Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
Lanthar summons me alone.
The passage the Lithenmere opens is one I haven’t walked. Narrow. Gold veins running close together, dense with light. The stone polished smooth.
The chamber at its end is small. A table of dark stone. Two chairs. No ornamentation. The walls are bare except for the gold, which runs in patterns I haven’t seen elsewhere in the palace. Tighter. Drawn closer.
Lanthar is standing at the table.
He turns when I enter. A new quiet sits in the silver eyes. Smaller than the convening’s authority.
“The alliance is sealed,” he says.
“Yes, I’m glad.”
“I have something for you,” he says. His gaze stays on mine. “It is not part of the alliance. It is not political. It is personal, and I am trusting you with it because you earned that trust.”
He reaches into his coat and produces a stone. Small. Pale. Smooth. The color of bone, fitting in his palm. The chamber responds to it, the gold in the walls brightening, the patterns tightening further. Whatever this object is, the gold answers it.
“A memory stone,” he says. “It carries the truth of why I left. Every year. Every reason. Every choice I made and what it cost.”
He pauses.
“Stone remembers. It also listens. You will understand what I mean when the time comes.”
He sets it on the table between us.
“For Mira. When she is ready.”
I look at the stone. Pale against the dark surface. Small. Luminous.
“I would tell her myself,” he says. “But some truths are better kept in stone than spoken by the mouth that caused the wound. She will look into it when she chooses. She will see what I saw. And she will decide what to do with it without my face in the room asking for forgiveness I have not earned.”
He’s handing me his confession. For me to keep until Mira decides she’s ready to hear why a king watched her grow from the other side of the world.
I pick up the stone. It is warm. Heavier than it looks. The gold dims slightly when it leaves the table.
“I’ll keep it for her,” I say.
Lanthar nods.
The Lithenmere opens a passage behind me. Dismissal in stone.
I turn toward it. Then back, one more time.
Lanthar’s head is lowered. His hands are flat on the table. He doesn’t look up.
This isn’t mine to witness.
I step through. The passage seals behind me.
We leave in the morning.
The convening is over. The alliance is sealed. We have been gone four Thessivane days, and there is no way to know what that’s been on the other side of the Veil. Seraphina has given us this one night to rest before the crossing, and Celeste has already decided how we are going to spend it.
The healing springs are deep in the Lithenmere’s roots.
Seraphina mentioned them to us before. They are ancient. Predating the palace. The water draws from a vein of deep magic that runs beneath the mountain’s foundation, and the chamber is private.
Celeste is already in the water when I arrive.
The chamber is carved from raw stone, unfinished, the walls rough and glittering with unrefined gold.
The pool fills most of the floor, shallow at the edges, deep at the center.
The water is clear but carries a faint discoloration that catches the light wrong.
I don’t know what it means. I don’t care.
Because Celeste is sitting at the shallow end with the water at her shoulders, her hair wet and pushed back from her face, and the mark on her chest glows crimson above the waterline. She looks up when I enter.
“You’re late,” she says. She smiles.
I undress.
Her eyes track me the entire time. She watches me take off my clothes. Taking me in.
I step into the water.
Heat rises through the water from below. The deep magic in the springs presses against my skin, and the shadows in my blood respond with the same quiet recognition they’ve carried since we crossed the Veil.
I move to her. The water shifts around us. The gold brightens as I close the distance. She meets me halfway. The water runs off her shoulders, her chest, the mark glowing against her skin. She closes the distance and presses her hands to my chest, fingers spread.
Her warmth catches me off guard. No vampire should carry this much heat, and she has been carrying more of it every week.
I take her face in my hands. Tilt it up. The gold-light catches the water on her skin and the crimson of the mark and the brown of her eyes, and I let myself look at her without restraint after four days of Fae politics and court dynamics.
I kiss her. Hard. Her mouth opens under mine, her hands slide up my chest to my shoulders, her fingers dig in, and everything opens between us so completely that I feel what she feels when my tongue finds hers. The sharp intake of breath. The heat building low in her body. The ache underneath it.
I walk her backward through the water until her spine meets the pool’s stone edge. She arches against it, pulling me toward her, and the contact is immediate and devastating. I can feel every inch of her body against mine through the warm water.
