Lustfully Ever After by Kristina Wright Page B

closes her eyes, swallows hard. “I… can’t.”
    Oh, my queen. The things we do for love. The crop makes such beautiful lines, crisscrossing the already red bleeds of her ass, her hips. She whimpers, bows her head.
    “Ask,” I say. Third time, and she knows that she must.
    She looks at her reflection, really looks. The mirror is magic, yes, but it is not her magic, and it owes allegiance to nothing but the truth. It shows her herself, on all fours and naked before it. Her chest is crisscrossed with raised welts, their surface pink and purple. Bruises flower on the inside of her arms, across the ridges of her collar bone. Her makeup is smeared, the black of her eyes, the ruby of her lips. Her ass is snow white and blood red. Her skin is stained with a thousand drops of blood that bloom like the smallest of roses.
    There is nothing more beautiful in this world or any other.
    She begins again. This time she makes it through. “…who’s the fairest of them all?”
    “You, my queen,” says the mirror. “Are the fairest of all.”
    It’s true. Snow is dead. The huntsman is dead. Even the raven is dead. Don’t ask me how I know. What I do know is that there is nothing more truly alive in this whole country than my queen.
    From her place on the floor, my queen lifts her gaze to mine.
Her smile is a radiant thing. It alone could force roses to bloom, cause ravens to talk, turn servant girls into rulers, get princesses lost in the darkest of woods.
    And it is only for me.
    Love is a thorny thing, fraught with peril. I have held a lot of beating hearts in my hands, but hers is the one I love best.

THE LAST DANCE
    Kristina Lloyd
     
     
     
     
    D on’t get me wrong, I love my sisters, but being the youngest of twelve totally sucks, especially when my siblings are such famewhores. They drag me here, there and everywhere, and when I try to refuse they accuse me of being selfish and spoiling it for everyone. “Eleven? What will people think if part of us is missing?” Emotional manipulation and its best mate, guilt, are so entrenched in our family dynamic I’m tempted to lay places for them at mealtimes.
    We were conceived on the IVF program and are the world’s only surviving dodecaplets. My mother needed two hospital beds, one for her body, one for her belly, before she pupped her litter of twelve. Hardly surprising, but she didn’t survive. We were brought up by our father—or publicity agent, as I prefer to call him.
    Our lives have been sponsored by a range of companies taking care of everything from baby booties to buzzing sex toys. I swear, the house practically levitated the weekend we received
our first box of freebies from LoveStuff, a dozen Double Fun Pocket Rockets. But you don’t get anything for free in this life. “Who do you dream of?” the marketing people wanted to know. For me, with my new toy taking me to heavens I’d never explored, the question wasn’t “who” but “what.” Oh, and I’d dreamed all manner of terrible things; of being abducted, tied up, and spanked; of sucking cock till I couldn’t take any more; of muscular men getting soapy in the shower; of being fucked by strangers who called me “slut” and “whore.”
    “David Beckham,” I told them.
    “He’s married,” said my father. “Say Prince Harry.”
    Ultimately, I could forgive my father for being overbearing, controlling, and insensitive. After all, bringing up twelve identical daughters isn’t easy or cheap. However, he lost my sympathy by contracting us to appear in a fly-on-the-wall reality TV series when we were too young to appreciate the consequences. Our lives have been lived in the spotlight, and the spotlight was inside our home. The show, Full House, ran for seven years, and even though the TV cameras have long since gone, I can’t shake off the feeling I’m being watched.
    On the night it all started, I felt unseen eyes tracking us before we’d reached the end of our street. As ever, we’d snuck