13. Valerian
— ? —
Valerian
Headlights sweep across the library ceiling, and underneath me Posy scrambles for her shirt.
“Who is it?” she whispers, wrestling fabric over her head inside out, hair ruined, mouth kiss-swollen, cheeks still flushed with everything we were seconds from doing. “Valerian, who could possibly be…”
“Stay behind me.”
My body has not received the message that the evening has changed.
Her taste is still in my mouth. My hands remember the exact heat of her hip under the waistband I was seconds from solving, and the venom is still aching in my fangs with nowhere sanctioned to go, and whoever is in that car has interrupted the single most important almost of my long existence.
I intend to hold that against them permanently.
I know that engine. I knew it the moment it turned off the road, some animal part of my memory sitting up before my mind caught up, and now, moving through the darkened foyer with Posy’s heartbeat quick at my back, I know the footsteps crossing my gravel too.
Unhurried. Expensive shoes. A stride I sparred against for two hundred years.
Mircea.
My cousin. My childhood co-conspirator, the only member of my court who mocked me to my face and the only one I ever fully believed.
He vanished into the human world around the time the conspirators came for me, and in the box I had nothing but time to wonder which of those facts explained the other.
Some nights I decided he’d escaped. Some nights I decided worse.
The dark tries every version of a story on you, given years enough, and makes each one fit.
And now he’s here, the week my seal breaks, walking up my drive with his old unhurried stride.
The boundary that bleeds me for every inch does not so much as ripple as he walks through it.
Of course it doesn’t. The binding was written for one prisoner, keyed to the seal carved over my heart; it knows its man, and everything else in creation may come and go as it pleases. The injustice is not lost on me.
I open the front door before he can knock.
The man on my steps is dressed for a magazine, dark jeans, a jacket that costs more than this manor’s roof repairs, ink winding down both forearms in patterns that did not exist when I last saw him.
His hair is artfully disheveled. His smile is the same one he wore at every court function for two centuries.
He has already counted the exits, and charmed the guards at each one. He always has.
Behind him, crouched on the gravel, sits a low black McLaren built for speeds this county has laws against.
“Cousin,” Mircea says, spreading his arms wide. “You’re looking… less dead than expected.”
“Hello, Mircea.”
“A century apart and I get a hello.” He presses a hand to his chest. “I drove all day. I brought wine. I rehearsed a speech.”
“Rehearse a departure.”
“There he is.” His grin widens, delighted, and then his gaze slides past my shoulder, and everything in me goes taut.
Posy has followed me into the doorway. Of course she has.
I told her to stay behind me and she interpreted that as a suggestion, and now she’s standing in the spill of porch light with her shirt inside out and her lips swollen and a love bite blooming at her throat that I put there minutes ago, and my cousin is reading the entire evening off her the way I read her heartbeat.
“Well, well,” Mircea says softly. “The rumors are true, then. The lost king found his prophesied bride.” He tilts his head, studying her with open, unhurried interest. “Though I confess I expected someone more… regal.”
“I expected someone less insufferable,” Posy says, “yet here you are.”
The silence lasts one perfect second.
Mircea throws his head back and laughs, full-throated and genuine, and I watch him recalculate her in real time. “Oh, I like her. Cousin, where are your manners? Introduce me.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then I’ll manage it myself.” He flows up the steps, and before I can move, he’s caught Posy’s hand and bowed over it, lips brushing her knuckles, court-perfect. “Mircea. The handsome cousin. The one they warned you about, assuming my cousin retained the good sense to warn you about anything.”
I have him by the collar before the sentence finishes.
The jealousy is instant and embarrassingly primitive.
His mouth on her knuckles. Her hand in his.
Every possessive instinct I own stands up at once and starts issuing decrees, and I don’t remember crossing the space.
One heartbeat he’s touching her; the next his designer jacket is bunched in my fist and his feet are finding the edge of the top step, and my voice comes out of some cellar register I haven’t used since the war.
“You do not touch her.”
“Valerian, easy.” Posy’s hand lands on my arm, warm through the sleeve, present without pulling.
Mircea, to his credit, doesn’t fight the grip. He hangs there, loose and easy, grinning at me around his own strangled collar.
“Still fast,” he observes. “Good. I worried the box might’ve dulled you. Everyone talks about the sanity risks, nobody mentions the reflexes.”
“Why are you here, Mircea?”
“Can’t a man visit family?”
“You’ve had a century of visits to attempt. You chose the week my bride wakes me.” I set him back on his feet and stay planted between them, and Posy’s hand slides down my arm and, quietly, deliberately, into mine. Mircea’s eyes track the motion. He misses nothing. He never has.
