Taken by the Faerie King by Jane Grey

Author:Jane Grey [Grey, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Eight

“Will my ladies know to find me in your chambers?”

I wrapped Orion’s dressing gown around my naked figure, breathing in the deeply ingrained, musky scents of the oils he used in his own bath water that lingered in the fabric.

He shook his head and lay a hand at the small of my back, ushering me to the far side of the room. Unlike my bedroom, the walls of his room were completely covered in engraved wooden paneling, worn down by the ages. Some walls were covered in tapestries like my own, but he took me to a bare section of well-worn paneling. His hand slid across the wood until he reached a split in the wood. The split, I realized, ran all the way up the wall. With a gentle push, a creaking noise emanated from the wall, and the section swung open to reveal a dark hallway.

“The rooms you used when you arrived were temporary,” he explained. “This is a secret passage connecting my quarters to your new, official residence.”

My heart thrilled at his words. A secret passage connecting our bedrooms… we could visit each other at any time and no one else in the castle would have to know. We did not have to keep ourselves a secret, but after the events of the last few hours… I doubted that I would be able to keep myself out of his bed.

He lit a torch fireplace and passed it to me. “I’ll walk with you today because I’m not exactly sure how far the passage is, or if it has been kept clean since…”

His voice trailed off. A distant look, a kind of glaze passed over his features. Since my mother died.

This room was once his father’s. His mother would have used this passage to visit her husband. These simple facts broke my heart in two, and I remembered our hastily-whispered conversation from last night: we were in danger here.

I grasped his hand and pulled him into the passageway. “An adventure,” I teased, trying to break the sudden tension. He smiled and padded along after me, wearing only the pair of trousers he’d stripped off last night. His skin glowed warmly in the firelight as we descended deeper into the queen’s passage.

The glow of the torch only illuminated a small circle of a few feet around us in all directions. As we walked, Orion ran his free hand along the ancient stone. If it was anything like the rest of the passage, it must be ice cold.

He must be thinking of his mother. How could he not? How many times had she walked this same path to and from her husband’s bedchambers? Through the ages, so many of his ancestors passed over these same stone floors, admired the same artfully woven tapestries. So much of Orion’s own history, his bloodline, had worked its way into the very stones of this castle.

“Not too bad,” he noted as we approached the backside of a door at the opposite end of the tunnel.

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