2. Caspian
Caspian
When I slung an arm around my girl’s shoulders, a cold shock drove into my forearm like an icy spike. My wolf recoiled with a snarl I barely kept behind my teeth.
Fuck.
Xander’s announcement in the ballroom came back to haunt me. From this moment, no one lays a hand on my betrothed with desire in his heart. The contract is active. She is mine. Mine alone.
I’d written it off as fucking theater. A small man staking a claim in front of an audience because he couldn’t stake one in the field.
It bit back.
It hadn’t been theater. It had been a term on that damn parchment, sealed in blood magic.
I dropped my arm and made it look like nothing. Rolled my shoulder, eased it back along the seat.
Max snapped her head toward me, a question in her midnight eyes, then her gaze flickered to the inches between us. She’d tensed when I draped my arm over her. If she’d felt the same shock, she hadn’t shown it. Neither had I. We could both take pain without flinching.
“Are you okay?”
“I will be,” I said. “Rest, sweetheart. Long road ahead. I’ll take the first watch.”
She closed her eyes, and her breath went slow and even. The first easy breath she’d taken since the ballroom. Underneath it, the rage hadn’t gone anywhere, and neither had mine.
It had nowhere to go.
It churned around and around in me, hot and tight and useless, hunting for a throat and finding upholstery. A wolf with nothing to bite is a bad passenger. I breathed through it the way I would before a fight and kept my face empty.
In the rearview, Nikolai’s eyes found mine. Monster-red and steady.
He knew. Neither of us said a word. There was nothing to say that Max couldn’t hear.
Hours ago, she’d put a hand on each of us to settle us down while we buckled into our gear. A nettle-prickle had come up under my sleeve, and I’d put it down to adrenaline. Nikolai’s jaw had locked like hail had hit him, and vampires don’t flinch at cold.
The curse was growing. That much was clear.
This had to be one of the worst nights of her life.
The White Witch’s lost daughter. Even in my own skull the words came out wrong.
That bitch had executed my parents too. Drakken got it worse. He’d knelt on that platform and watched her take his father’s head, then his mother’s, helpless, knowing he was next on the block.
Two seconds slower, and Aelindor would have carried a corpse out of there instead of a prince. The Fae heir had lost a third of his men saving Drakken.
Nobody else alive could have pulled it off.
Aelindor had found the rest of us when we were still children and gathered us in. Protected us. Raised us. He’d have died for any of us, and now for Max, and every one of us would do the same for him.
Max shouldn’t have to pay for whose blood she carried.
A lock of white hair fell across her face, and I couldn’t even push it behind her ear.
We’d break this shit.
She was mine.
Ours.
Aelindor had said so in front of everyone. In front of Xander. And Max’s eyes had lit with a hope that hurt to look at.
Aelindor had her first.
Before Xander darkened our gates, Aelindor had pulled the three of us into his suite at Elenmoor, and Max’s scent hit us in the face. She’d been in that room not long before, and she was all over the Fae heir.
The three of us stood there, Drakken, Nikolai, and me, with a storm coming up in all of us.
“Let’s speak plainly,” Aelindor had said. “We keep no secrets from each other, least of all about our mate. I have taken Max as my mate.”
I’d been bracing for it. It still stung. Some part of me had wanted to be her first.
Jealousy didn’t show up, which surprised me more than the news did. My wolf had known she was ours since I carried her half-dead out of the wasteland, and a wolf doesn’t argue with fate.
“No secrets,” Drakken drawled. “How about Nikolai’s little blood deal with Max?”
“How long did you feed from her?” I wheeled on Nikolai. “Did you force it on her?”
“Fuck off.” Nikolai had the nerve to pick up a glass of sparkling wine and take a sip.
Smoke curled out of Drakken’s nostrils. “You bled her in the dark while she was a cadet under my command. In my academy. Any other vampire, I’d have staked him to the gate.”
Drakken and I were closing on him from both sides when Aelindor put a stop to it.
“Let it go,” Aelindor said. “Nikolai was being loyal to Max. The secret was hers. It was never his to hand us.” He looked around the room.
“But we’ll have no more secrets among us from this point on, brothers.
It’s time we decided this out loud. Max belongs to all of us, and we to her.
Either every man at this table is on board, or we settle it tonight. ”
Silence dropped around the table.
Nikolai, Drakken, and I had shared a woman a few times, drunk on victory wine and stupid with youth. Fun, forgettable, done by sunrise.
This wasn’t that. With Max it was all or nothing.
