12. A King’s Appetite
Alex
Iwas dreaming of fire when the touch came.
Not the warm, golden kind that lived between Atlas and me, but the other sort.
The kind that smelled of scorched skin and basements and a voice I had once trusted telling me it was for my own good.
So, when fingers brushed the bare skin of my shoulder, my body reacted before my mind could catch up.
I jerked violently away as a gasp tore out of me, and my eyes flew open to a room I didn’t immediately recognize.
“Easy. Easy, my love, it’s only me.”
The voice settled over me like a healing balm, low and impossibly gentle, and the panic drained out of me as quickly as it had come.
Atlas.
Of course, it was him.
I was in his ridiculous island of a bed, tangled in sheets that smelled of him, with sunlight pouring through the tall windows and not a single basement in sight.
He shifted closer, and I felt the warmth of his lips press softly against the curve of my shoulder.
“There she is,” he murmured against my skin, the words a quiet echo of the night before. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“You didn’t,” I lied, my heart still galloping. “I just… wasn’t expecting…” I trailed off because his hand had drifted lower, tracing an idle path down my spine, and the moment his fingers found the ruined skin there, I went rigid.
The scar.
My back was bare.
Every muscle in my body locked tight as ice flooded my veins, and the words came tumbling out before I could stop them, clumsy and panicked.
“Atlas, I… I was going to tell you, I swear, it’s not… it wasn’t…I just got hurt and I…” I fumbled for the right words more than I ever had in my life.
“Shhh.”
The sound was soft, soothing, and his hand never stopped its slow, tender stroke across the mark Riley had left burned into me.
“It’s alright, little bird,” he said quietly. “Aster told me what happened.”
I twisted to look at him then, searching his face. He lay propped on one elbow beside me, dark hair falling loose across his brow, watching me with an expression so calm it didn’t make any sense at all. Not after everything. Not given what he now knew.
“Then why aren’t you…” I frowned. “… murderous?”
Something flickered behind those dark eyes. A heat, there and gone in an instant.
“Oh, I am,” he said pleasantly, as though we were discussing the weather.
“Make no mistake about that. There is a part of me that wants to tear a certain world apart with my bare hands.” Then the corner of his mouth tilted, and the warmth came flooding back.
“But I have to say… finding you still naked in my bed does help.”
A startled laugh escaped me, surprising us both.
“You’re impossible,” I muttered, but some of the tension finally eased from my shoulders. His gaze softened as he looked at me, and when I spoke again, it came out small and quiet, the way the truth always did when it cost me something.
“He wasn’t himself, Atlas,” I said. “Riley. Whatever did that to me, it wasn’t him. Not really.”
Atlas said nothing, as if contemplating my words. Then he leaned down and pressed a slow kiss to the very center of the scar on my back.
I shivered.
“That,” he said against my skin, his voice low and dark, “does not give anyone the right to touch what is mine.” He lifted his head, and his eyes found mine, burning. “Let alone hurt you.”
My heart did something complicated and entirely unhelpful.
I opened my mouth, though I had no idea what I’d intended to say, and never got the chance to find out. Because in one fluid, infuriating motion, Atlas rose from the bed, seized me around the waist, and hauled me clean off the mattress and over his shoulder.
I squealed. There was no dignified way around it. I squealed like a kettle.
“Atlas!” I shrieked, my hair tumbling toward the floor as the world flipped upside down. “Put me down! What are you… this isn’t… You can’t just keep picking me up whenever you feel like it!”
His answer was a laugh and a sharp, ringing swat to my bare backside that made me yelp.
“I beg to differ, my little turnip”, he said, infuriatingly cheerful, and I laughed at his reference to our vegetable conversation last night.
“What are you even doing?!” I asked as he strode across the room.
He carried me through a doorway into a flood of warm light, then bent and set me down on my feet, steadying me with both hands when I swayed. Then he stepped back, looked me up and down slowly, and smirked.
“You’re so little,” he said, “and I’m hungry.”
I blinked up at him, thoroughly lost.
My brain, still half-asleep and entirely scrambled, snagged on the word hungry and went somewhere it absolutely shouldn’t have, given we were standing in what I now realized was an enormous, gleaming bathing room.
Oh, and I was also naked, so there was that.
