Max
Frost drove west through the compound, past the Covenant Hall, a broad-fronted building that served as headquarters for the army’s daily operations.
Staff moved in and out with the clipped urgency of people who reported to four heirs and feared disappointing any of them.
Then we passed the Greycrown Library, its carved marble facade still bearing scorch marks at the base of the entrance steps where dragon fire had parted for the loyal and consumed the traitors.
I didn’t look at it long.
He drove all the way to the western edge, along the forest line, and pulled up at the curved driveway of a white-stone building half-swallowed by ancient trees.
“Elenmoor, Prince Aelindor’s residence,” Frost informed me.
I hadn’t known where he lived. Now I understood why—the forest hid Elenmoor.
You wouldn’t find this place unless someone brought you.
“The other heirs keep rooms here as well,” Frost added. “They each have their own residences elsewhere, but this is where they convene when it isn’t a war room matter.”
The door opened, and every thought in my head scattered at the sight of Aelindor strolling out.
He wore a white linen tunic with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and gray slacks that fit his powerful thighs well enough to be a problem.
Without the silver coat, stripped of rank and formal precision, he looked different—not less, but differently formidable.
In uniform, he looked like a king. Like this, he looked like a gorgeous poet who could kill you.
His silver hair fell loose past his shoulders, and his forearms were a swordsman’s—corded, built for grip and draw.
He was scholar and warrior in the same body, and the combination was unfair and deadly.
He nodded at Frost and came to me. “Walk with me.”
The Fae heir led me around the building to a training ring that backed onto the lake. The scent of pine and damp earth suffused the clearing.
“We shall train here,” he said.
Away from the compound. Fewer eyes. I understood.
His gaze moved over me and stopped at my left side. I was favoring it; the limp from Delia’s blade work was still there, and he clocked it in two seconds. I held his eyes. His said he didn’t like seeing me hurt. Mine said it couldn’t be avoided and that he’d have to get used to it.
“Are you fit to train?” he asked. Straightforward. No fussing. Then, quieter: “If the barracks situation has become untenable, I can reassign you. You don’t have to remain in the standard cadet rotation.”
Heat crept up my neck. The idea that barracks politics had reached Aelindor—who was running a kingdom, coordinating a war on three fronts, and managing whatever the court demanded of him—made something in me curl inward.
He already carried the weight of my sister’s extraction on top of everything else.
Our two-day timeline for Crimson Ridge had expired the moment we learned Missy was no longer there.
Now we were waiting on intel from the eagle shifter the heirs had sent to the Haven, and every day without word was another day my sister spent in the Collector’s hands.
“No, sir. I prefer to stay with the other cadets. Nothing I can’t handle.”
“Good.” He moved toward the ring’s edge. “But understand this: you can come to any of us, at any time, for anything. That’s resource allocation, not weakness.”
“Understood, sir.”
He led me to sit on the grass. We faced each other, our knees close enough that I could feel the warmth of him through the air between us.
“What do you know about your own power?”
“Not much,” I admitted.
“Then start from the beginning.”
“Alchemy,” I said. The familiar ground. The one subject I could speak about without guarding every word. “I was born into it, the way you’re born into a language. Coldiron is different in degree, not kind. No one taught me to temper ore at eight. I simply did it.”
“The DarkVeil?”
I shook my head. “I knew nothing about it until I faced it. I heard Coldiron calling from within, and so I entered.”
Unlike Drakken, he hadn’t scolded me for my recklessness.
“The power that subdued Cadet Slade and his gang,” he said. “What was that?”
“I don’t know.” I kept my voice level and my eyes on the tree line. “They had me cornered. Something released. A shockwave probably. It blasted out, and I haven’t been able to replicate it. I can’t access it on demand.”
No way was I going to tell him about the demon.
Not because I didn’t trust the Fae heir, but because everything was at stake.
Possessed. I was fucking possessed, and the consequences of that confession were unthinkable.
He valued me now, but who in their sane mind could trust a girl with an entity coiled inside her skull?
I said nothing and shoved the guilt past my bruised ribs.
Beneath the guilt, a practical worry churned: I was wasting his time. The shockwave came from the creature, and it had made its terms clear. Accept it fully. Unconditionally. Until then, I was a locked door Aelindor was trying to open from the wrong side.
“Two distinct channels,” he said, working through it like a tactical problem.
“Your alchemy is innate. The shockwave is something else entirely—it surfaced under extreme survival stress.” His blue gaze locked on me, reading me with the patience of a man who had interrogated centuries’ worth of liars.
