Chapter 25
Chapter
Twenty-Five
TO THE VICTOR GOES THE SPOILS
I am not prey. I never run.
A strategic retreat, however. . .
Bright eyes, a cage of arms. His unique scent a perfume I inadvertently inhale and as it settles into my lungs it feels like home. Like fate.
A duo of harps with percussion that echo the staccato beats of my heart join the strings, a wordless androgynous voice twining through the notes. It's haunting, ethereal.
“I made no offer and I gave you no right; neither to send that letter, nor come to my home.”
As if I’m no threat. As if my submission is inevitable. His power is greater than mine. His will? No.
Nothing is inevitable but vengeance, and the blood of a mother running strong in her daughter’s veins. My mother was the strongest in Everenne, second only to the demon holding me. She never claimed the designation Old One, but I’ve wondered .
“What is right?” Renaud begins a slow perusal, a quizzical light in his cold stare.
“It starts with consent.” I say this, unironically, to a High Lord —without clawing his eyes out.
Fingertips brush again along the curve of my hips, sliding over silk, ownership in his touch. “You consented to the dance.”
I force my jaw to unclench, my anger ticking up a notch. “I consented to dance, not for you to fuck me while standing in public.”
“After I fuck you, Aerinne, you won't be capable of standing.”
English. Raw, savage English.
His voice punches past my defenses, embeds in my core and sprouts vines of black and blue roses that twine round and round, caging me in velvet and thorns. Struggling only tightens the trap, increases the pain that infiltrates my lungs. The air in them burns as they constrict.
His voice smoothes as he slips back into Everennesse. “But if you have never beheld Fae make love while dancing, you have never beheld Fae truly dance.”
I can’t breathe and when I look into his eyes, I see nothing but endless night. Darkness that calls to my soul, even as pinpricks of the brightest light shine through, last hope for the hopeless. Everyone is staring. My breaths come faster, ice picks beginning to hammer at my temples?—
“Look at me, Aerinne, and not the Courts. Count to your ten, if you must. You are safe.” Calm, implacable. An emotionless offer of an anchor I grasp even as I loathe needing him.
“Safe?” Moonlight morphs into a pulsing aura, the beams crystal shards stabbing my temples. Too fast, he whirls us too fast. “How are you safe? ”
I haven't been fully safe outside my District and at times even outside my home since my mother died. I need to be a High Lord if I want relative safety. High Lords are monsters.
But my mother was a High Lord.
Breathe, just breathe. I inhale lavender air, staring up into his eyes, a wisp of beautiful mocking laughter in the distance but there is no mockery as he looks at me.
What will I have to do, become, to survive the Vow?
“Calm, or you will hyperventilate.” He retreats behind a voice absent contempt and the sensual teasing from moments before.
Now there is only glaciers, and equally cold steel.
“You are mine, Aerinne. Nothing can harm you unless I will it. No one will so much as approach you without my leave. Breathe, Malisse ni. Control your thoughts and emotions, do not be controlled by them.”
I haven't drawn true breath since the day on the battlefield he'd forced us to accept a white flag or die. No, even before then, the moment his gaze met mine across the remnants of an ambush as he saved my people from imminent death.
Ironically, I owe the male I must kill my life. Maybe this is how he chooses to call in the debt. But I don't want seduction. If I'm forced to interact with him, what I want is. . .nothing. To feel nothing.
I want all of this to be over.
“Your mother and I first met on the shores of Avallonne, your ancestral home,” he says. “We were true children.”
I focus on the music, on his unexpected words like the necklace was unexpected, on the press of his hands that are now soothing rather than sexual, his scent—smoke and blackberries and frost dripping from evergreens in the deep of winter.
“She was the scion of the island, and I the conqueror’s get. But our gazes met and over time, despite my father, I understood that family is not only blood, but choice.”
I listen as he speaks of my mother in a cadence as if I’m a human priest and this a confessional. Such an odd practice, giving up one’s secrets to a stranger behind a veil. I don't even want to give up my secrets to myself.
