Throne of desires: my uncle, my sinful mate

PARIS POV

I woke up gasping from my own scream.

The dream was the same as always, a look of my father's face, pale and broken, reaching for me before it fell away into the dark.

And then she was there. Selene. Wrapping her arms around me and her lips close to my ear. She was whispering the words that bound me forever.

"You belong to me now."

I woke up suddenly, sweat dripping down the small, bare skin of my back. My room was quiet except for the bear of my heart.

My mother died when I was six.

Too weak, the healers said. Alpha Jareth my father remarried almost right away. He married Selene. She smiled at me sweetly then, called me her little dove. But within few years, Father was gone too. And from that night on, the house became a prison.

Selene's house. Selene's rules. Selene's lies.

And me? I was her tool.

At first, it was the parties. She would dress me up and have me sing or dance in front of her guests. I hated the way their eyes followed me, heavy and greedy. I hated it more when she began sending me to the club at night, saying I had a gift, that men would pay just to watch me move.

That was how it started. That was how I became hers completely.

The knock at my door came sharp, three times, but I ignored it because I already knew what it meant; Selene's orders, Selene's rules, Selene's voice reminding me that tonight I would dance for strangers until their eyes burned through me and their hunger made me sick.

But before I could be dragged into that suffocating world of smoke and music and greedy hands, I felt a pull in my chest, a quiet desperate need to see him, even if only for a moment, even if only to feel his eyes soften when they met mine, so I did what I had promised myself I wouldn't do tonight, I slipped out.

And it wasn't Selene at the door after all, just a maid carrying a tray of food I would never touch, her head bowed low as she set it down without meeting my eyes, but even that small mercy of not being caught gave me the chance I needed to move unseen, to take those stolen steps down the shadowed hall toward him. My boyfriend Mason.

The halls were dark, and I held my breath like a thief. Selene had ears everywhere, and Morgana was always looking for a reason to catch me, but I moved silently through the servant's corridor toward the only place where he and I had stolen time before.

People whispered about Mason with suspicion, the pack said he was just Liam's adopted, illegitimate son taken in out of guilt. Liam himself never confirmed it, but the warnings in his glares told me

and I never understood why because if the boy weren't even Liam's