Comms #2
“Mira is currently living in several levels of the hells all at once. I’m strongarming a variety of things through the Assembly.
In doing so, I’m stepping on a lot of toes.
As this is the important undoing of a colossal mound of horseshit Arnaud buried us in, I don’t have time to kiss ass and shake hands.
Because of this, representatives are talking shit about me.
They’re saying we traded one tyrant for another.
She’s in a constant state of damage control.
What she doesn’t need is added work, having to finesse my courtship.
With her current duties, my love life is not a priority, and yet I’ve told her it’s her priority.
She’s not happy with me, and maybe you felt that. ”
“She seemed pretty geared up to kiss your ass.”
“I’m king. Daily, beings kiss my ass. It’s part of the job. You don’t tell a king off. As for her, I’m also her boss. You don’t tell your boss off either. Not if you like your job and want to keep doing it. Which, she does.”
Hmm again.
“My beings will love you,” he declared, like he could say it and it would be so.
“We’ll see,” I replied, laying a dubious tone heavily on those two words.
“We shall,” he stated.
“Okay, can we be done talking now?” I requested.
“We should take some time to get to know one another better, Catla,” he asserted.
“We’ll have an entire weekend to do that in less than a week, sire,” I returned.
For once, I saw emotion in him.
Impatience.
This came audibly when he said, “For fuck’s sake, you’re to be my wife. You can call me Tanyn.”
“Thanks, no. I’d rather remind myself I’m a member of your peasantry, obliged to bend to your will.”
Now…this…
Being a bitch was totally a ploy to get him to back out of the marriage contract.
Bonus: I was really good at it.
“Warning, I’ll also be curtsying to you every time I see you,” I shared.
See?
Really good at it.
He sighed.
I carried on.
“Though, this discussion has reminded me that I am just a peasant, obliged to bend to your will, so, Your Majesty, do tell. What do you want to know about me?”
“Mostly, what your cunt tastes like. Also, what it feels like when I’m fucking you. Beyond that, in your current mood, not much.”
I refused to admit, regardless of how incredibly forward and unforgivably rude that was, my nipples tingled at hearing it.
Mightily.
“So, we’ll be having angry sex,” I remarked.
“If you don’t get with the program, perhaps that’s all we’ll have.”
Angry sex was awesome.
Though, he didn’t seem angry.
He seemed perfectly capable of tolerating me in whatever mood I had.
That said, he hadn’t experienced a good one yet.
“So this isn’t a waste of His Majesty the King of Sky’s Edge’s time,” I started, “my favorite color is purple. My favorite thing to do is eat out at an extortionately expensive restaurant that requires me to dress up. Or have extortionately expensive drinks at a ridiculously trendy bar, ditto on the requiring me to dress up thing. I have no pets. I do not cook. I do not own my own craft because I cannot be bothered with piloting it, which means my father gives me a lecture on a quarterly basis to share he dislikes how much I spend on Flys. And it is not advised to speak to me until after my second cup of coffee, because I am not a morning being.”
“Do you like animals?”
“I do. But having one would require me taking care of it, and the energy I have I vastly prefer to funnel into taking care of myself.”
Another ploy.
Be selfish.
Again, not hard, because I already was totally selfish.
“As queen, you’ll never have to pilot a craft,” he retorted.
“As queen, you can fill the castle with animals, there will be staff to take care of them, and you can just love on them. As queen, you’ll have to dress up for everything you do, and designers will be falling all over themselves to dress you. ”
All that was fabulous.
I would never admit this.
“You do know Laura is my best friend, don’t you?” I asked.
Since he did, I didn’t wait for him to answer.
“So I’ve been watching all she’s had to learn since she met Aleksei.
And one can say I’m not all that fired up to be told what my popularity rating is twelve times a day, to pat children on the head and share how cute their drawings are when said drawings look like the deranged scribbles of an unbalanced mind, at the same time juggling hundreds of invitations, planning balls and hanging on every word my mate says like he’s some storied philosopher. ”
“Popularity rating?”
“It’s a thing for the Knightstars,” I mumbled.
“We don’t give a shit about that in the Edge.”
“Huzzah,” I mocked.
He ignored my mocking.
Instead, he stated, “Even though you didn’t ask, my favorite color is red.
I’m a morning being. I have a pet. A dog named Hurley.
My favorite things to do are all outside, but I like to relax being home, with no one around, reading.