I fought not to squirm. “Let me approach it differently.”
He sent his power out carefully.
Fae magic—cool and ancient, like wind off a glacier—pressed against something in the center of my chest. It pulled back. Pressed again. Testing.
It found something. And that something responded.
Heat flooded upward from my core without warning, nothing to do with exertion or the morning air. My hands curled at my sides. I was acutely aware of his proximity, of the clean male scent of him.
Something deep in my well strained toward his magic.
I locked my jaw and held the line. His magic pressed closer. The heat redoubled, my breath caught, and I looked at him.
The careful professional attention was still there, but something beneath it had cracked. His jaw was tight. His deep blue eyes had darkened, his chest rising and falling. He felt it too. Whatever my power was doing to his magic, it ran both ways.
A sound I hadn’t meant to make slipped from my lips.
Aelindor’s eyes dropped to my mouth. Then he rose, took three fast steps back, and turned away.
His hands opened and closed once, the slow, deliberate movement of a man rebuilding control from the ground up.
But I’d seen the front of his slacks before he turned.
He was hard. Visibly, unmistakably hard.
I had never seen Aelindor lose a fight against himself. The sight shook me.
He stood with his back to me and we both breathed hard.
If he came to me now, I would give him anything.
Offer him everything. I knew it with a certainty that sat in my bones, the need to feel him, to have him inside me, overriding every sensible thing I knew about myself.
The only reason I hadn’t crossed the distance was that he’d moved first, removing himself from my reach.
Aelindor walked to the edge of the clearing and through the tree line, and then he was gone.
I sat frozen in the empty ring. Shame arrived like a hailstorm.
Shit. I’d practically seduced the highest-ranking officer during a training session when all he’d done was try to help me sort out my power. How could he ever trust me again?
I was still sitting in the wreckage of that thought when Aelindor returned.
He was carrying two glasses of water, ice filling them halfway.
I wouldn’t have complained if he poured one over my head. I deserved it.
He held a glass out. I took it and drained half in one pull. The cold spread through my chest and settled.
“I’m so sorry, sir.” My face was still warm with shame.
“I don’t know what happened. I behaved poorly, but I wasn’t trying to.
It might be the pollen, sir. The trees are blooming and…
” I stopped. That was a terrible excuse, and extending it was only making it worse.
“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. ”
You know exactly what happened, little liar, the demon chose that moment to comment.
You pictured him getting you on all fours and pounding into your swollen, aching cunt from behind.
You saw it play out in his eyes too. If he hadn’t left, he’d have taken you and not taken no for an answer. And the first thrust alone—
Anger rose on top of the embarrassment. I shoved the demon down hard. The tail of its laughter stung on the way out.
“Max.” He raised a finger. “You never need to apologize. I lost control. The fault is mine.”
“But sir—”
He stepped closer and lifted his knuckles to my cheek, one brief brush of contact, then stepped back. The tenderness of it, after such rigid control, after his absence, hit me harder than the magic had.
“It happened, and it will happen again,” Aelindor said, his eyes warmer than before.
He wasn’t pretending the last few minutes hadn’t occurred.
“I pressed into unknown territory without adequate reconnaissance. What I found—I think I understand something I didn’t before.
Your magic can’t be trained the way I’d planned. It has to be fulfilled.”
The word landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water.
Fulfilled. The demon’s word. Accept it fully, let it in completely—power in exchange for possession. I’d heard the terms. I wasn’t fucking paying them.
“Does this mean you won’t train me again? No more sessions?” I fought to keep my expression level, but something tightened behind my ribs at the thought of being left behind.
“We’ll continue,” he said, amusement flickering through his deep blue eyes. “I can still help you map the terrain: meditate, look inward.”
That was the last thing I wanted to do. When I looked inward, the demon looked back.
Wind moved through the canopy, carrying pine and damp earth and early blossom from somewhere deeper in the tree line. Birds. The distant sounds of the compound, reduced by distance to almost nothing.
“I need to tell you something,” I said.
It had pressed against my chest for weeks—this weight of the deception toward him. I needed to tell him about my blood arrangement with Nikolai.
Silk on the path. The sound of it before the sight.
A stunning Fae woman glided through the tree line, moving with the particular grace of her kind. An elaborate gown of deep green and gold. Silver hair dressed high and threaded with blue diamonds.
She looked at Aelindor with warmth on the surface and desire underneath. Her glance moved to me once, then away, as though I’d already left the clearing.