Nikolai and I had come to an understanding. No one but Max.
One woman. Four crowns and one bond, if Drakken joined us.
“If we all claim her in public,” Aelindor said, “our enemies will paint us as degenerates.”
“It won’t only be the enemies.” Nikolai put down his empty glass. “Some of our own officers and soldiers hold to the old traditions. Their religion. They’ll call this immoral. They’ll whisper that the high command’s gone rotten. Four of us bonded to one woman, and we’ll wear it in our own ranks.”
I laughed. “When did we ever give a fuck what anyone thinks of us?”
Aelindor’s eyes went to the end of the table, to the one heir who hadn’t weighed in. “Drakken. Your decision.”
“What we do in our bedroom is nobody’s fucking business.”
“We’ll have to brace for political repercussions,” Aelindor said. “New Columbia may shy away from us. They’re the hardcore traditionalists.”
“Then fuck them too,” Drakken growled.
I grinned at him. “So you’re on board? Surprise.”
He shrugged and said nothing. Arrogant asshole.
Then I caught what was rolling off Drakken. Not angst, nothing he’d have a word for. Sour and scorched, the smell of a man losing a fight with himself.
Every one of us at that table had something of hers. Aelindor had all of her. Nikolai had her blood and her trust. I had her laughing at me, and the catch in her breath when I stood too close.
Drakken had only her glares.
I didn’t say a word about it. He’d earned every one of them.
“This bond to Max goes past brotherhood.” Nikolai’s long fingers tapped the edge of the table. “We’re not just sharing a mate. It runs deeper. Max is one of us.”
“Then it’s settled, brothers,” Aelindor said. “We go all in.”
“There’s one issue.” Drakken sighed.
“Yeah?” I raised a brow.
He ran a hand over his cropped hair. “I don’t think Max will have me.”
“Understatement of the century, man,” I said without sympathy.
“You put her through hell at the academy,” Nikolai added, also without sympathy. “Max keeps receipts.”
“You need to grovel. As hard as you can.” I offered it generously, a relationship expert to a hopeless pupil. “You’re welcome to pick my brain. I’m a ten, and you—”
“Fuck off, wolf,” Drakken growled.
We settled it that night. All four of us, all in.
A night later, the Collector walked through our gate with a rolled parchment, and not one thing we’d decided at that table mattered to it.
Old Texas had been one of the oil empires. Highways stacked five layers deep, a port that fed half a continent. The bayous took the freeways back after the Rupture, and what survived sprawled under the wet gulf air in a patchwork of old-world bones and new-world skin.
Every mile of it belonged to that fucker Xander now.
Captain Holt and Odalys, our undercover agent, met us at the designated spot. Holt had flown ahead. The fewer people who knew we were in the city, the safer for all of us.
The agent was in her forties, brown-skinned, in a market vendor’s apron. Twenty years stationed in Houston. Gray hair braided like any dockside wife’s. Only her eyes gave her away, counting exits and hands and faces.
“Is that a castle?” Max stretched her legs beside the van.
“Built after the Rupture.” Odalys studied her while she answered. “Xander had it remodeled last year. More gold on it now.”
“On the ruins of the old Space Center, wasn’t it?” Holt asked.
“Yes,” Odalys said. “Space programs were what the old world dreamed about.”
Corrupted magic from the Rupture still kept machines out of the sky.
“Humans once threw themselves at the stars,” said Bryn, the friend Max had insisted on bringing.
“What do you have for us, Agent Odalys?” Nikolai asked. “Where was the girl last seen?”
“It’s confirmed Xander didn’t bring her north to the Zodiac fortress with his entourage,” Odalys said. “He always keeps her in his sight at public functions. But this time he locked her away with the rest of his collection. The Glass Tower, in the west wing, under maximum security.”
The blood left Max’s face. She didn’t move an inch.
I reached for her, then stopped my hand halfway.
The palace of red and gold sat at the peak of the castle like a jewel box in the twilight. A gilded cage with a king’s hoard inside it.
Somewhere in there, Max’s little sister was trapped.
“We go straight to the Glass Tower,” Nikolai said, stealing my thunder again.
Regular folks might need a night to rest before diving into any sort of rescue. Not us. We were Spartans.
“Nightingale, get ready!” I barked. “Remember the plan.”
But Odalys held up her hand and pulled in a shaky breath. “There’s a problem, sirs.”
“Which is?” Nikolai towered over the agent, frowning down at her.
“The Glass Tower isn’t just warded and guarded. It’s glamoured invisible to anyone except Xander’s elite.”