39. Isla
39
ISLA
I pace my floor, gaze flicking between the rotund moon painting the sky indigo, the candelabra bleeding silver wax onto the white tablecloth, and the door my fiancé has yet to bluster through.
“He’s fine,” I tell myself. Not to mention we didn’t specify a time; we just said dinner. “Everything’s fine.”
What if everything’s not fine, though? What if Izolda left the castle and?—
A burst of air knocks open the vestibule door. Konstantin strides over the threshold, carrying a slender wooden box.
“What? No knocking?”
“Only those who have something to conceal require advanced warning, Miss Ríhbiadh. What is it that you have to con—” His voice ebbs as he takes in my accoutrement, his lambent gaze tapering on the band of bare thigh visible between my trimmed dress and my velvet over-the-knee boots.
The footwear is one of the two gifts I received from Izolda. The other is a set of shimmery underthings that make Shabbin undergarments seem conservative.
“You’re going to be the death of me, Isla.” His Adam’s apple jostles as his gaze rushes over the sheer sleeves that tie with a bow around my wrists to match the one around my neck.
“Don’t say that. Not even in jest.” I move toward him, then wrap my arms around his slim middle and rest my cheek over the slate fabric of his dinner jacket, right above his scudding heart and the Cauldron’s talisman that safeguards it. “Any new developments?”
“Salom didn’t kill Lev.”
I blink. “You’re certain?”
He nods. “One of the soldiers tasked with listening and transcribing reported hearing father and son argue after Salom left the room. If his throat was being chewed open by iron, he wouldn’t have been able to talk.”
“What were they arguing about?”
“Who was trying to make Lev look like a traitor… Lev asked his father if he’d sold those weapons.”
My heart feels suspended. “You heard this from the soldier’s mouth or from Salom’s?”
“The soldier’s and Salom’s. Imogen offered to give Salom a ride to pick up Bohdan and carry him back here for an interrogation.”
My skin prickles at the idea that Bohdan could be behind his son’s demise.
“May I ask you something?” Konstantin sounds downright exuberant, which clashes with the way I’m feeling. I suppose learning Salom isn’t deceiving him must be quite the reprieve.
Filicide … How horrific. How incomprehensible. I shake the deliberation away. I’m getting ahead of myself. There must be another reason…another suspect.
I press out of my thoughts to embrace the here and now. “Of course. Anything.”
He snakes one arm around my back and nods to my dress. “Is this Crow fashion?”
“No, I just felt like showing off the boots that your sister got me for my birthday, and the floor-length skirt was hiding them.” With a smile, I step back and twirl. “Admittedly, I may cut all my dresses from now on, because the shorter hemline is loads more practical.”
His throat bobs. “I’d encourage you to go wild with the scissors considering the end result, but?—”
“Talons.” I wriggle my fingers.
“But I’m uncertain how I’ll react if anyone else lays eyes on your bared skin.” He traps my raised hand and presses a wooden box topped with a folded piece of parchment into my palm. “I never got a chance to say it, but happy birthday.”
“Thank you,” I whisper
The crisp sheet of paper feels heavier than the box. Probably because I assume it’s Mimi’s inked reply to the talisman query.
“I have another gift on its way, but money—I recently learned—cannot buy expediency.”
I hand him back the letter, pulse bumping out of alignment as I picture myself trying to decipher my great-grandmother’s script under his watchful stare. “Read it out to me?”
“There’s not much to read.”
“Please?” I croak.
“All right.” He unfolds the missive. “It’s a ticket.”
“A…ticket?”
“For a voyage. Through Glace.” He holds out the paper that gleams with neat silver letters.
I can make out my name and that of his kingdom, but all the other letters are too slanted, too squashed, too small. And they wobble to the drumbeat of my heart.
“By train,” he adds. “Activities include reindeer spotting, ice fishing, skating, a visit to the greenhouses, a soak in the hot springs, and anything else you’d like to do.”
I lift my wide eyes to his, trying to make sense of his words, since they are nothing like what I expected to find within that parchment.
“I wanted to show you my kingdom. I know you have wings, but I don’t. Obviously, you have no need for a ticket to board any of my trains, but I thought…” He crinkles the paper in his fist. “I’m not sure what I thought.” His lids twitch. “The other is a more useful gift.”
I clasp the back of his neck and tow his head down to mine. “I love my present. I cannot wait to see and experience all that your kingdom has to offer.”
I kiss away the tiny spasms caused by his nervousness before pulling back and concentrating on my next gift. As he carries the parchment to my desk and sets it there for safekeeping, I click open the box. My lungs seize and the corners of my mouth catapult downward when I spy the creation cushioned on the sky-blue silk.
“What was I thinking, gifting you a dagger?” He treks back to me in three long strides, gait rigid with tension. “You have talons and blood at your fingertips. You’ve no need for a weapon.”
“That’s not…that’s not?—”
“It’s all right.” He tries to wheedle the box from my fingers.
I clamp down on it. “Stop. Let me…just give me a minute to explain the reason for my reaction.”
“Isla, it’s all right.”
“ ItstheweaponfromtheprophecyKonstantin !” I hiss on a single breath. “It’s the weapon with which…”
I lick my lips, my pulse suddenly buzzing with something other than trepidation. I was wrong to worry that Izolda would be ambushed and forced to murder her niece! I was wrong!
“It’s the weapon with which I kill Mestyla.” A thought occurs to me then. “Did you know?”
His pupils throb. “No.”
“So, you gifted this to me by complete chance?”
