FoolSilver (Blood and Bond #2)

1. Drakken

Drakken

“Iheard a rumor,” Caspian said, his voice slicing through the dark tent.

The wolf prince always radiated restless energy, which was especially annoying tonight.

Aelindor lay on his bedroll in the far corner, his silver hair spilling across the canvas like a sheet of starlight, his chest rising and falling in the rhythm of quiet sleep.

The Fae could sleep through a siege. I envied the man.

We’d all had a punishingly long day. Greyhold, the outpost, was a graveyard of morale—twenty-one dead, demon tracks still smoking in the dirt.

But Aelindor had centuries of practice at locking the world out when he closed his eyes.

Caspian and I had no such discipline and hadn’t learned that particular skill.

We’d camped three blocks from the DarkVeil, close enough that its shadow bled into the edges of our firelight.

Even inside the tent, without staring at the massive wall of darkness that stretched from ground to sky, I could feel its malevolent pull, a pressure against my skull, a low hum in my teeth.

The air tasted of sulfur, old iron, and something underneath both, this close.

I trusted the Spartans on watch. If anything crawled out of that Veil tonight, they’d handle it. The high-caste demons were harder to kill than mutants and cannibals, but they could bleed and die as well, as we’d proved.

But the demons weren’t what kept me awake.

Nor were Aelindor and Caspian. I’d shared tents with the other heirs on dozens of missions, and not even Caspian’s chainsaw snoring or Nikolai hissing in his sleep (probably dreaming of draining his victims dry) could wake me.

But tonight, the arrangement was unbearable, because Max Morning was on the other side of a sheet of canvas, and my body fucking knew it.

Her presence was like a persistent hum in the back of my awareness, like coals that refused to go out.

Aelindor had placed her tent in the center of the Spartan ring, every precaution, every courtesy signaling that the girl mattered more than anyone else.

I lay rigid on my bedroll, jaw locked, as I willed myself to think about supply lines. Troop rotations. Anything tactical. Anything cold.

Instead, my mind served up the Sorting.

My dragon’s fire had wrapped around her, caressing her, before peeling her uniform away and burning the binding from her chest. It’d dressed her with three patches of flame that covered her most private areas.

And her scent, sweet, intoxicating, more potent than anything I’d ever smelled on any woman, had nearly undone me.

My dragon had caught it first and shoved it into my awareness.

I’d gone hard in front of my entire army.

The shock had been the only thing that saved me from humiliation, as everyone was too stunned to look at anything but her.

Just the slice of memory made my cock painfully hard, even now.

I clamped down on the image of a nude Max, trying to replace it with Delia’s—how she arched her back when climbing into my bed. My cock went limp so fast it was fucking insulting.

I’d achieved the goal of shooting it down, and it only made me want to punch something.

Before Max had arrived at the fortress, Delia had been enough. Now my body treated the memory of her and the handful of the females I’d fucked over the years like cold water. Max fucking Morning had rewired something in me, and no amount of fury or denial was going to undo her work.

The erotic picture of Max wearing my dragon fire like a bikini while she stared down at the assembly slid back in, and my hard-on returned with a vengeance.

I ground my teeth until my jaw ached.

“You hear me, Drakken?” Caspian pressed. “I know you’re awake.”

“What fucking rumor?” I asked, my voice hostile. I shouldn’t have engaged. I knew better. Talking to Caspian at night was like opening a gate you couldn’t close, and the flood of nonsense would keep coming.

“It’s not exactly a rumor, since it’s a fact.

” He was grinning. I couldn’t see his face in the dark, but I heard it.

“Max told everyone in her magic class that I was a ten. How do I know? I was heading over to say goodbye to her when I heard her say, ‘Prince Caspian is a ten. Anyone disagree?’—her exact words. No one disagreed, of course.” He let out a satisfied chuckle. “That girl has excellent taste.”

“Yeah, right,” I said sarcastically. “That cadet might be a pain in the ass, but I doubt that she’s shallow enough to say things like that.”

“Ask Aelindor.” Caspian jerked his chin toward the far corner. “He got there a few seconds after me. Went inside instead of me and brought Max out to join us, which was really cool of him.”

Even if Aelindor had been awake, he wouldn’t have joined in.

He never waded into the verbal brawls between Caspian, Nikolai, and me.

He’d let out a measured sigh, maybe lift one eyebrow, and leave us to sort ourselves out like bickering kids.