Which was why heat crept up my neck. Atlas watched it happen, and his grin widened wickedly.
“I wanted to get your little legs to the bathroom quicker,” he explained, the picture of innocence, “so you can get yourself ready for breakfast.”
Then he leaned down, pressed a kiss to my forehead, and patted me on the top of the head.
Patted me. On the head. Like a pet.
A low growl rumbled out of me, which only made him chuckle.
The smug, beautiful menace actually had the audacity to look delighted by it.
Before I could decide which heavy object to throw at him, he took me by the shoulders, turned me firmly to face the room, and delivered one more swat to my naked behind.
“Now get to it,” he said.
“So bossy,” I grumbled over my shoulder.
He leaned in close behind me, his breath warm against my ear, and his voice dropped to that low register that did absolutely criminal things to my pulse.
“You mean kingly.”
I felt him smile against my hair. Then, lower still, barely more than a whisper,
“So don’t keep this king waiting…” A pause, “…or I might have to eat something else instead. Something delicious.”
The memory of exactly what he’d called delicious the night before crashed through me, and every coherent thought in my head promptly evacuated the premises.
By the time I’d recovered enough to summon a single scathing word, he was already gone, the door clicking shut behind him and his low laugh fading down the corridor.
I stood there for a long moment, flushed from head to toe, staring at the closed door.
“I’m in so much trouble,” I told the empty room.
The room, much like the wolves on the bathtub downstairs, offered no sympathy whatsoever. It did, however, offer opulence on a frankly obscene scale. If the guest chamber’s bathing room had looked fit for gods, then the king’s own private version looked fit for the gods’ more extravagant relatives.
The floor was warm, pale marble shot through with veins of gold, and a vast sunken bath had been carved directly into it, already steaming gently.
Silver fixtures gleamed against dark stone.
Glass bottles lined a long shelf, each one filled with oils and soaps in jewel-bright colors.
Tall windows looked out across the same breathtaking sweep of mountains I had glimpsed the night before, snow-capped and gold-touched beneath the morning sun.
I would have happily drowned in that bath for a week.
Unfortunately, I had a king to not keep waiting.
So, I was efficient about it, for once in my life.
I scrubbed the last traces of the previous night from my skin, washed my hair, and tried very hard not to think about the way certain muscles ached in a way that had nothing to do with battle.
When I finally climbed out, pink and clean and feeling something dangerously close to human, I found a wardrobe waiting along one wall, and inside it, of course, more dresses… like he’d planned for me being there.
Because heaven forbid this castle contain a single pair of trousers.
I picked one in deep crimson this time, a change from yesterday’s pale blue, the fabric soft and rich and embroidered with a silver thread at the cuffs and bodice.
It was beautiful. It was also, I quickly discovered, every bit as much of a tactical nightmare as its predecessor, and after a brief and humbling struggle with the laces, I was deeply relieved to hear a soft knock at the door.
“My lady?”
I could have kissed her.
“Please tell me you know how this works,” I said the moment I let Thalia in, gesturing helplessly at the half-fastened back of the gown.
The young maid’s hazel eyes crinkled, the nervousness from yesterday already softening into something warmer.
“I do, my lady… erm, I mean, Alex,” she said, remembering to use my name with only a small, shy hesitation. “Hold still.”
Within minutes, she had me sorted, the laces tightened with brisk, practiced ease, my damp hair brushed and pinned back from my face.
When I turned to the mirror, the woman looking back at me once again barely resembled the one who had crossed a battlefield.
Crimson and silver, clean and soft, like something out of the storybook I still couldn’t quite believe I’d fallen into.
“Now,” I said, turning to Thalia with what I hoped was an air of confidence, “I don’t suppose you could also show me how to find my way to wherever I’m supposed to be?
Because I will be honest with you, I got lost twice yesterday just trying to find the stairs.
” Of course, I left out the part where I was trying to run from her king.
Thalia laughed, the sound easier now, and led me out into the maze.
She guided me down sweeping staircases and along corridors lined with towering windows, past tapestries and silver lanterns and more grandeur than any one building had a right to contain.
And we continued on still until at last she brought me out through a pair of open glass doors and into the late morning air.
And I forgot, for a moment, how to do anything but stare.