“Not by chance.” He scratches his nape. “Since you sealed the talisman to my neck, and the thing throttles your shifter magic, and I want to keep you close to me always, I thought…well, I thought it would make you feel safer.”
“Thank you.” Again, I hook his tension-filled nape and draw him low for a kiss.
Little by little, his vertebrae untense and his shoulders uncoil, softening not only the edges of his body but also the texture of his mouth. His respite is short-lived, though.
By my own fault this time. “What did Mimi say?”
His gaze darts to the table I wheeled into my bedchamber after the attendants delivered it in front of my door. Though they insisted on coming inside to set everything up, I didn’t let them past the wards, keeping the access to my chambers limited to a select few.
“You swore you’d tell me,” I prod.
His jaw flexes. “How about we eat first and then?—”
“It won’t change how I feel.” When he begins to toy with the shiny button of his standing collar, I sigh. “It doesn’t block shifter connections, does it?”
Without meeting my stare, he mumbles a quiet, “No.”
“Good.”
“Good?” he scoffs. “That means that I’m not”—he rolls his lips—“ it for you.”
I set the box down on the wooden trunk at the bed’s end. “ Yet .” Unlike a moment ago, his posture doesn’t magically unstiffen. “Where are all these insecurities coming from?”
“My lack of ascendency over Glace. Over my home. Over my heart.” His gaze slants to the side. “The day you get your connection, Isla… If it’s not with me but it is with someone from my kingdom…”
Dread froths inside my heart, drowning out its beats.
“…can you leave immediately with whomever the Cauldron mates you with? Even if the prophecy hasn’t yet come to pass?”
“I wear your ring in the prophecy.”
I’m not trying to give him false hope. I’m merely reminding him that the prophecy will come to pass before I’m mated to anyone else.
I nudge his nose with mine to coax his stare off the rug. “I’m glad for Mimi’s reply. At least now, I feel neither guilt about sealing the charmed medallion to your skin, nor temptation to cancel my magical command.”
When his lashes lower, obscuring more of the gray, I sigh against his clamped lips.
For a long while, they remain unyielding, but then they part around a heartbreaking murmur, “One hundred and seventy-seven years old, ruler of a fucking empire, yet ever since I met you, I feel like some pathetic youth playing at being king.”
To defuse his glumness, I tease, “Skies, you’re old.”
Sure enough, it peels back one layer of self-loathing.
“You know what I think, Konstantin Korol?”
“What do you think, Isla Ríhbiadh?”
“I think that you should set down your crown and your responsibilities for one night and let yourself live a little.”
I start cooking up arguments which could counter any protest he may toss at me, but he surprisingly concedes and lets me lead him to the dinner table. I fill up his cup and then unveil his bowl full of borsht.
“I picked the menu,” I say, “ not your chef.”
“You know me too well.” He reaches across the table for my hand and holds it as he polishes off his bowl and accompanying flaky rolls.
“Do I?” I ask.
“Yes. You do.”
I take a sip of Faerie wine. “I’ve yet to see you stark naked.”
He chokes on his bite of bread, then pinkens from both lack of oxygen and discomfiture. “Holy Gods, woman, the sort of things that come out of your mouth…”
His throat moves over a cough and then over a swallow. He releases my hand in order to scoot back his chair and pat his thigh.
“Come here.” Once I’m seated on his lap, he skims one palm over my bare skin, then higher, beneath the fabric that’s ridden so far up it barely covers my lady parts. “Thank you for coming back. Even if it was only for the prophecy, I?—”
“I came back for you , not for the prophecy.”
Emotion washes over his face, leaving behind a sparkle that floods my heart—reverence. That’s how he looks at me. As though I were precious. Me, the daughter of a ruthless shifter king with unseemly war paint, ruinous iron edges, disgraceful manners, and a shabby command of words and magic.
He captures my mouth in a kiss that is as heady as the scrape of his fingers against my thigh. “You feel like velvet,” he murmurs, before kissing me more deeply.
When his fingers slope toward my inner thigh, my breathing turns nippy, and then downright erratic because he’s palming my legs apart to give himself easier access. I gasp when he glides his knuckles down the scrap of silk, then stop breathing altogether when his fabric-cloaked knuckle reaches my center. And then it’s his breathing that changes.
I smile, keenly aware of the reason for the disruption—he’s just discovered the strand of pearls that winds up the runnel of my buttocks.
When his fingers bump into the second bead, he lifts me, plants me between his thighs, and hikes up my dress, rasping out a husky, “ Fuck .”
I glance over my shoulder, committing to memory the look of devastating desire that hones his attention.
He hooks a finger around the strand, then lowers his hand excruciatingly slowly, caressing my cleft with his knuckle. “Feels like my birthday.”
I press my hair aside, then grab the ribbon around my neck and give it a tug. “Slide my zipper down.”
Though he seems almost in pain from having to release the pearls, he does as I ask. His eyes become pools of hungry black when he unveils the rest of my body and uncovers the matching strand of white pearls hugging my rib cage.
As I turn back to face him, I nip at the bows at my wrists with my teeth. He leans back in his chair, cheekbones flushed, irises aglow and aimed at the swatches of silver fabric that cloak my erect nipples. When the silk bows unravel, sending my dress tumbling to the floor, his fingers close around the armrests.
“Instead of gripping your furniture, I think you should”—I circle his wrists—“grip me .”
Between rasping pants, he says, “If I do…I won’t stop.”
“I’m counting on it, Vizosh.” With little effort, I pry his fingers off the carved wood, carry them to my waist, and set them there. And then I let go, giving him back the control.
He holds still for so long I worry he will resist.
I’m wrong to worry.