Chapter 27
I waited until Errik’s bedroom door had clicked shut on the other side of the landing. Then I put a quick spell of naudiz and ansuz on my own – lack, sound – and slipped out into the dark Dawn House again.
I could sleep once Lark had been taken care of.
Up the stairs I went, bare feet quiet on the cold marble, hands finding their way by touch.
I knew the layout of this floor like I knew the scents of woodsmoke and Mother’s fresh bread – memories so old they slumbered in the very marrow of my bones.
Carved doorpost, wooden door … and there, finally the handle.
Another muting spell, and I tiptoed into the dark room beyond without a sound.
Slow breaths rose from the bed, shallow and even.
‘Durlain?’ I whispered.
No response.
Raising my voice seemed a terrible idea: this was the room right above Errik’s, and I doubted the old guard had already dozed off again.
Didn’t need him to wonder what I was doing sneaking into His Highness’s bedroom at night.
So I slunk closer to the bed, navigating by only the faint outline of the window, and tried again. ‘Durlain?’
His breathing still didn’t falter. I stifled a curse and cautiously stretched out a hand, finding the edge of the mattress, then a soft woollen blanket.
Upward, towards the pillow … My roving fingers found sheets, more blankets, and finally the marble-smooth warmth of a bare shoulder. I gave it a small shake.
‘Dur—’
A hand clamped around my upper arm.
A vicious, practised yank sent me flailing onto the bed, a blur of shadows and limbs moving too fast for me to even gasp out loud.
I hit wool and down. Tried, instinctively, to turn.
A hot weight landed on my back before I could move, a knee pinning down my thigh, a hand settling between my shoulder blades – his body pressing me face-first into the mattress as cold, unerring fingers slid against the underside of my jaw.
Ready to draw fire.
I gulped in a breath and hissed, ‘Wait! It’s me!’
His hand stiffened.
‘Thraga?’ His voice was very close to my ear – more breath than voice, brushing hot and rough against the side of my neck. The pressure on my back eased slightly, but didn’t disappear. ‘What in the world are you doing here, you stunning little fool?’
Stunning.
Had he said that?
Was he still dreaming?
I swallowed hard, feeling the unyielding press of his fingers against my jaw. ‘Needed to talk to you. Thought—’
‘I ought to tell you about the astonishing concept of knocking,’ he interrupted, tone quiet yet caustic, sounding not at all like he was dreaming.
Although perhaps he dreamed sarcastically, too – I could think of more unlikely possibilities.
‘I could have charred your throat before you’d gotten a word out, do you realise that? ’
‘Didn’t want the family to hear,’ I ground out, trying to shake his weight off me. To no avail. All my efforts achieved was to press me more tightly against him, his thigh rock-hard against mine, my bottom rubbing against—
Oh, no.
Oh, sweet death and oblivion, no.
I was only wearing my nightgown. A single layer of silk, and on the other side of that flimsy shield, something was growing swiftly and unmistakably harder against me – pressing hot and hungry into the small of my back.
I abruptly ceased my wiggling.
Too late. The damage was already done. I’d already felt all there was to feel, and so had he – the evidence rigid and heavy against my spine, a touch more intimate than the caresses of his breath beneath my ear.
Still his weight didn’t lift off me. But his fingers had frozen against my throat, and he no longer seemed to be breathing – as though he, too, had grasped the sudden danger of making one move too many.
‘You’re …’ My voice was a hoarse croak. ‘You’re naked?’
‘I was sleeping safe as a newborn babe in my own dear bed,’ he tartly informed me, tone too stilted to achieve its usual biting edge.
The weight of his body was a searing brand.
Pressing me into the blankets, trapped and helpless …
and yet the fear refused to flare in my chest. ‘Odd as it may be, I don’t usually prepare for midnight ambushes by runewitches.
Can we agree you won’t make a habit of it? ’
I barely heard those last sentences.
My mind was a blank sheet. My pulse came in staggering beats, pumping molten, mortified heat through my veins. He was growing even larger against me, and it no longer mattered how hard I tried to tell myself that that burning feeling was anger or humiliation or shame … because it wasn’t.
Mists take me, it wasn’t.
‘What?’ I gasped, realising too late he’d asked me something.
‘Next time you want to talk to me.’ No matter how quiet his murmur, the tight-jawed tension in his voice was unmistakable. ‘I might not be so quick to recognise you a second time. So promise to ask me nicely, will you?’
Ask me.
Nicely.
