Chapter 20 #2
Still, I had thought the danger was to me. It hadn’t occurred to me that my father would find out—or care. That I would put the fae’s life in danger just to sate my endless curiosity.
Guilt stabbed at my gut. Lumen let out a low whine, barely audible, his nose bumping my knee like he could scent the spike of shame rolling through me.
Wynnie pursed her lips like she wanted to lie, but that wasn’t what we did. “It does seem unlikely,” she acknowledged.
“So what, when he isn’t losing himself in booze and boobs,” I said, rubbing a hand across my face, “you think he’s eliminating anyone who poses a threat and actually giving a single damn about the daughters he never speaks to? How would he even know?”
“Who the hells knows?” she said, throwing up a hand.
“He knew about the portal to the Wilds and that he had a secret lovechild out in the world somewhere, and he never bothered to share either of those things. He only told me about the portal when he was ass-faced wasted, and even then mostly in slurring words I only half believed. He’s a vault when he wants to be. ”
She drained half of her glass in one go.
“It doesn’t matter now.” She stabbed half-heartedly at a piece of roasted carrot, then abandoned it entirely. “It doesn’t change the fact that he abandoned us every shards-damned chance he got, or that he left you completely alone at that estate after I left.”
“So why do you think he’s here now?” I asked, swirling my pale blue wine in my glass and watching it catch the blazing firelight.
Wynnie poked listlessly at her roll. “I don’t know. I suppose we could ask him,” she said, though her tone made it painfully clear how little she wanted to do that.
“Assuming he was lucid enough, we’d still have to go see him again,” I muttered, taking a small sip of the wine that did absolutely nothing to settle the tightness in my chest.
Batty peeked over the edge of my plate, nose twitching in sympathy before she stole a crumb and curled up against my hip.
Wynnie snorted into her cup. “There is that. So… icewine and unanswered questions it is.”
She clinked her glass against mine, a soft, resigned toast to the emotional mess neither of us wanted to excavate.
In spite of the circumstances, I couldn’t help a small smile from creeping onto my lips. Even if the rest of my family was an excrement show of epic proportions, at least I had Wynnie.
And our honesty, always.
By the time Draven returned from his longer-than-necessary shower, we had polished off the bottle of wine. And also another larger one that I had coaxed out of Mirelda by finishing all my vegetables like a good little queen.
My husband surveyed us through his dark lashes. His hair was damp, curling slightly at the ends, and the scent of juniper and snow drifted behind him.
“There’s a… poetic… shustice in being drunk while our father is finally sober,” Wynnie mused, staring up at the ceiling from her position on the rug in front of the fire, the final glass of wine held in her precarious grasp.
I tried not to think about the last time we had been here like this, laughing with Soren and Nevara like the world wasn’t crumbling at our feet.
It had been easier to pretend when we were all together and whole. Now, we weren’t bothering to feign any sort of peace. Just this small escape while the world was on fire.
Draven’s lips tilted up into what might have been a smirk as he watched Wynnie try, and fail, to blow her curls out of her face long enough to take another perilous sip of her wine.
Wynnie was right. He did have the potential to be fun, post stick-removal.
Maybe when the war was over.
He let out something between a huff of offense and an almost-laugh. “I’m so relieved you think so, Morta Mea.” His tone was pure sarcasm.
I narrowed my eyes in suspicion. “Are you… reading my thoughts again?”
“No. You… shed that out loud,” Wynnie explained dryly.
Shards damn it all.
“And that,” she added helpfully.
I scowled at her, reluctantly pushing to my feet.
Frosted Hells, I was tired. Drained in the way only one’s absentee father sneak-attacking you with a rare and confusing display of decency could accomplish.
My mana flared in response, prickling under my skin, and Draven reached out to place his hand on my wrist, pulling me closer than was strictly necessary.
My breath caught in my throat, and I peered up at his flawless skin, his sharply cut jaw, his piercing blue-green eyes.
Shards. He really was beautiful.
“Gross,” Wynnie muttered, either at my expression or because I had once again spoken aloud. “Go back to your rooms.”
“Draven’s rooms,” I corrected automatically.
He raised his eyebrows, and he paused in the middle of picking up his plate from the side table. “I must imagine you sharing that bed every night then?”
“I—” I paused, crossing to the window to let Batty out, giving her a needed reprieve from babysitting my volatile powers. The colder air that rushed in carried the faint shimmer of mana. “Do you want me to share your rooms?” I finally blurted out, uncertainty tugging at my chest.
We had solved exactly nothing between us. Nevara was unconscious. Monsters were ravaging Winter. Most days, it didn’t even feel like we had a future, so it was an impossibly silly thing to wonder if he resented my intrusion on his space.
But I had, more than once.
Draven’s brow furrowed. “I would think that was obvious.”
I mentally reviewed the exactly zero times he had commented on it, creasing my brow in turn. “Well… it isn’t.”
“Yesh it is, Evy, to everyone but you,” my sister chimed in, pushing unsteadily to her feet. “Perhaps the better question is whether I should get rooms further from newlyweds. Goodnight now.”