I reach down. My hand slides down her stomach, over the curve of her hip, between her thighs. She’s ready, the heat of her cutting through the spring water, and when my fingers find her, she gasps into my mouth and her grip on my shoulders goes sharp.
I take my time.
I know her body. I’ve learned it in a compound bedroom, against a desk, in the dark hours after dusk when the world outside doesn’t exist. I know the pitch of her when my thumb finds her clit. I know she bites her lip when she’s close and releases it when she stops caring who hears.
Tonight I want every sound.
I press two fingers inside her and curl them forward, and the cry she makes is rough and broken and goes straight down my spine.
Her hips rock against my hand, chasing the angle.
I give it to her. I press in, and her head drops back against the stone edge.
Her throat is bare, and the mark on her chest pulses brighter with every stroke.
The sensation runs both directions. My fingers stretching her open. Her body’s response is hot and tight and wanting more. It doubles back into me until the line between what I’m giving and what she’s feeling dissolves.
“Maximus.”
My name in her mouth, needy.
I withdraw my hand. Her protest hits me in the chest. I grip her hips and lift her, and her legs lock around my waist, and she reaches between us and guides me to her entrance.
The world narrows.
She sinks onto me slowly. Taking me in by degrees, her breath stuttering against my lips.
I feel what she feels. The stretch of her body opening around me.
The pulse of pleasure that follows the initial discomfort, riding the edge between too much and not enough until her hips finally settle flush against mine and we both stop breathing.
Her muscles clench around me. I stay very still because if I move right now, it will be over before it starts.
“Don’t hold back,” she says. Her lips against my ear. “Not tonight.”
I move. Slow at first. Full strokes. Each thrust pressing her back against the stone, the water sloshing around us in ripples that catch the gold light. Her fingers dig into my shoulders. Her legs tighten around my waist on every stroke. Demanding more.
She shifts. Rolls her hips and takes the rhythm from me, slowing me down, setting a pace slower than I want. The look she gives me while she does it, brown eyes and wet mouth and pure challenge, is the reason I will never win a negotiation with this woman.
“You were saying something about not holding back,” she says. Wrecked. Still managing to sound like herself.
“I was under the impression you wanted control.”
“I want everything.” Her hips roll again. Slower. “Keep up.”
I take what she’s giving and let her set the pace. But I want her undone.
My thumb traces the crescent mark. The crimson pulses beneath my touch, brightening with each stroke, amplified by the springs’ magic until the glow bleeds out across her skin. She arches into my hand. Her groan is raw and ragged. I lean down. Close my mouth over the mark. Suck.
Her hips falter on me.
“Don’t,” she breathes, but her voice is already breaking.
“Don’t what.”
“Don’t make me come yet. I had a plan.”
“What plan.”
“I was going to wreck you first.”
I laugh against her skin. It shudders through both of us where our bodies are joined. “Try harder.”
She does.
Her fingers grip my hair. Pull my mouth back to hers. Tongue against mine. Her hips speed up, fast and tight, taking me at her angle. Her muscles work around me. Her rhythm now. I follow it.
The heat where I’m buried. The pressure low in her body. The coil pulling tighter with each stroke.
I let her have it.
In the compound, we stole hours between crises. Against the desk, we had minutes. Here, in the mountain’s heart, there’s no alarm. No timer. The only thing after this is more of this.
She runs me right to the edge.
Then I take it back.
I lift her off me, ignore her protest, and turn her so her hands brace against the pool’s edge with the water at her hips. She looks back at me over her shoulder, hair wet, mouth open.
“You’re cheating,” she says.
I slide one hand around her hip, then between her thighs, and the other up her spine to settle at the back of her neck. She shudders under both at once. I press her down a fraction, angling her, and slide back into her in one slow stroke that takes her until she has nowhere left to go.
She lets out a gasp.
I move. Hard now. The angle giving her everything, my hand on her clit and my hips driving against hers, and the water churning in waves around our bodies.
Her forearms slip on the pool’s edge and I catch her, wrap an arm across her chest, palm pressed over the mark where it blazes hot under my hand.
“Maximus.” Softer. The edge stripped out. “Please.”
I press my mouth to the back of her neck. “I have you.”
“Don’t stop.”
“I won’t.”