I do not cook either because fortunately, someone invented the Cook-Companion, so I don’t have to.
Now I don’t because I live in a castle with precisely seventy-eight members of staff, including a chef who trained under Sirk Parrin.
And if you ever hung on my every word like I was a storied philosopher, I’d probably throw up. ”
I wondered what kind of dog Hurley was.
I didn’t ask.
I also didn’t get the chance to ask.
Because Tanyn said, “Now, I’ll leave you to your mood. I’ll call sometime during the week and we’ll try this getting-to-know-you thing again. Hopefully, with a little more time, and distance from your break with that male, you’ll be more open to it.”
His gaze grew intense, the electric part of his electric blue eyes suddenly appearing super-charged.
I would know why when he finished, “And you need to make yourself open to it, Catla. I will have you. So acting like a bitch and pretending you’re an empty-headed, self-involved party girl is a waste of energy. We’re happening. So you better come to terms with it.”
I knew this was him finishing, because after he said that the comm blinked out.
I glared at my Palm a good long time before I grunted my annoyance, threw it aside and tossed my arm over my eyes again.
He didn’t know me, not really.
And he’d still figured out two of my ploys.
Already!
In a comm conversation!
“I am so screwed,” I said to my arm.
Silence greeted me.
But I didn’t need anyone around to confirm.
I knew it.
I was screwed.
Totally.
But that didn’t mean I was going to give up.
Not a chance.
Thursday evening, I was in my closet organizing my packing in order to head up to Sigil the next night when my Palm chimed to tell me I had a call.
I looked down at it and unleashed a huge, ill-tempered breath.
Then I engaged the comm and greeted Tanyn with, “Warning. I’m packing to freeze my ass off on Sigil. So I’m not in a better mood.”
Tanyn said nothing, but my display changed from his face to a roaring fire that looked cozy and veritably screamed make some cocoa, grab your tablet and read for the next three days.
This changed to dark wood, a variety of equally cozy chairs, sofas and nooks, soft lighting, and then I could hear the wind whistling and see the snow gently falling because he’d walked out onto some balcony.
And the display was nothing but a vista of moonlit landscape covered in snow, an abundance of white-crested pine trees, stark-black stone mountains (also crested in white), and it wasn’t easy to see, but in the background, there were dark waters with big chunks of ice floating lazily on them.
His face filled the display again, and his lustrous brown hair was windswept when he said, “I’m already on Sigil.”
I didn’t want to have a million questions, but I did.
Questions like, even though it was gorgeous (no way around that, it just was), how did he survive it, being stuck out there, so far away from everywhere?
And other questions, like, had he been close to his mom?
And how did she die?
Also, did he speak to his dad at all in that time?
Further, even if it was gorgeous, why would he ever want to go back there?
Sigil Isle was less an exile than a prison.
“Is there anything there? Like a town or something?” I asked.
I watched him walk inside while he answered, “A landing bay for crafts, and a dock for boats. Other than that, no. Anything needed is flown in.”
“Do you have a staff?”
“Serving bots.”
Really?
“In a historical, royal property?” I queried.
Those didn’t usually have bots, because although it had been years, they’d had bugs when they first came out, and such properties couldn’t risk having damage done by bots on the fritz. It was very rare, but it still sometimes happened.
This was one of the reasons Dad and Mom employed beings at their house.
When Mom was a little girl, her family had an early bot, it went haywire, it caused a huge amount of damage, not the least of which was breaking my Aunt Fiona’s clavicle, and Mom had barely escaped somewhat the same happening to her.
This meant Mom had a fear of bots. She wouldn’t even go to a restaurant if they used them as servers.
“Sigil’s citadel was in disrepair when Mom was sent here with me,” Tanyn shared, and I focused on him to see the firelight was dancing on his tanned face and fabulous hair, making his normal resting handsome even more resting handsome.
“It was practically falling down. The one thing my father did after he got shot of us was have it restored. While Mom and I were here. It is not an important property to the crown.”
But it is to you, I thought.
And I thought this right before thinking of a female and her baby being stuck in a falling-down citadel in the literal middle of nowhere, where the one thing you could count on was freezing to death if you didn’t have proper shelter.
Gods, King Riland had been a massive dick.
“We’ll get more into that when you’re here,” he murmured.
I just stopped myself from wincing before I murmured back, “Okeydoke.”
“Did you have a good week?”