She made a clumsy shooing motion toward the door, and I shuffled into Draven’s—our?—rooms, Lumen padding in behind us with a low chuff, tail swaying protectively.
Draven stayed at my side, still holding my wrist in his firm grasp. Was it my imagination, or was he even warmer tonight than usual? Heat radiated from his body to mine.
My gaze drifted around his chambers as we stepped inside.
Where my rooms were white stone and polished frost, his looked like a pocket of night carved into the palace.
The midnight walls were veined in silver, and deep blue silks draped from carved beams. The auroras spilled through the massive windows, shimmering ribbons that streaked the room in blues and greens that danced across his bare arms and collarbones.
“So if… if we survive all of this, you want me to… stay here? In your rooms? All the time?” I asked as I cracked open a window for Batty to return, my pulse thrumming in my throat.
“Morta Mea,” he said quietly, “if we survive all of this, I am never letting you out of my sight again.”
“What about the Court? And the… everything else,” I pressed. My voice wavered despite my best efforts.
“Nothing between us has ever been easy,” he said, stepping closer.
His mana rippled across the room then, a slow, controlled surge that washed over my skin like a tidal wave of desire.
“And I don’t expect that will change. But when I told you I would set my entire frost-forsaken Court on fire for you, I assumed you understood that meant I had every intention of seeing this through, no matter the cost.”
“Well, you know what they say about assuming…” I muttered, rather than take the compliment like a remotely normal person.
“Indeed,” he agreed sardonically, setting his plate on the table behind him. “And now?”
“I’m starting to see it.” I moved closer to him, and he trailed a hand along my side, pursing his lips when he came up against the absurdly thick fabric.
“What?” I teased. “You don’t like me in several yards of shapeless flannel?”
“I’d like you better out of it,” he said, voice low, his mana brushing against my legs again in a slow, hungry sweep.
Another wave of power slid through the room to the fireplace, igniting the flames until they roared in the hearth. So I wouldn’t need the flannel.
The heat in his words mixed with the higher-than-usual amount of wine in my bloodstream gave me the confidence I usually lacked. In a single, mostly-fluid movement, I rid myself of the nightdress, standing before him in just my thin silk underclothes.
Draven’s lips parted, his eyes blazing with every shade of light in the winter sky.
Lumen excused himself into the sitting rooms, something I couldn’t even find the grace to be embarrassed about.
“You’ve been drinking,” Draven reminded me, though his voice was deeper, roughened by something he couldn’t hide.
I stalked toward him, eyebrows raised. “Wynnie had most of it.”
That was true. I had been more tired than anything, but I sure as hells didn’t feel tired now.
“I’m not drunk,” I told him, stopping just short of his chest. “And I know what I want.”
The moment the words left my mouth, the room shifted.
He went very still, the subtle tension in his shoulders drawing tight as a bowstring.
I could feel the unspoken things between us pressing in from every direction: the fights, the distance, the mistrust, the truth I had only just learned about him wanting me near.
Wanting me here. In his space. In his life.
Something daring rose inside me, sharp as starlight.
I closed the remaining distance between us, letting my fingertips skim his sternum.
He inhaled through his nose, a slow, deliberate breath that betrayed nothing and too much all at once.
His hand lifted, hesitating for a fraction of a heartbeat before resting at my waist. The warmth of his touch through the silk sent a shiver up my spine.
I stretched up on my toes to brush my lips against his neck.
His brows drew together in that way of his, like conflict lived behind his eyes and he didn’t know whether to stop me or surrender to me. I didn’t give him the choice. I reached up and cupped his jaw, tilting his face toward mine. The breath he released was ragged.
“Everly.”
My name in his voice felt like a door unlocking.
I kissed him before he could speak again. Tentative at first, testing, then deeper when he answered with a low sound I felt rather than heard. His hand slid fully around my waist, drawing me closer until the silk of my underthings brushed the cold fabric of his own layers.
The contact lit something wild inside me.
I trailed my fingers up the back of his neck, into his hair, tugging just enough to break whatever restraint he was holding on to.
He caught my hips, holding me to him with a force that had my breath stuttering.
His mouth descended to the edge of my jaw, the warmth of it sending sparks racing down my spine.
My mana surged in response, and his reacted in kind, drawing my power into himself, steadying me the way he always did, even when he threw me off kilter. I deepened the kiss.
My wings broke free, stretching behind me like dying flowers reaching toward the sun.
Whatever restraint he had been holding shattered. His palm cupped the curve of my waist, careful of my wings, but the rest of him was anything but cautious. His lips claimed mine again, deeper, urgent, a collision of want and fear and relief.
He broke from the kiss just long enough to rest his forehead against mine, breaths uneven.
“You have no idea what you do to me,” he growled.
“Then show me,” I breathed.
For once, there was no distance between us. No walls. No guarded truths. Only the heat of his hands, the storm of his breath, and the wings that wrapped around us both like a vow.
And in that moment, the tumult between us quieted. It wasn’t healed, and it sure as hells wasn’t resolved, but at least we had a reprieve.
For now, it was enough.