“I was selfish,” he continues in a quieter voice, eyes going remote. “When I was dragged back to Ninephe, I couldn't leave her behind. Her life would have been happier if I had.”
“My mother would never choose personal happiness over those she loves.”
He focuses on me. “No. You suffer from the same weakness. It is a weakness, Aerinne. The selfless rarely survive long unless they are wise enough to walk at the side of a monster.”
“I’m the monster.” I speak with his ice, no pity in my tone. It’s only fact.
“Sweet halfling child.” His voice is rich with amusement. “I am the only monster in your life, and that side of me you have yet to fully encounter.”
The assembled are a blur, standing in a loose circle far enough from us that there’s a semblance of privacy as we speak.
He whirls me at a pace to match the music, his grace effortless, his hands on my body certain.
It's not a dance with choreographed steps; it's meant to be wild, a slow unleashing. He leads, my footsteps follows.
“Why did you not marry?” I hear myself ask. “She loved you. ”
“She was meant as the sister of my soul, not the mate. Addajenari was not to be born for many thousands of years yet.”
It's a word I don't know, and I won't put myself out to ask. If he wanted me to know, he would have said it in Everennesse.
A different word swims to the front of my consciousness, one that explains my inexplicable, growing reaction to him. The opposite of the word Nora used for him.
Closing my eyes, knowing he has me, I see that beach, feel the heat of the sun on my skin and the waves lapping at my ankles.
Her hair would have been brighter than the sand, her eyes in sunlight the color of the ocean.
Her coloring took my father’s and paled it several shades, meeting somewhere in the middle in their only daughter.
A hand brushes my jaw, gently tilts my head up and I open my eyes to focus on the moonbeam of his gaze. No condemnation, no pity. Acceptance. A spark of desire beneath the cinderblocks of ice.
My heart rate steadies, my breath even, and I am once more Aerinne of Faronne, not a female having a panic attack in a male’s arms.
No, I’d looked into his eyes in the forest and knew Aerinne of Faronne was dead. It’s why I fear him as much as I hate him. As much as I pray to the Ancients I don’t want him.
Aerinne, of the Prince. He stares down at me, and does nothing to counter my understanding. Each word drives a nail into the coffin of his claim.
“Good,” he says. “Now, tell me of yourself, Lady Aerinne. I was not awake when you were born, and I would know my sister’s only daughter. ”
“When I was fifteen I almost died when rogue—so Barry claims—elements in House Montague tried to assassinate me for the first time.”
He narrows his eyes, that acceptance now annoyance. Aw. . .does someone want to sweep all the gauche unpleasantness under the rug?
“. . .unfortunate.”
“That I survived? I suppose. If I was of your House.”
“Oh? Will you attempt to avenge Muriel, called Maryonne, tonight?”
His regard, the glint in his eyes, lures me to try my luck—and accept the consequences. But it isn't death in his gaze, at least not death that requires a grave.
“Why would I attempt to kill you in front of your White, Renaud?”
“Wise. They would cut you down a second before you tried, Aerinne. I would not need to lift my finger.”
I want to skin the faint amusement from his face and use it to decorate the dart board in my office where his picture used to be pinned.
“This is a farce.” The ball, the ceasefire. Everything. “I refuse to participate in this, any of this.” I ball my hands into fists and shove against his chest. “Let me go. ”
And like that, his air of quiet shatters and he's once more the cruel, mercurial Prince.
“You begin to tire me and when patience expires, so to will this petty game of defiance I allow.
The resistance I indulge, so you may retain some small sense of your own independence though it's an illusion built from ignorance and desperate, faulty pride—and because I prefer fire and talon in my lovers.” He lowers his head. “But not too much, Aerinne .”
Hands tighten their grip to the point of pain. A warrior's body shifts against mine and this silk dress is flimsier than a puff of air.
“But I understand your flailing—you never learned to swim, therefore pride is all you have. So I ask you this; why should I let you go? Why, when I've gone to so many years of difficulty to claim what I cultivated and you are now finally in my hands.”
These last four words are spoken with the soft, precise emphasis of someone who understands they’ve dived off a deep end and are trying to pretend we all think they are still sane.