But then, Aelindor was older than the three of us put together and probably older than most things still breathing on this broken continent. He’d earned the right to be above it.

“Do you even know what a ten means, Drakken?” Caspian continued, unable to keep the taunting out of his voice.

I regretted taking the bait. Every time I engaged with the wolf at night, I ended up grinding my molars and fantasizing about dropping him from cruising altitude.

“It means shut the fuck up,” I growled. “You got stupid horny, but the rest of us still need sleep.”

“Grumpy, grumpy.” He tsked, and I wanted to smash that smug grin from his fucking face. “Bet Max would never call you a ten. You’d be lucky to crack a three.”

“Like I give a fuck.”

“Now you sound like a bitter old man.” He chuckled. “You should probably get laid more often.”

“I get laid plenty.”

“That’s not what I hear.” His voice dipped into something knowing. “Word is you’ve been driving women out of your bed.”

I wanted to roll off my bedroll, cross the tent, and shatter his jaw. The urge was so vivid, I could almost sense the impact in my knuckles.

He wasn’t wrong.

Even before the Sorting had revealed her true gender, Max Morning had wrecked me. Every woman I’d tried to take to bed since the day she arrived, every attempt to pretend my body still answered to anyone else, had ended in epic failure.

Delia had noticed, and I’d told her it was exhaustion from the outpost deployments. She’d believed me, or pretended to. Either way, I’d stopped calling on her.

I wouldn’t admit my dilemma to anyone, not even to Caspian. He’d stopped bedding his rotating lineup of women the moment he’d carried Max in from the Scorched Wastes.

“Fuck off, wolf,” I grated. Then, before I could stop myself, “And I’m not the one who let a woman get between us.”

The words detonated in the tent.

That was the real wound. Not the sexual frustration, the sleeplessness, or the DarkVeil vibrating menace mere blocks away.

It was the betrayal that cut deep.

All three of them—Aelindor, Nikolai, Caspian—had known Max was a woman from the moment they pulled her out of the wasteland.

They’d looked at me across briefing tables and war room maps, knowing what I didn’t, and said nothing.

They’d watched me interrogate her for three days, bark at her on the track, design an entire Sorting around testing the loyalty of a cadet I believed was male—and they’d held their tongues the entire time.

My brothers. The only family I had left in this world.

They’d indulged her deception. And I’d been the fool standing in front of the entire assembly while my dragon fire stripped her bare, and the shock on my face had told everyone what my brothers already knew—that the General of the Zodiac Covenant was the last heir to figure it out.

If the fire hadn’t exposed her, my brothers would still be laughing behind my back.

The hurt was old now, weeks old, but it hadn’t faded.

It had calcified, sitting in my chest like a stone I couldn’t cough up, pressing against my ribs every time I looked at one of them and remembered that they’d all chosen her over me.

Over the brotherhood we’d forged in blood and war and the ashes of our murdered families. Over the only bond I had left.

Max isn’t just any woman, Drakken. My dragon stirred, his voice a rumble at the base of my skull. We’ve felt the same pull toward her, and we don’t like it.

“That’s not fair, Drakken, and you fucking know it,” Caspian said, his smugness gone.

His voice carried a sharp edge. “We don’t let anyone come between us.

We made a call, all right. The three of us looked at a half-dead girl in the desert who’d clawed her way out of a slave mine, and we decided that if you found out what she was before you understood, you’d have her throat cut within the hour. ”

“I would not have—”

“Yes, you would have.” Caspian sat up. I could see the outline of his broad shoulders in the faint campfire glow that bled through the canvas.

“You smelled the White Witch’s bloodline on her, and you wanted her dead on the spot.

If you’d also known she was a woman who’d been lying about it, a woman hiding behind a disguise in your academy, under your command, you would have called it treason and skipped the tribunal. Don’t fucking pretend otherwise.”

My jaw flexed. Smoke curled from my nostrils.

“You couldn’t fucking know what I would have done!” I yelled at him.

“We know exactly what you’d have done.” Aelindor’s voice cut through our argument.

I turned my head. He hadn’t moved from his bedroll, but his eyes were open now, deep blue like frozen water.

That was Aelindor—even in sleep, he was never truly off guard.

“We rescued a slave girl running from the worst of the Pallid Court’s mining operation,” Aelindor continued.

“She was starved and dehydrated past the point where most humans die. She had nothing except the rags on her back and a dagger that burned Caspian’s hand black.

And now we know it was a Coldiron blade. ”