Chapter 8
The Formidable D’Arco Power Princess
Even while Baz was removing my ankle shackle, I didn’t believe he’d actually lead me from the cell that had been all I’d known for eleven days.
Alobaz Hawxley, commander of the emperor’s entire military force, was reputed for being not only merciless but also cunning.
He’d conquered most of the Opalese World not just by wielding his insuperable might, but also through careful strategy that capitalized on his enemies’ weaknesses.
Before knowing who I was, when the potential was wide open, he’d taken care to use an ankle shackle warded with dark faithum.
No simple key had opened it. He’d similarly locked me in a room only accessible via magic—or Marina’s mysterious and wondrous resourcefulness.
He’d dampened my power with a collar so rare that Marina hadn’t known such a tool existed—and she had access to the wealth of knowledge that was the goblin network—nor had Rafaela or Alonso warned me against it.
So it made no damn sense now that Baz knew who I was, and therefore that I was the most powerful s?nglure ever to come from the D’Arco lineage, that he would afford me any freedom at all.
If indeed the emperor was somewhere in the castle, Baz should have been giddily serving up my head for him on a shiny platter.
It would forever go down as one of the greatest victories of all time: the formidable D’Arco Power Princess, resurrected after long centuries from the dead, only to be dealt a permanent death by the equally formidable Razer of the Rubors.
Troubadours would compose songs about the great and mighty Alobaz, who killed the most beautiful woman history had ever known, delighting their eager audiences.
Not only had Baz released me from my prison cell, he’d taken me to his private chambers and allowed me to bathe.
Sure, pretty much since my ankle shackle had snicked open, he’d been muttering to himself a litany of insults such as: “I must be out of my damn mind,” and “Idiotic! I’ll never hear the end of it;” as well as, “Stupid, scorching titfucker, what do you expect is gonna happen?” But he’d afforded me the consideration of getting to wash off the blood, semen, and madness that had coated my body in a sticky film of grime.
After my confinement, which I’d survived without a single drop of water, the rain shower sluicing along my skin had felt damn near orgasmic.
He’d watched me the entire time, and though it made perfect sense that he wouldn’t let me out of his sight, I hadn’t missed the way his rapt stare heated with desire, or how his leather pants tented with his massive erection.
When we’d traded places, and he’d washed away the traces of me by gliding those big hands of his across sculpted muscles and wet, glistening skin, not even a squadron of enraged dragons would have been able to drag me away from the view.
If Baz was naked, I wanted him inside me. And if he wasn’t naked, I needed him to hurry the fuck up and get naked so he could plow inside me.
Whatever this attraction between us was, it was all-consuming and maddening.
And highly problematic.
We were sworn enemies. And that was before he’d killed my twin. No meeting of D’Arcos and Rubors had ever ended in anything less than bloodshed. In the thousands of years since their arrival in the Opalese, the dynasties had never once come together for true diplomacy.
Baz and I should be murdering each other, not screwing, and certainly not feeding off each other.
Those were the rules. He knew them as well as I.
It was plain in his tormented eyes and the way his actions grew frenzied when he finally gave in to the impulse to have at me.
We should be getting as far away from each other as was possible without falling off the edge of the world.
Entire continents should span between us.
Yet, after our showers, he’d bound himself to me with a length of unreasonably strong black silk that kept me from separating from him any more than a body’s length.
When we entered a small parlor that was filled with the remaining members of the Bazrian Seven, who were loitering around plush furniture pushed to the center of the room, their collective attention landed on the silk rope before studying me and then him with an astuteness that didn’t bode well.
Baz was still parking me at one end of a couch when Levin said, “Oh, okay. I see now. You’ve gone and lost your damn mind. Suddenly everything makes so much more sense.”
Lev perched at the edge of a settee, wreathed in settling olandule smoke that smelled of flowered meadows.
Unlike Rafaela, Lev didn’t use an unborn, full-term infant serpunta, or a spike, but instead smoked the potent herb through an inert ceramic pipe.
As a member of Baz’s inner circle, I suspected Lev could afford the pricy spike if he wanted it.
From behind the dense smoke, illuminated by several hovering lumoons, his eyes bulged as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
He shook his head so ferociously his shoulder-length hair flew free of its tie, which plopped soundlessly to the floor.
