Chapter Twenty-Nine
“What was that?” I asked as he collapsed back into his throne, panting. My heart still beat arrhythmically, pulsing with unfulfilled yearning and frustration.
“I climaxed,” he said, his voice gravelly and shaking. At my bewildered expression, he added, “You brought me to completion.”
“Oh.” I was confused. “I thought that could only happen inside of me.”
He reached up to stroke the side of my face. “There is so much you don’t know.”
Show me.
I had to bite the words back. I might have just done something very bad. Something that couldn’t be undone.
He looked wrung out. Exhausted. Despite my fear of having potentially, accidentally broken my vow, all I could think about was that I had done this to him.
I had brought the mightiest man in Ilion to his knees.
A sense of power surged inside me, a feminine pride exulting in the fact that I could make him this way.
I pinned his tunic closed for him, as he seemed unable to move.
I couldn’t help but smile. “I suppose that means I win.”
He laughed. “Wife, you may claim all the victories you’d like. I should probably feel embarrassed, as this hasn’t happened to me in years, but all I feel is . . .”
Not able to stave off my curiosity, I asked, “What does it feel like?”
“There are no words to describe it adequately. It is euphoric. The most incredible pleasure you could possibly imagine,” he said.
Pleasure . . . that I wasn’t allowed to give.
I couldn’t ignore that nagging voice in my head reminding me that I might have made a grave mistake.
The smile dropped off his face. “What’s wrong?”
“Pleasures of the flesh,” I told him. Maybe it wouldn’t count because I hadn’t intended to bring him to completion. Hadn’t known that I could.
Would the goddess hold this against me?
“You didn’t know,” he said, echoing my own thoughts.
“But if it happened again . . .” I wanted it again. Wanted it for him, wanted it for myself.
His expression sobered even further. “So we can’t.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling the tears welling up in my eyes.
His eyes were so soft. “I’m the one who should be apologizing. I knew better. I should have stopped it.”
He crushed me to his chest and I held on tightly. I should give him up. He was king now. We had no further need for pretense. We could have separate rooms. I could stay away from him.
But this was where I wanted to be.
“Stand up,” he said. “Try the magic.”
I felt foolish for not having thought of it earlier. Fear and apprehension squeezed my heart as I said, “Dea Erinys.”
The hot-and-cold rush of the magic filled me. “It’s here,” I said with relief.
And somehow the glow around him had turned an even brighter white.
“I’m glad,” he said. But his smile didn’t reach his eyes.
I turned the aspect off and was about to ask him what was troubling him when the doors flew open.
Lykaon strode into the room with half a dozen of his personal soldiers.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Xander demanded, getting to his feet.
“I am here to demand satisfaction,” Lykaon said, drawing his sword. “You have cost me a kingship. What right do you have to terminate my betrothal contract?”
“I am king of Ilion.” Xander sounded like wrath incarnate. “And after having made your acquaintance, my wife requested that you not be allowed on the same continent as her sister. I was happy to agree.”
Lykaon looked at me, and I waited for that moment when recognition would fill his eyes.
It didn’t happen.
He had no idea who I was.
How many women had he hit?
“So you mean to be the sort of king who lets a woman rule a ruler and command a commander,” Lykaon said with a sneer.
Angry, I picked my xiphos up off the ground and took it from its sheath. “You want satisfaction? You can fight me. For what you did to me, to my maid, and what you would have done to my sister.”
“Do you want your wife to die?” Lykaon asked Xander incredulously. “You would let her fight your battles?”
“It’s not my battle.” Xander looked genuinely amused. “You think you’re going to beat her? This is going to be fun.”
“Your husband must not care very much about you,” Lykaon said.
“He’s not concerned because he knows I’m going to win,” I said, lifting my sword.
At that Lykaon laughed.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” I asked as I paced toward him, my xiphos still ready.
“Should I?”
“That is your queen.” Xander snarled the words, and I had to smile.
I told Lykaon, “When you went to Locris, I found you beating my maid, Hippolyta. And when I tried to stop you, you backhanded me.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know why you think I’d remember that.”
Because it happened so often? I’d had enough. I swung at him and he looked shocked as he brought his own sword up to stop me. I hit him much harder than he’d been anticipating, and he had to take a step back to absorb the blow.
“Not so amusing now, is it?” I asked before I lunged forward.
Lykaon was not the warrior he apparently fancied himself to be. He could barely hold me off as I pressed forward relentlessly. His reflexes were poor, and he had no idea how to create cover to protect himself from me.
He was a spoiled nobleman’s son with battle masters who had probably let him win so as to not risk his or his father’s anger.
Giving him an overinflated sense of superiority.
“Why are you moving so slow?” Xander asked me. He was leaning against a column with his arms folded across his chest.
“Not all of us are goddess-blessed,” I said. Lykaon was such a poor sword fighter that I didn’t even need to call up my power. I could beat him on my own.
“I’m hungry,” my husband told me. “Quit toying with him and finish this.”
Lykaon mistakenly thought that my husband had distracted me and tried to strike at me. I blocked him with my xiphos, and then with my left hand, I punched him so hard in the face that his nose began to bleed.
