Chapter 44 #2
Steeler gave a half-laugh. “Not for long. I’d been living at the palace for a couple years when I caught on to the whispers that always seemed to follow me around and learned the truth.”
“The truth?”
“The truth.” He nodded, then took his deepest breath yet.
“Which was that twenty years ago, Her Majesty’s esteemed General of War retired at the ripe old age of 875.
Rumor had it that she couldn’t decide whether to replace him with Lieutenant General Magees or Admiral Fennelly, so she went to pay a visit to Fate in one of Sorronia’s most notorious temples.
” When my brows pinched together, he added, “Not to request a mating bond, but to ask Fate which of the two candidates was destined to acquire more soldiers, kill more enemies, win more wars.”
“And did Fate give her an answer?”
I couldn’t for the life of me see where this story was headed. I couldn’t even imagine what a visit like this might look like. Was Fate a solid, flesh-and-blood woman? A spirit? A voice or a vision?
Steeler had lowered his head.
“Fate did indeed give the queen an answer. But that answer was neither Magees or Fennelly: it was a two-year-old bastard born of a homeless whore on the streets of one of the outer cities.”
I blinked at him in a sudden flare of shock.
“You?”
Steeler let out a dry laugh and took a swallow of wine. “Me.”
“But you were a baby. You couldn’t be a general of war.”
“Exactly why my mother probably wouldn’t have agreed to it.
And why I think the queen murdered her so that she could have access to me without a pesky little faerie whining in her ear about it.
Besides…” He shrugged, but his voice sunk into a deep bitterness.
“Her Majesty has lived so long that a couple decades to let me grow up…. it was nothing to her. Not in the face of the armies I have been fated to conquer.”
I stared at the planes of Steeler’s face lit up by the fire and candlelight as if seeing him for the first time. To think that Fate had already whispered his name to the most powerful faerie in the world…
“So you didn’t actually grow up on the ship?” I asked. “You grew up in the palace?”
He snorted. “Oh, no. As soon as I found out about my so-called fate, I started acting out. Knocking over suits of armor in the Grand Hall, refusing to wear the clothes they laid out for me, making friends with the servants’ children instead of the pompous little nobles they tried to force me to play with.
” He grimaced. “And so when I was five, the queen sent me and those same friends to the ships that she had posted outside the island of Eshol to await the day her treacherous sister’s dome of magic finally collapsed from overexertion—to help me learn the ways of my new position, she claimed.
” He shook his head. “Really, it was just a punishment. Both for me, and for the servants who had let their children run around with me.”
“Terrin, Garvis, Sasha, and Sylvie were the children of the servants,” I whispered.
“Yes. And Mattheus.” Pain cracked in his voice at that last name.
“They were all forced to join me later, too, when the queen thought planting me inside the dome would help… speed up my maturing process. She had no fear that the experience would actually kill me, you see. Being named by Fate means I will not die anytime soon. But as for the others…”
A knot in his throat tightened as he swallowed a lungful of air.
As for the others, one of them was already dead.
Outside the window, rain was pelting the lighthouse in droves now, and that deep rumble of familiar thunder was rolling in with the tide. Lightning flashed in forks through the gloom.
I sat in silence, my hand still on his knee as if it had been melded there.
“You’re the Fated General,” I said at last.
He looked up, but there was only resignation in the gesture.
“Yes. Once I officially accept my oath, that is—on the day you explode into power, you will serve the queen of Sorronia as her General of War and conquer her enemies forevermore,” he whispered.
“She spoke that oath into being long ago, and it has been hovering over me since the first moment the darkness claimed me and I landed here at the lighthouse. But…” He turned to me with an expression I’d never seen him wear before—almost pleading.
“I didn’t want to conquer her enemies when that would have taken me away from you.
So I’ve been procrastinating. Biding my time for as long as I can, telling the captain that my powers aren’t fully formed yet, that I’m still working on perfecting them. ”
Again, something animalistic inside me bristled at the implication that he was thinking about the queen—and that it was scaring him.
“If you don’t want the position, then don’t accept it.”
“I can’t refuse.” His voice had fallen flat, dead, and cold. “As soon as Lexington gives Dyonisia those pills and I know you’re safe from her, I’m going to have to accept it. I can’t delay any longer.”
Another roll of thunder crashed into the lighthouse. The lightning outside seemed to flicker in my own veins, filling me with electricity.
“Steeler, you have the power—literally—to go anywhere in the world you want to go.”
Just like that, I’d removed my hand from his knee, set my now-empty wineglass on the coffee table, and bent to rummage in my bag again.
“I have a map, look.” I brought out the tome and flipped to page nine hundred and ninety-nine. “We can find someplace where you could lie low.”
“I can’t,” he said again without looking at the map.
I stood on legs that quivered just as much as the windowpanes.
“You can. Because you know what I just saw when you talked about this queen and Fate and your title as General of War?” I pointed a finger at him.
“I saw that damn light in your eyes—every hint of your smirk and your smugness and your confidence that I wish I could hate so much—I saw that all disappear. You cannot accept this role, Steeler. You—”
“I have to.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I HAVE TO,” he said, finally standing up to tower over me. “I can feel that oath thickening every day, ready to explode. If it goes unanswered, the queen of Sorronia will kill everyone I’ve ever loved—and that includes you.”
I didn’t realize that my hand was a furious fist clutching at his shirt against his chest until I looked down in bewilderment.
