me had burned him, and I crashed onto my knees on the stone floor. My hands immediately flew back over my chest. Pain shot through my knees hard enough to jar my teeth. When I looked up, Kael had already stepped away from me. His jaw was locked.

And the front of his black trousers made it obvious that whatever he had felt, his body had reacted strongly.

What the fuck?

Then I looked at the others. He was not the only one.

The dragon’s heat had climbed so much that the air around him seemed to move. His body was visibly tense beneath his tailored clothes, and both of his hands were clenched into fists at his sides. The vampire’s perfect stillness had finally broken, his lips slightly parted and his posture rigid.

The witch had gone pale around the edges of his usual calm. His rings dug into his own fingers while his clothes did little to hide his reaction. The demon let out one quiet laugh and did not even bother turning away from me.

All five of them. Fully dressed and obviously affected.

Only Kael had touched me, yet somehow every single one of them reacted.

No one spoke.

They did not need to, because I could see what was happening to them. The witch swallowed hard. The dragon refused to look at Kael. The demon’s smile had become tight around the edges, as though even laughing was uncomfortable now. They no longer looked like five powerful kings standing together.

They looked like five men fighting the urge to reach for the same woman.

Then their eyes moved to my chest.

Fuck!

My hands dropped when I hit the floor. My breasts were completely exposed again. My body had reacted to the cold and to whatever the hell Kael’s touch had just done to me. Four of them stared openly, as though they had never been this close to a naked woman before. Kael looked too, but only for a second. His gaze snapped back to my face so quickly that I knew keeping it there took effort.

I slapped both hands over my breasts, but that only sent their eyes lower. All four of them looked straight down, their gazes sliding past my stomach before settling between my legs.

I was exposed to all four of them, and worse, the heat still moving through my body made it impossible to pretend Kael’s touch had done nothing to me.

Oh, fuck no.

Shame hit me so hard that I slammed my knees together and crossed my legs, folding over myself as though I could somehow hide what they had already seen. It was useless. I knew it was useless.

They saw everything.

“Cover her,” the vampire said. His voice somehow managed to sound bored and completely fucking ruined at the same time.

“With what?” the demon asked. “Your coat? You’ll smell her on it for a year.”

“She walks between us,” the dragon said. He still refused to look at Kael. “No one carries her. No one puts a hand on her until we are out of this house. I am not standing here watching another man hold what we all paid for.”

“We paid together,” Kael reminded him.

“And you already touched her.” Scales flashed across the dragon’s throat before disappearing beneath his skin again. “I felt it from here. So did they. Do not stand there and pretend your hand was only a catch.”

My eyes moved between them.

He felt it?

They all did?

The witch finally spoke, his voice quiet but firm. “She is not a prize for you to drape over yourself. She is a contract. For now.”

For now.

Those two words hit harder than they should have.

Shared. Theirs.

Five fucking kings bought me together, and they already could not stand beside one another without arguing over who got to touch me or whose coat I should wear.

Kael took his coat off.

He did not come closer to put it around me. Instead, he held it out toward me while keeping his eyes fixed on the floor between us. His body was still visibly tense.

“Put it on,” he said. “Or don’t. But I am not putting my hands on you again in this room.”

“Why?” I asked. My voice came out smaller than I wanted, and I hated myself for that too. “You bought me, didn’t you?” I continued. “Isn’t that the whole fucking point? You paid four billion so you could put your hands on me.”

Kael’s jaw flexed. “Not until I understand what the hell I just felt.”

For the first time since the bidding ended, Lucius had gone completely quiet. That alone told me something was wrong.

His eyes moved from the key in his hand to my stomach, to the exact place where Kael’s palm had touched me. A faint red handprint remained against my skin. It was not a bruise. It looked more like a heat mark, and it was already beginning to fade.

My pulse beneath it was racing.

“The card said human,” Lucius said carefully. “Compatible. High survival. That is what we tested, and that is what we sold.”

The witch’s rings chimed softly against one another. He lifted his eyes from my knees to the fading mark on my stomach, and something changed in his expression.

It was not desire this time; it was recognition, and whatever he recognized, he did not fucking like it.

“Then your card is late,” he said.

Nobody asked him what he meant.

Kael’s gold eyes snapped toward him with a warning. The dragon’s heat spiked again, making the air above his collar shimmer. The vampire became completely still. Even the demon stopped smiling.

What the hell was happening?

I grabbed Kael’s coat and pulled it around my shoulders because my hands would not stop shaking and I desperately needed something between their eyes and my naked body. The coat was enormous on me. It nearly swallowed me whole. It smelled like him, pine, iron, and something darker I could not name, and somehow that made me even more aware of the heat still moving through my blood from where he touched me.

Underneath his coat, I was still naked. Crossing my legs did not erase what they saw. And my body was still betraying me. Another wave of heat moved through me, sharp enough that I clenched my thighs together even harder. I gritted my teeth until my jaw hurt.

What the fuck did they do to me?

Kael refused to look at the others. The dragon refused to look at him. The vampire watched the door as though their argument was beneath him, even though his body told a completely different story. The demon tilted his head toward me, amused and hungry, clearly loyal to no one but himself. The witch, however, had stopped looking at my stomach.

Now he was staring at my wrist.

For now I belonged to all five of them. Yet standing in front of me, they already could not agree on something as simple as who got to touch me or whose coat covered my body.

Beneath the heavy coat, the mark on my skin continued to fade.

The heat inside me did not.

And the witch kept staring at my wrist as though my blood had just told him a lie that no one in this room was ready to say out loud.