He stumbled backward, in shock. He reached up to touch the blood and said, “Did you see what she did? Don’t just stand there! Get her!”
His soldiers pulled out their weapons, and my husband turned toward them to calmly say, “I will kill anyone who interferes.”
Lykaon’s men stayed put.
I forced Lykaon to reengage with me. “Is this why you hit women? Because you’re so pathetic?”
“Be silent!” he screamed at me as I began to rain down blows on him.
It was laughable that he thought he could tell me what to do. “What was it you said to me in Locris? You told me to learn my place and obey my betters. I am giving the same advice to you now.”
I knocked his sword out of his hand, and it went flying across the room. I whirled around Lykaon to kick him in the back of his legs so that he dropped to his knees. I grabbed his hair and held my xiphos to his throat, letting the edge pierce his skin.
“Don’t kill me,” he pleaded. “Please, I don’t want to die.”
I gripped his hair tighter and yanked his head back so that he cried out.
“The only reason I’m letting you live, worm, is so that for the rest of your pathetic life you’ll remember that you were bested by a woman.
And if I ever hear of you hurting another woman, I will find you and cut off all the protruding parts of your body. ”
I released his hair and stepped back. “Your soldiers witnessed this. They will tell others. Soon everyone in Troas will know.”
“Get out,” Xander said. “And do not darken the doors of my palace ever again.”
Lykaon scrambled to his feet and his soldiers followed after him.
Xander came up behind me and turned me toward him. He kissed me so thoroughly and completely that I stopped breathing and became lightheaded.
He put his forehead against mine. “That was . . . arousing.”
“You enjoy watching me beat people up?”
“I find it immensely entertaining when I’m not on the other end of your little sword,” he said.
“That’s not how I remember it. I recall you very much liking it.”
“You’re right.” He kissed me quickly on the forehead before releasing me. “I shouldn’t kiss you like that.”
No, he probably shouldn’t.
But that was all I wanted, to melt into his arms and his kiss.
“What will your sister do now?” he asked me.
I folded my arms against my chest to stop myself from reaching for him. “Themis mentioned her youngest son being a possible candidate as a prince consort. I’d like to meet him. But as long as he’s not Lykaon, I think it could work.”
Xander nodded. “I need to go meet with Thrax to set up guard placement throughout the city. I’ll probably need to talk to him about putting a guard to watch Pelias’s house. I don’t trust him or his son.”
I was sure I hadn’t helped matters by beating Lykaon. “Right now?”
“First I need to clean up and change,” he said in a way that made me think I should have understood what he was hinting at, but I didn’t.
We walked back to our room in a comfortable silence until the moment when I realized that I shouldn’t go into our room with him. We both needed a chance to cool down.
“I’m going to check on my adelphia,” I said.
“You don’t want to help me bathe and undress?” he teased, and I knew my cheeks had to be an extremely bright shade of pink.
“That should probably be a solo activity,” I said.
“You have no idea how many times it has been,” he said with a wink before entering our room. Another thing I didn’t understand, but the heat of it still flustered me.
His flirtatious invitations would be the death of me. Maybe I should tell him he couldn’t do that, either.
I opened Io’s door and the smell of the dead terawolf had me covering my nose and mouth with my hand.
“Terrible, isn’t it?” Ahyana said.
“Yes. Did it work?” I asked.
Io sat at the table in front of the scroll, looking dejected. “No.”
My stomach sank like an anchor. I had been so hopeful.
“We’ve tried everything. We used blood. Some of its fur. Its toenails. I even scraped its horns, but nothing.” Io held up her hand to show me the silver sparkles from the horn still attached to her palm. “The scroll hasn’t changed.”
“Maybe it has to be alive,” I said.
“I can’t imagine that would make a difference,” Io said sadly.
“The scroll did reject the Locrian dirt and would only work with Ilionian soil,” Ahyana pointed out.
“Yes, but I don’t think terawolves have enough aether for it to work.
Aether was created by the tears of the goddess’s daughter when she was parted from her mother.
How could there be enough of that in a creature special to her brother?
The only aether part of the terawolves seems to be their ability to turn invisible,” Io said.
That made me think about Luna, and how I’d briefly thought she had turned invisible. “Did I tell you all that Luna disappeared?”
They all turned slowly to stare at me. As if I had taken leave of my senses.
“She reappeared a few moments later,” I added. “What?”
“That’s not normal,” Zalira told me.
“I just assumed that animals here did that.” I had no frame of reference to know differently.
Io stood up and headed out the door. She nearly slammed into her brother, who was leaving. He had gotten ready quickly. She put her hands out to stop from running into him and he quickly grabbed her to keep her from falling forward. He glanced down.
“Have you been holding my wife’s lizard?” he asked his sister.
“No. This happened from the terawolf.”
“So now we have two things in the palace making this mess?” He raised one eyebrow at me, sharing a heated moment from our inside joke, and then he left.
“What did he mean?” Io asked.
“There have been a couple of times when Luna has sneezed and she gets silvery sparkles everywhere. It annoys him.”
Then it was as if we all shared a single brain and came to the same conclusion at the same time. I raced into my room, over to Luna’s enclosure.
And saw that there were two long, furled wings protruding from the bumps in her back.