Chapter 12 #2
The second sip is fuller. Thicker than human blood, slower across my tongue, and the warmth spreads down through my chest before I've swallowed.
My head goes light at the edges. Not dizzy.
Soft. Like the space behind my eyes has expanded by half an inch in every direction.
The bond opens wider, and the edges of the room go soft.
Something is wrong.
But this feels like the opposite of wrong, so I take another sip.
By the third sip, I understand. The warmth has moved into my limbs, and my thoughts are arriving a half-second late, and everything in my peripheral vision has a faint luminous quality that I'm fairly certain is not the gold veins in the walls.
I'm drunk.
I haven't been drunk since I was human, and I forgot that it felt like this.
Maximus's hand is on my waist. His thumb tracing a slow line above my hip, and I can feel his pulse through his fingertips, and my pulse is matching it, and the music has moved inside my body somewhere.
He's on his third sip too. His eyes are brighter, but his posture is still his. Composed. Present.
"How are you already this far gone?" he asks with an amused look.
"I don't know." I mean it. "We don't get drunk."
"No," he says. "We don't."
I giggle.
He looks at me like I've sprouted two heads.
You don’t giggle, Celeste! I giggle again.
I toss the goblet back and drink the rest of the blood.
A girl’s got to have nourishment.
By the time mine is empty, the room has gone warm and close, and the music is threading through my bones, and I am aware of every point where Maximus's body is near mine without touching it. He sets his empty goblet down first.
Wait, I didn’t see him finish his!
He takes mine from my hand. His fingers are careful, deliberate, like he knows I need the extra second.
He offers his other hand, palm up.
“Dance with me.”
I look around the room. The cleared floor has filled with Fae couples moving in patterns that look choreographed by geometry. Precise, elegant, ancient. The kind of dancing that requires a few years of practice and a body that doesn’t make mistakes.
Oh, what the hell? YOLO.
I put my hand in his.
He leads. I follow. Badly. His hand is at the small of my back, against the bare skin the dress leaves open, and his palm is cool and steady, and I can feel every finger individually, and my feet are not doing what they’re supposed to do.
“You’re thinking about your feet,” he says.
“Because they’re wrong.”
“Stop thinking about them. Follow my hand.”
I try. The music helps. It moves through the stone floor and up through my bones, and after a full turn around the floor, I stop counting steps and start moving with him. Not correctly. Not the way the Fae are dancing. But with him, which turns out to be enough.
He pulls me closer on a turn. My back against his chest. His mouth near my ear.
“Every Fae in this room is watching you,” he says.
“Let them.”
He turns me out. Turns me back. I’m laughing.
The Fae drink wine and dance, and the cavern pulses. The music shifts. Slower. Deeper. The harmonics change, and the sound becomes something more rhythmic, more percussive.
The Fae blood is fully in my system now, and my body is moving before my mind makes decisions.
The formal patterns feel like a costume that doesn’t fit.
My hips know a different language. My spine learned rhythm in East Atlanta with a speaker system that rattled the windows and girls who could make their bodies do things that defied the laws of physics.
I stop following Maximus’s lead.
I start moving the way I know.
His hand falls from my waist. He steps back.
Rolling my hips to a rhythm the Fae strings didn’t intend but absolutely support.
Dropping low and coming back up with the kind of isolation that requires core strength most people don’t have.
The crimson dress moves with me because the Lithenmere made it to move with me, and it handles this just fine.
Maeven stops mid-conversation.
Veyran looks confused.
A cluster of Stone Court Fae tilt their heads in unison like birds encountering a new species.
I don’t care. I’m having the best night of my life, and this music works, and my body works, and I have spent months at war, and a year as a vampire, and tonight I am going to dance like a woman who doesn’t have a single enemy on any plane of existence.
Mira appears beside me. “Are you actually twerking in a Fae ballroom?” She arches a brow.
I giggle again.
She shrugs a shoulder and begins to move. She grew up in the mortal world, she knows what to do. Her green dress handles the motion differently than mine, tighter through the hips, and she compensates with footwork that tells me she’s been to clubs I’d have liked.
We’re closing down a Fae rite with moves that I’m sure have never been seen in Thessivane, and I am having the time of my life.
Seraphina has her hand over her mouth.
Across the cavern, Syrenne raises one perfect eyebrow and drinks her wine.