There was no reason for those words to slide down my spine the way they did, like hot, gooey honey. No reason for my skin to turn itself inside out in every place he lay pressed against me, my nerves curling hungrily towards his hand on my jaw. And yet …
Fuck.
Was this arousal? Was this want? Or was it just me rattling the bars of my cage, drunk on days of shock after shock, desperate to prove myself free from the shackles of lies?
‘Promise,’ I managed, breathless and boneless. ‘I’ll knock. Now are you getting off me, or do I need to bite to make the bloody point?’
His cock twitched against me.
Just that one involuntary reaction, a moment of lost control so brief I wasn’t sure if I’d felt it at all – and then he rolled off me, his weight gone from my back, and the world around me seemed so suddenly empty I wanted to roar with frustration.
‘Good.’ He sounded a little out of breath. ‘Glad we cleared that up. So what did you want to discuss so urgently you couldn’t let me sleep the sleep of the innocent until sometime a little closer to sunrise?’
He was still naked.
He was talking to me, on a bed, barely a foot away from me, and he was still naked.
If only I’d had a fraction of his court-bred composure, just a dollop of that same restraint I could hear in his half-whispering voice, I might have been able to focus on the matter at hand.
But the feel of him had imprinted itself on my back, my mind was alive with the memory of his bare, scarred chest in that Colris bath, and the silence lasted a mortifying moment too long as I grappled with my thoughts. The cold outside air. Errik. Vial.
Lark.
Shit.
Was this infidelity? Getting all worked up under another man’s touch when the lover I’d once pledged my heart to was dead and possibly never coming back?
And if it was … was that more or less unfaithful than him fucking me while pretending not to be an enemy prince’s close friend?
Focus, damn it. I had to focus, and this was the exact damn reason I’d come here in the first place – these endless spirals, these spinning thoughts.
So I belatedly rolled myself over on the blankets, away from Durlain’s invisibly yet aggressively naked body, and managed to grind out a choked, ‘I need your help.’
‘Ah.’ I felt him move in the darkness as he spoke, the dent of the mattress shifting beneath me. Quiet, padding footsteps, and then the rustle of cloth. ‘Did you eat?’
‘What?’ My soup lay an eternity behind me. ‘I did, but—’
‘Wonderful,’ he said, his voice followed by the sound of fingers scuffling around on a wooden surface, looking for something. ‘You smell like you’ve taken a bath, too. All in all, I’m going to call that a significant improvement.’
‘Did I tell you,’ I said, somehow vexed and quite giddy at once, ‘that I’ve had encounters with hungry wild boars that were really rather enjoyable compared to any conversation I’ve ever had with you?’
A small flame flared in his palm, muted yet bright enough to briefly blind me.
A dressing gown was wrapped loosely around him, I discovered once my eyes had adjusted, which ought to have been a relief and didn’t precisely feel like one.
He lit the candle on the nightstand, then whisked out his magic and said, ‘And yet you’re here. ’
‘I’m desperate,’ I said. ‘As you once told me – I’m paraphrasing – the average drunkard would make better choices.’
He glared at me. I grinned back, remembered I shouldn’t laugh, remembered that might have been insincere advice too, and felt like my face might split in two any moment.
‘The trouble with you,’ he said, neatly arranging his pillows around him as he settled himself cross-legged onto the bed, ‘is that you’re disturbingly good at spotting weaknesses. A habit of survival, I presume.’
‘And you’d rather believe you don’t have any weaknesses?’ I suggested.
‘I’m a scheming murderer, Thraga. Not a fool.
’ He finally looked up, the pillows positioned meticulously behind his back, his dark curls sleep-mussed around his face.
In the flickering candlelight, it was hard to say whether I’d imagined the tug at the corner of his lips.
‘That said, you do find an annoying number of them. Do you still want to talk about your urgent despair, or are you merely here to insult me?’
Oh.
Yes.
My urgent despair.
I had no right in the world to feel comfortable here, sitting on a bed with the prince of many faces by the light of a single flickering candle, neither of us anywhere near properly dressed, the weight of his cock quite possibly etched into my spine for the rest of my life.
Then again … I’d had no right to hear about his tangled family relations, either.
He’d had no right to listen to me ramble about runes and then remember every irrelevant detail of it.
So perhaps right no longer had anything to do with it. Perhaps wrong was just as sensible, and perhaps that was why the words slid past my lips as easily as they did. ‘I need you to keep Lark’s blood for me.’
He stiffened.