Blood & Crown (Crimson Crescent #4)

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

The heat wakes me.

His hands are on me, one spread across my hip and the other curled around my ribs, fingers cool against skin that has no business being this hot at three in the morning.

The compound below us runs pre-assault inventory, carts rolling, Marcellus’s voice carrying through stone.

The heat cuts through all of it. Mine. Pouring off me in waves that started weeks ago and haven’t stopped climbing.

Twelve weeks of this. Getting worse, not better. Noted.

Maximus is awake beside me. I can tell because rest-still and thinking-still are two different things, and I’ve slept next to this man long enough to know which one keeps his thumb tracing circles on my hip bone.

On the nightstand, the photograph sits face-up where he put it.

A pale hand on dark wood, the angle composed, the light chosen so you see exactly one thing.

Heavy gold on the third finger. Maximus’s father’s ring on Konstantin’s hand.

A reminder or a promise, depending on the night.

The shutters are open. He stopped closing them after the springs, when the sun stopped being a thing that could kill him.

It never could kill me. Konstantin built me for it.

Moonlight cuts across the bed and catches my ring, the M and C worked into a single crest.

“Stop planning,” I say.

“I’m not planning.”

“You’re planning so hard the mattress is vibrating.”

His mouth finds my shoulder, and the temperature difference alone is enough to make me press closer. “I’m lying next to my wife on the last quiet night before everything starts. The planning is incidental.”

Wife. The word still hits me somewhere below the ribs every time he says it.

“You’re going to wear that out.”

“Good.” He pulls me tighter. “I intend to.”

I turn into him and his arm comes around me and I press close because he runs cold and I run hot and I have since the pregnancy started changing my body one degree at a time.

The crescent over my heart pulses warm against his chest and his answers mine, both marks deepening to crimson.

His heartbeat slows under my palm. Mine matches from inside my own chest, the same rhythm, the one they’ve kept since the marks first wrote themselves into us.

Below, the compound keeps working. Tomorrow night we hit the first of Konstantin’s three remaining facilities.

Seraphina and Mira can shatter the wards in a single night now.

What we don’t have is his estate, the place he runs everything from.

Vivienne sent the coordinates after Konstantin turned her reserves, the closest thing to choosing a side she has ever done, and they put the estate in a fold of mountains that sits on no map we own.

What the coordinates can’t give us is a way in.

Every probe we’ve sent at its wards has come back with nothing. So we start with what we can reach.

He kisses me. Unhurried. Tomorrow belongs to the war.

These minutes don’t. His hand slides under his shirt, the one I slept in, up my spine, and his fingers spread across my back, and it’s possessive in a way that stopped being new and became the thing I reach for in my sleep.

I push closer. He makes a low sound against my throat.

Then something pulls tight below my navel.

Deeper than him. Deeper than anything he’s doing. A hard inward drag from where the twins are, a clench in a place I don’t have muscles to clench.

I know where my telekinesis starts. I trained it. Up from the sternum, steered from behind the eyes. This comes from lower and it’s climbing and I didn’t tell it to move.

“Maximus.”

The lamp lifts off the nightstand. Smooth, no wobble, cord drawing taut. Glass follows. On the low shelf the books slide forward as one.

Heat flares through me. Past anything the kiss explains. Past anything the pregnancy explains. Past my experience. Past my training.

More of it than I have ever felt at once, flooding up from below, and when I grab for the place I learned to steer this, there’s nothing to grab.

It isn’t going out from me. It’s coming up through me. I’m not the one moving it. I’m the thing it moves through, and the thing it moves through doesn’t get to pick where it goes. And right now it’s climbing, and it’s aimed at the thing nearest me. The thing nearest me is my husband.

Maximus.

Into him. Past skin, into the cold dense interior of him, into the places where a body comes apart.

Mapping the seams. Finding the angle. The same automatic reach that went for a bird on a branch once and mapped its hollow bones before I could stop it, except now there’s three times the force behind it and it’s reading my husband, every fault line, and the thing roaring through me has already found the answer and is asking whether to pull.

No.

I rip it back. Both hands, everything, and it fights me, massive and unwilling to let go of what it just learned. I drag it out of him and throw the whole mass of it sideways into the wall.