And Maximus. My Maximus. The lord who commands armies and carries six centuries of composure like a second skeleton.
He’s leaning against a stone column with his arms crossed, and he’s watching me with an expression that has nothing to do with protection or strategy or control. His eyes track my hips. My spine. The line of my back where the dress opens.
He’s smiling. The full one. The one nobody else gets.
I move toward him without stopping what I’m doing. His smile widens.
Then the floor shifts under my right foot.
A spike of heat in the stone. Targeted. Precise. The kind of change that makes your balance fail before your brain registers why.
My body registers it first. Forty-three fights. My weight transfers before I think. My right foot finds solid stone, my left pivots, and my hand catches the source of the heat signature passing behind me.
Syrenne’s wrist. In my grip.
Her balance was already committed to the step that was supposed to be mine. The redirect sends her momentum where it wants to go, which is down.
She hits the stone floor. One knee. The impact echoes.
The cavern holds its breath.
I extend my hand.
“The floor’s slippery,” I say. “The wine must be strong tonight.”
Syrenne looks at my hand. Her banked-coal eyes carry a calculation that reconfigures in real time. She takes it. I pull her up.
“It must be,” she says.
She releases my hand. Dips her chin. Walks back toward the Ember delegation with her shimmer pulled tight around her.
Mira materializes at my shoulder.
“Did you just put the Lady of the Court of Ember on the floor?”
“She slipped.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“She must’ve had too much wine.”
“Sure.” Mira’s mouth curves. “Uncle Max looks like he’s about to abduct you.”
I look at Maximus. He hasn’t moved from the column. His arms are still crossed. His expression hasn’t changed from the smile, but something behind it has deepened into something I am going to need privacy to address.
The music shifts again. The Fae have resumed dancing around us as if nothing happened. The gold in the walls is blazing. The crystal ceiling is throwing light in patterns that turn the entire cavern into a living jewel.
Maximus pushes off the column. Crosses to me. Doesn’t stop until his hand is at my hip and his mouth is at my ear.
“We’re leaving.”
“Sounds lovely.”
We make it to the corridor. The Lithenmere seals the passage behind us, and the music dims, and the stone cools, and it’s just us in a passage lit by gold.
I’m still buzzing. My body is still moving. The Fae blood hasn’t finished with me, and I’m not finished with him.
We make it to our chamber. The door seals. The Lithenmere dims the walls to a low glow.
The energy hasn’t left my body. The blood and the dancing and the night and the look on his face, all of it still in my system.
I step onto the stone table. It holds my weight. Of course it does. The Lithenmere built it.
I keep dancing.
He watches from below me. Coat off. The collar of the Fae-cut shirt loose. His eyes tracking me the way they tracked me across the cavern, but here there’s no court and no protocol and no distance.
“Get down,” he says. Quiet. The kind of quiet that isn’t a request.
“Make me.”
He moves.
His hands close around my waist, and he lifts me off the table, and my legs wrap around him, and my back hits the wall, and his mouth is on mine before I finish the breath.
The kiss is the entire evening compressed into one point. The blood and the music and the crimson dress and the way he looked at me across a cavern full of beings who have lived since before language existed.
The wall behind me pulses gold.
His hands slide from my waist to the open back of the dress, and his fingers spread across my bare skin, and the bond goes so bright I can feel it in my teeth.
“Best night,” I say against his mouth.
He doesn't answer with words.
His mouth moves to my jaw, my throat, the place below my ear. I push my fingers into his hair and pull, and he makes a sound low in his chest that I feel more than hear.
The dress has a single closure at the back of the neck. He finds it without looking.
Efficient. Of course.
The crimson fabric falls.
He steps back to look at me. The gold light from the walls is doing the same thing to his face that it did in the cavern, and I reach for him before he's finished looking because tonight I am not particularly interested in patience.
Carries me to the bed.
His shirt goes. Then everything else, and his skin is cool against mine.
I close my hand around him and stroke slowly, and his hips press forward before he catches himself, a sharp exhale through his teeth, his jaw going tight.
I watch his face and do it again, feeling the weight and length of him, the way his breath changes when I vary the pressure, the way his whole body holds very still when I find the right grip and work it.
He lets me have this for longer than I expect.
Then he puts me on my back.