Steeler dropped his voice again, but his shoulders heaved up and down as he said, “I am going to stay and help you through everything until Dyonisia Reeve is dead, and then I am going to accept my role as the Fated General of the Sorronian Army, and I am going to leave you alone. I will not stalk you, I will not leave you little black pearls, I will not kidnap you, whisk you away and hold you against your will forever. I will not enter your mind again, I will not look at you again. You will be free of me and all the torment I have caused you.”
“Steeler.”
Just one more night, he’d told me, and now the desperation that had gripped his tone made sense. Just one more night because he wasn’t planning on any more nights with me after this one.
No matter my true parentage, I was just a girl who’d grown up in a small village on a relatively small island, raised by two wonderful but very normal fathers. He… he was destined to be in charge of whole armies, to win wars around a world I would never travel.
I backed away several steps, my entire body buzzing with the urge to scream and thrash like every drop of my blood was on fire. Steeler’s own face shone with that same kind of wild, starving energy—two predators facing off, resisting their most-anticipated meals.
What if I wanted him to look at me again? What if I wanted him to enter my mind again? What if I wanted him to hold me?
But what if I told him all that and he rejected it? What if I kissed him like I’d been wishing I didn’t want to and he left again?
“Fine.”
The word fell out of my mouth and hovered in the air like a raised weapon.
To the delight of the animal inside me, Steeler didn’t back down in defeat.
He stepped forward.
“Fine? Really? What kind of fine was that?”
I raised my chin. “The kind that means I’m fine. You’re fine. We’re all fine and this situation is fine and it’s fine if you leave me again.”
“Oh, no.” He took another step forward. “We’re not playing this game again.”
“What game?”
“The game where we both pace and prowl around the thing we really want to tell each other.”
I felt the friction of the air vibrating between us as he moved a final step toward me, so close I could smell his skin and every unspoken word on his lips.
“I didn’t realize you have more to say to me,” I breathed.
“Oh, I have plenty more to say to you, Rayna.” Every one of Steeler’s features shone on high alert.
His nostrils flared, the tips of his fangs glinted, and his eyes ravished mine.
“But let’s start with you. My new faerie maturity heightens all my senses, you know, and those senses are picking up on some mixed signals. ”
“Mixed signals?” I scoffed, crossing my arms.
“Yes, mixed signals. For instance, you sound like you want me to get out of your sight sooner rather than later, but you smell like you want me between your legs. So which is it?”
Heat poured into me in waves as I looked down at myself in mortification. My chest was heaving in the lacy red dress I’d never changed out of, and my legs—dammit, they were pressed together in an attempt to stifle the burn growing between them.
I dared to look up and meet his gaze.
“Why can’t it be both?” I challenged.
Steeler crossed his arms back at me. “Because even with my Walking power, I can’t be in two places at once. So choose.”
“I’m not going to—”
“Choose.”
“Fine!” I shrieked. “I want you. Right here, right now.”
For one heart-stuttering moment, we stared at each other.
Then the wineglass on the coffee table shattered as Steeler swept it aside and it hit the floor. Lightning forked across my vision when he cupped one hand around the back of my neck and eased me onto my back with the other until I was laying on the coffee table instead.
He lowered himself over me until he was hovering above my face and whispered, “Was that really so hard to tell me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, let me reward you for being so brave.”
He stood to his full height and marveled down at me, grabbing my ankles and slowly sliding his hands up my left leg until he found the knife sheath I always wore.
Without taking his gaze off me, he unclipped it and threw it to the side, where it landed with a thump on the floor that got drowned in the next roar of thunder from outside.
That wretched heat writhed and squirmed in my core as his fingers moved further up and grabbed my underwear, sliding them off with smooth precision and tossing them aside as well.
The lower half of my dress still covered everything that pulsed and ached for him, though, and when he just stood there, towering over me while I lay on my back, I almost screamed.
“Steeler, if you don’t touch me right now, so help me God…”
“I’m just curious.” He tilted his head, eyes gleaming. “Do you still gasp when I do this?”
He placed a hand on each of my knees and yanked them apart.
A gasp tore through me.
He grinned with all the wickedness and humor I’d come to love.
“Do you still curl your toes when I do this?”
Moving his hands up my legs, he shifted the dress upward until I was completely exposed to him before shifting his thumbs to my clit.
I just barely managed to resist crying out, but my toes… they curled. My back arched at the delicious hint of touch, desperate for more. More pressure, more movement, more him.
“Do you still make the same sounds when I do this?”
I watched through a daze as Coen Steeler sank to his knees on the coffee table before me and spread me wider, wider, wider, until he was eye level with that most yearning, aching, desperate part of me.
“So beautiful,” he repeated, and caught my eye for an instant. “Every piece of you, Rayna.” Then his attention flicked back down, and he smiled with those fangs on full display.
By the moonbeam and the mist.
The thought that he was that close. That he was just staring at me with such wonderment and possession and hunger and ferocity…
“We can stop whenever you want,” Steeler said, his breath hot against me. “No matter what, if you want me to stop, if you change your mind, you say so. Okay?”
I nodded.
He yanked down my legs to repeat, “Okay? I need to hear that pretty voice of yours say it out loud, Rayna.”
“O-okay,” I gasped. “Okay.”
Then I flung my head back and closed my eyes.
“This is what I would have done to you if I had won our bet,” I heard Steeler say.
Just before the warmth of his mouth sank into me.