Chapter Six
Bren
I have ruined the library.
The manor will repair itself — Ashenmere always does — but the scorch marks on the desk and the charred spines of three irreplaceable texts and the antler gouges in the seventeen-foot ceiling are evidence of a loss of control so complete that I should be ashamed.
Yet, I'm not. I'm lying on the library floor — we migrated from the desk at some point, when Izzy pushed me onto my back and rode me with a ferocity that would humble anyone's ego but mine — and she's draped across my chest, her breathing evening out, her dark hair sticking to both our sweat-slicked skin.
The bond hums between us. I can feel her contentment, her sated exhaustion, the low-level simmer of a mind that never fully stops analyzing. She's cataloging what just happened. Classifying it. Filing it in whatever internal archive her academic brain maintains.
She's also already thinking about Kael.
I feel it through the bond — not his name, not a specific thought, but a directional pull. A cold curiosity sitting beside the warm satisfaction of what we've done. She isn't finished. The bond knows it. I know it.
I should be furious. For three centuries, the mere thought of sharing anything with Kael Duskwood has been enough to make my fire destructive.
Our courts have been locked in the curse's mutual stranglehold — his magic weakening mine, mine weakening his — and the resentment between us has calcified into something that functions identically to hatred whether or not that's technically what it is.
But the bond is showing me Izzy's emotional landscape, and in that landscape, the cold curiosity isn't a betrayal.
It's the other half of a sentence. I'm the heat.
He's the shadow. She needs both, and the part of me that burns with possessive fury is going to have to negotiate with the part that felt the curse shudder when I came inside her.
It shuddered. For the first time in three hundred years, I felt the binding loosen.
A fraction. A hairline crack in the chains around both courts' magic.
And the crack happened not despite the bond's incomplete state but because of its potential — the curse felt the genuine desire between Izzy and me and registered it as partial payment on a debt that requires three.
Which means the curse needs Kael too. Needs her to want him with the same visceral, undeniable hunger she just demonstrated with me.
I tighten my arms around her. She shifts, pressing closer, and the bond floods with warmth — hers and mine, indistinguishable.
"He was watching," she says. Her voice is quiet, post-sex raspy, and the sound of it does things to my already-spent body.
"I know." I sensed him. The temperature drop at the doorway. The shadows thickening.
"Are you angry?"
I consider the question with more honesty than I usually permit myself. "I should be."
"That's not what I asked."
She lifts her head. Her grey-green eyes are steady, clear, entirely unwilling to let me deflect. The bond pulses between us, and through it she can feel the complicated mess of my emotional state — the possessiveness warring with pragmatism, the jealousy edged with something I refuse to name.
"I'm not angry," I admit. "I'm territorial. There's a difference."
"Explain it."
"Anger would mean I want to keep him away from you. Territorial means I want to be first." I pause. "I was first."
Her mouth twitches. "You were."
"And whatever happens next — with him, with the bond, with the curse — that doesn't change."
She sits up, cross-legged on the library floor, magnificently naked and entirely unself-conscious.
The firelight catches her skin, the marks I left on her throat and collarbones, the flush that hasn't fully faded.
She looks like something a fae artist would paint and then go mad trying to recapture.
"I need to talk to him," she says.
"I know."
"You don't get to decide how that conversation goes."
My fire flares. The sconces, which had dimmed to a reasonable glow, surge back to full brightness. My antlers, which had been slowly retracting, manifest again with a bone-deep ache.
"I know," I repeat, and it costs me more than the first time.
She leans forward and kisses me. Slow, thorough, tasting the aftermath of what we did. When she pulls back, the bond blazes between us — bright and real and ours.
"First," she says. "Always."
It's not a lie. The bond would reject it if it were.
I let her go. She gathers the green dress from the floor, laces it loosely, and pads barefoot out of the ruined library. The moment she's gone, the warmth in my chest contracts to a dense, burning point, and I feel her moving through the manor — toward the west wing. Toward him.
I press my forehead to the scorched floorboards and let the fire consume me until there's nothing left to burn.
***