He didn’t so much as glance at it. His hair was a deep blueberry blue, a hue that alone indicated he was fae and not human, if the crests of his ears hadn’t already given away his magical nature.
Lev slammed his pipe down on a side table before surging to his feet and flinging his arms wide, smacking into Edwidge and seeming not to care.
“By the Ethers and all the Fuerin, Baz, what the fuck is this? Why the scorch is the woman who tried to kill you free of her cell? You told us you were going to deal with her.”
All eyes in the room zeroed in on me. Standing beside me, Baz crossed his arms so that his biceps bulged and the black rope snaked between us. “I am dealing with her.”
“By fucking her?”
I didn’t know Lev any more than I knew the rest of them. But I didn’t think his voice was usually this high-pitched.
Baz scowled those plump lips of his and pinned an accusatory glare on Ramone. “Seriously, Moncho?”
Moncho was shaking his head. “Uh-unh. I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but I agree with Lev on this. I had to tell ’em.”
“You had to tell them.”
“Yeah, Baz, I scorching did. You’re not only our leader but our friend. And she”—he jabbed a thick finger into the space between us—“she’s the fucking enemy.”
He had no idea how much of an enemy I really was, or his stabby finger would be replaced by a stabby sword.
“The enemy. You remember what that is?”
“Yeah, Moncho. I remember what a fucking enemy is. Do you all remember what the scorch a general is?”
“Obviously we do,” Lev said. “But if you’re gonna try and pull the ‘I’m your superior, listen to me and shut the fuck up’ card, it ain’t gonna work this time, brother.”
“Does it ever work?” Baz said on a growl.
“Nope. Sure as fuck doesn’t. So maybe stop trying to pull that crap with us once and for all, huh?”
Baz looked from Lev to Moncho, who stood on the other side of Edwidge, then to Night and Félix, who’d sidled together as if to block the door we’d entered, as if Baz and I needed an intervention before we would be allowed to leave.
Aziza sat on the far end of the couch I occupied, deceptively casual as she leaned back into the cushions and caressed the handles of her wicked mordaris.
When she caught me looking, she ran her finger along one of the curved blades, slicing the skin.
A line of vibrant, glistening crimson welled along the cut.
As one, each and every one of us in the room, all s?nglures, including Aziza, sniffed the air.
It was a reaction so automatic that I doubted most of them noted they did it.
I, however, definitely noticed. With no notion of how much of Baz’s blood I’d consumed in my frenzied madness, I hadn’t known if it would be sufficient to satiate the monster inside so it would return to its hibernation, but the scent of Aziza’s blood, while enticing, produced nothing more noteworthy than the usual pang of interest. I had no desire to launch myself at her to devour her whole.
Baz however—even with his cuts all healed shut, and none of his blood to perfume the air—I felt myself leaning his way, if so slightly that no one else would notice.
Like the automatic sniffing when fresh blood was spilled, I couldn’t seem to stop my reaction to him.
I felt the heat radiating off him like an extension of his body, when he was too far away for the sensation to be anything but a phantom touch.
“She’s very obviously beautiful,” Edwidge began in a voice that was still feminine despite being deeper than any I’d ever heard from a woman.
I stiffened. That’s what it always came down to with everyone, wasn’t it? My beauty and my power … they were the only motives anyone but Teo, and probably Marina, ever had for valuing me.
“I can see why you’d want to make love to her.”
“We didn’t make love,” Baz protested immediately. “This has nothing to do with love.”
I snorted. Duh.
Once again, all Bazrian eyes landed on me.
“Well, whatever it is,” Ed continued, “now’s not the time for it.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Baz said. “You think this is what I wanted?”
“We don’t know what you want anymore,” Zi said.
“Your reaction to your intended assassin isn’t at all what we expected.
” She ran another finger along the edge of one of her mordaris.
When more blood beaded, she licked it clean.
“You should have had her head mounted on a pike before the day was out.”
“Yeah,” Lev said. “Instead, you mounted her. That’s the kind of shit I’m supposed to do, not you.”
“Like I said”—Baz uncrossed and crossed his arms in the opposite direction, setting the rope to swinging—“not planned. Doesn’t mean I’m not in control as usual.”