Something in the wall gives with a deep structural crack.

Then it lets go all at once.

Lamp drops hard. Glass topples off the nightstand. Books settle crooked. My arms won’t hold me. My forehead is pressed to the mark, to the heartbeat I was reading for how to stop three seconds ago.

His heart is fast.

Mine matches it, slamming. The bond between us is wide open.

Everything I’m feeling pouring through. The terror.

The relief. The sick knowledge of what I almost did.

And his end of it is sending back something I can’t name.

Fury and awe and a tenderness with edges on it.

He just felt my power push inside him and map his death, and then he felt me drag it back by force.

You didn’t. He’s here. You didn’t.

He hasn’t moved except to lock his fist in my shirt.

His whole body rigid, the shadows flared off his shoulders and hunting a threat that isn’t in the room.

The shadows are doing what they do when his body perceives danger, spreading across every surface, tasting the air, looking for the thing to fight, and the thing to fight is me, is the force that came through me, and the shadows can’t find an enemy that lives inside the woman pressed against him.

So they search, and they turn up nothing, and the searching makes the room darker, the edges of the furniture blurring into shadow, and his heart is fast against my cheek, and his body is perfectly still.

He’s whole. The crimson over his heart burns bright.

“What just happened?” he asks.

“I had it.” My voice comes out wrecked. “Every other time, the power listened. That time it didn’t.”

“I felt it.” Quiet. Careful. The handling tone. I store that to be annoyed about when I have the bandwidth. “Something reached for me through the mark. Then it pulled back.”

“It wasn’t me.” I push up far enough to see his face. “It reached for what was nearest.” My voice cracks. “You. I felt my own power measure you for how to take you apart.”

He gets us sitting, my back to his chest, his arm locked across me, and puts his hand flat on my stomach. Low. Over them. Where it started.

His hand stays.

Under his palm, the force stirs again. A small flex. An outward push that wasn’t there a second ago. I close my fist against the sheet and drag it back down, and it goes, easy this time, like it only wanted to prove it could.

My heart slams once. He presses firmer. Neither of us says it.

“Something’s been building.” I face away from him and say it to the wall because it’s easier.

“Weeks. The heat. A pressure I kept telling myself was the gift settling. Nobody looked for anything wrong because nothing was wrong.” His arm tightens around me.

“I think it’s them, not the gift. It came from where they are, not from where my power starts, and it grabbed for whatever was nearest the same way my gift does, except I couldn’t steer it.

Couldn’t even feel it start.” I take a breath.

His hand spreads wider. His ring catches the moonlight. One mark, he’d said when he gave it to me. For the two of us.

“If I’m right,” I say, “they’re strong. And whatever it was, it found how to kill you, and I’m the channel it would’ve used.”

“You stopped it.” Flat. No argument, just the one fact he can put weight on. “I felt you fight it and I felt you win. Whatever this becomes, you are not the thing that hurts me. I won’t hear it.”

“It’s close enough to scare me.”

Silence. His jaw is set and the muscle at the hinge is jumping, and I’ve watched him stare down a hundred crises without that look. This one’s got it.

The lamp is on the floor. The glass is scattered. The wall is cracked, a dark line running from the baseboards toward the ceiling. And my husband has me and his heart is beating and the two inside me are quiet, the surge spent, the terrible reaching finished.

I don’t know what a partial pull does at this magnitude.

The fraction of force that reached him before I caught it.

I don’t know if the seam it found is structural, if the reading it took left damage that doesn’t show yet, if the thing my power learned about how to unmake him is now stored somewhere in the twins’ developing nervous systems. I don’t know any of that, and the not-knowing is going to sit in my chest until someone with better instruments than my panic can tell me whether I broke something I can’t see.

If it is them, I don’t know why they would map their father in the first place.

“Elena. Tonight. Before we sleep.”

“Elena tonight.” His arm loosens a fraction. “And the circle of those who know stays where it is. You, me, Elena, Dalton. No one new before the strike.”

Because that’s what he does. The smallest perimeter possible. Send everyone away, handle it where nobody can watch, keep the circle tight enough that trust is a given and not a variable.

“No.”

His arm goes rigid.