My response slips out before I have a chance to work through my shock. “No one has ever spoken to me like this.”
Like I'm property for their bed. Held me like this, as if I'm soon to be a sheathe for their cock and from the look in his eyes not merely one sheathe. And what does he mean, the years of difficulty? What did he cultivate? While asleep?
His eyes flare. “Then we are even, Malisse ni, and you are finally receiving the first lesson in a delayed education.” He brushes his lips against my ear, and whispers, “Choose your opponent wisely and never, ever, capture the desire of a Temthrennes High Lord. We do not release what we have claimed, not even to death, and lest you think that hyperbole, Aerinne Nyawira Kuthliele of Avallonne by the Sea, it is not.”
Now I'm furious, and my fingers itch. “You victim blaming bastard. I did nothing to court your attention.”
If I thought his gaze cruel before, now it's vicious. “And yet you have it. Accept your fate, as I have accepted mine. Girls are so whiny.”
As I grapple with the savage, possessive words spoken in a velvet courtier's voice, he whirls me away from the courtyard and half drags me down a labyrinthine walkway of flower strewn stone where we slow to a stroll, heels crushing petals to release heady perfume in the air.
“I haven't begun to do what I want with you. We met in battle; you lost. I allowed you to retreat with your life and the lives of those who look to you.”
Realms, he could give Darkan a run when it comes to rants. At least I know how to handle this—don’t engage, because that only encourages them, and wait for it to pass.
“To the victor goes the spoils, Aerinne. Did you hope I would fail to collect? You hoped in vain. Not even in memory of my sister will I relinquish you.”
“You call her sister, but perversely speak to her daughter, your niece , of spoils.” So much for not engaging.
Renaud laughs. “I was born of Ninephe. We do not care for such human strictures. My father once granted one of my older sisters to a harem of our brothers to speedily breed a recessive trait in Temthrennes blood.”
His father did what now? I blink, eyes widening. That's. . .different.
I'm not sure I want to know either way but, “Did she agree to this?”
His lips curve, an edged slice of a smile.
“Malisse ni, it was her idea. We knew we would be at war again in a century, and our ranks had thinned. We are always the front line. Temthrennes warriors were needed, specific warriors, which means children.” He shrugs.
“All of the High caste families are subject to Assariel's will. There are traits in your maternal line he will be pleased for our children to inherit. Muri. . .held out until Danon.”
His expression wipes clean then .
. . . I'm suddenly certain this is one of the reasons Danon said he would never take me to Ninephe.
Wait a minute. Our? What kind of our?
I dig my nails in Renaud's arm as ancient firs envelop us in an intimate cocoon. Murmuring voices reach my ears so we can't be far from the others but now we’re alone.
“Can they hear us?” I ask as we slow to a stop. The current conversation is not at all what I imagined the cocktail hour socializing would go like tonight.
“Not from the moment we began to dance, my halfling. Your public vitriol is for my ears only, else I would be forced to punish you.”
Renaud backs me against a tree, each step deliberate, rough bark scraping my bare arms and where my slip of a gown dips low on my back. It’s a modern style, and I'm regretting it now.
“What are you doing?”
Damn him, what does he mean by our?
I push at his chest and finally my avatar rouses. Absent the lure of bloodshed, it rarely bestirs itself to wake, much less grow. Not that there’s much to wake, but at my age I'd appreciate a little cooperation.
His arms become a cage as he angles his head to study me as if I’m the alien creature.
“Your scent reminds me of. . .” He lifts a curl from my shoulder, running the strands through his fingertips as if tasting me via touch, and even lifts the lock close to his face to inhale.
He inhales.
I still.
Scent. He's scenting me .
Nora warned me.
I close my eyes a moment, focusing on my knees. Growing dread crawls along my skin, adding fuel to the near combustion level of my need to lash out. If I resume the feud, I'll have to face my father with an explanation.
“I told myself I would be patient. But my control is. . .challenged.” He speaks softly, voice too gentle, the hidden crouch of a silent predator before a strike.
“Baba will send my guards for me.”
“No one can reach us unless I allow it.”
One beat, two.