“Word travels, cousin.” He straightens his jacket with two precise tugs.
“A hundred-year seal cracks open, the old blood feels it. Half our scattered kind on this side of the door felt it. I simply drove fastest.” His gaze flicks to Posy, gentles by a practiced degree.
“And I wanted to meet the woman who managed what the entire court could not. Waking him. My condolences, by the way. He was insufferable even before the tragic backstory.”
“Relax, cousin.” The old words, the old easy voice, palms up in surrender. “I’m not here to steal her.”
“You’re not here to do anything. Leave.”
“Valerian, wait.” Posy squeezes my hand, and when I look down, her face is doing the thing it does when she’s thinking faster than the room.
“He drove all day to get here. He knew Gran’s seal broke.
He knows things about the curse we don’t.
” She looks at Mircea, cool and level, a librarian assessing a patron with suspicious late fees.
“That’s true, isn’t it? You know things. ”
“I know everything, little queen. It’s my finest quality.”
“Don’t call her that,” I say.
“He calls you that,” Mircea says to Posy, wounded.
“He’s earned it,” she says. “You’ve been here four minutes.”
“And what would it take to earn it? Flowers? References?” He looks genuinely curious, which is how he looks when he’s working. “I have a century of local references. Ask anyone. Ask several governments.”
“You can start,” Posy says, “by explaining how you knew the seal broke, what you know about the curse, and why you really drove all day the second you felt it. In the morning. With coffee. In complete sentences.”
Mircea looks at her for a long moment, and then at me, and the delight on his face is the first entirely honest expression he’s worn since the door opened.
“Oh, you’re in tremendous trouble,” he tells me. “You know that, yes?”
“I know it better than anyone alive.”
He laughs again, softer now, and for one blink the charm thins, showing the tired, watchful creature underneath, there and gone.
“All that time in a box, cousin, and you found the one mortal on this continent who negotiates.” He looks up at the manor’s dark windows, the ivy, the wild gardens silvering in the moonlight, and for a moment his face is unreadable in a way the court never taught him.
“The old keeper did fine work. The wards alone… she must have been formidable.”
“She was,” Posy says quietly.
“Then we have a great deal to discuss.” He claps his hands together, brisk, charming, decided.
“But not tonight. I’ve been driving since dawn, and reunions go better after sleep.
” He steps past me into my foyer as if the house voted for him, turning in a slow circle, taking inventory.
“I’ll be staying a few days, of course. The manor has plenty of rooms.”
“You will not…”
“East wing or west? East gets the morning sun, but I’m sentimental about a good sunset.
” He’s already moving toward the staircase, travel bag materializing from somewhere, utterly immune to the temperature of my stare.
On the third step he pauses and looks back at us, and the grin fades to something quieter and infinitely more dangerous.
“Sleep well, lovebirds. Tomorrow we’ll catch up properly.” His eyes hold mine. “There’s news from home, cousin. A century’s backlog of it. The kingdom, the court, the ones who put you in that box.” A beat. “Some of it you’ll want to hear sitting down.”
He climbs into the dark of my house, whistling a waltz from a court ball two centuries dead, and the foyer settles back into silence around the shape of everything he didn’t say.
Posy lets out a long breath. “So that’s your cousin.”
“That’s my cousin.”
“He’s very…” She searches for the word. “Shiny.”
“He has spent a century among humans learning to be shiny. Underneath it he’s the second-most dangerous creature I have ever known.
” I turn to face her, and my hands find her shoulders, checking her over the way I’ve wanted to since his eyes first landed on her.
Unharmed. Flushed. Watching me with an expression that’s beginning to curve at the corners.
“You growled at him,” she says.
“I did no such thing.”
“When he kissed my hand. You growled. Actual growling. I felt it through the floor.”
“I expressed a territorial opinion at a dignified volume.”
“It was hot,” she says, matter-of-fact, and my brain drops its ledgers.
She rises on her toes, presses a kiss to the corner of my jaw, and settles back down while my hands tighten at her waist of their own accord.
“Deeply unevolved of me, I know. We’ll unpack it later.
Along with everything else on the list.”
The list. The story I owe her. The cousin in my east wing with a backlog of news he wants me sitting down for.
Her hand tightens in mine.
“Valerian,” she says slowly, “who exactly put you in the box?”
The question I promised to answer tonight. The story I owe her, standing in my foyer wearing my cousin’s smile.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “It seems we’ll all be catching up.”