Drakken
Aball had been arranged in honor of the Haven and New Columbia, a courteous way of saying we’d all dressed up to smile at people we’d sooner gut.
Xander and his envoy of twelve had arrived an hour ahead of the New Columbians.
Aelindor, Caspian, and Nikolai met them at the gate with the full warmth of a state welcome.
I waited inside, in the Officers Club beside Greymantle, the war hall that squatted closest to the south gate, and let the others play host. Drinks, refreshments, the first careful round of pleasantries, and then the formal sitting once the New Columbian delegation arrived to round out the table.
Xander looked no older than I did, and—irritatingly—he was handsome.
Shouldn’t evil have the fucking decency to look the part?
Our intel said he was millennia old, but no one had pinned down his bloodline.
Ethnically, he read as a mix of European and Persian.
All we had was that he was an immortal warlock, and the old stories said a warlock was what you got when a demon bred with a witch.
He stood at Caspian’s height, lanky and graceful, and moved through the room as though he already held the deed to it.
Amber eyes—bright, cruel, amused, and missing nothing.
A neat goatee I suspected he kept as a signature, the sort of small vanity a man indulges when he’s had centuries to polish his own legend.
He dressed comfortably but elegantly: a crisp white shirt open at the collar, dark slacks, an officer’s coat cut with more style than anything in our regulation closet.
Set him beside Nikolai and Caspian both and he’d out-charm the pair of them without trying.
Neither of them would ever concede it. I had no intention of saying it aloud either.
The President of New Columbia came in his wake—a man named Whitmore, somewhere in his forties, elected to his seat the old way.
They still ran the bones of the Federal government up north, still swore by the constitution of a country eighty years dead.
He wore a black suit, the kind people wore before the Rupture, and he’d brought an envoy of twelve men and women, not one of whom had ever been taught to smile.
We’d agreed the real talks would wait until after the ball: the mutant experiments, the White Witch’s breeding pits, the shape of an alliance between three kingdoms. All of it a polite fiction, and every soul in the room knew it.
Our goals didn’t line up and never would.
Xander wanted more land for his collection.
New Columbia wanted a world where humans ruled and the rest of us learned our place.
We wanted the White Witch dead. Three sets of knives under one table.
With any luck, the talks would drag on for three days. Three days was what Operation Nightingale needed—long enough to slip in and slip out.
Max Morning would leave tonight. Without me.
Worry and bitterness warred in my chest. She’d made a mistake cutting me from the team, letting an old grudge skew her judgment. A childish mistake.
And whose fault is the grudge? My dragon snorted down the length of my spine. Stop terrorizing her.
You’re overstating it, I shot back. I’m no terrorist.
Antagonizing her, then, he said. What sane man draws a blade on a woman curled up with a romance novel? You had her flushed and soft and halfway to charmed, and you pulled steel on her. You should have kissed her.
Kiss her? Never.
I am formally distancing myself from you, you crazy son of a bitch, the dragon announced.
She knows the difference between us, you realize.
She held my face in both her hands. Stroked my snout.
She will never once do that for you, and I won’t have you wrecking the good thing growing between her and me.
Wonderful. Just wonderful. He’d conveniently forgotten the months he’d wanted her gone as badly as I had and remembered only his recent career as her devoted lapdog.
In that, beast and man are no different: we keep the memories that flatter us and burn the rest. And now my own dragon had talked himself into believing there was a thing between him and Max at all.
Stormglass chandeliers spilled cool light across the floor.
The wall tables carried iced wine and dark liquor and small, precise food no soldier had ever cooked.
A quartet played something old and stringed and pre-Rupture, the kind of music that sent every immortal in the room quiet and far-eyed for a moment.
Officers only. No cadets on the floor, save the handful we’d dressed as servers.
Twenty minutes in, every head in the room turned toward the entrance at once, as if a single string had been drawn taut through all of them.
There she was. Max Fucking Morning, in a gown.
My gaze locked onto her and refused every other thing in the room, which was a problem, because I was running security.
My detail—Spartans, most of them—had already melted into the shadows and the crowd, walking the perimeter.
I should have been watching the doors and the dignitaries. I watched her instead.
It was all staged: the timing, the entrance, the gown.
We needed Xander to see her, and see her first—a striking woman gracing a ball on no one’s arm—so the last thought in his ancient, evil skull tonight would be any suspicion that this same woman meant to walk into the heart of his kingdom before dawn and rob him of his prize.
He knew her face. His spies would have handed him a current profile.
She looked nothing like the half-dead boy from the mines now, but he’d know her. That was the whole point.
I’d caught myself wondering what she’d wear.
At the brief, she’d looked nearly cornered by the question. “I don’t own anything like a ball gown,” she’d said. “Could I just wear my uniform? You’ve already picked six cadets to serve. Make me the seventh. I’ll carry trays. I’m good at not being seen.”
“The entire point is for you to be seen, Max,” Nikolai had said. “To stand out. You will not be carrying trays. We’ll find you a gown.”
She’d bitten her lip. “That’s the trouble, though.
” She’d gestured down the long lines of herself, her height, the breadth a decade of swinging a pick had built into her.
“I’m not exactly standard issue. You could buy out every shop in the compound tonight and still not turn up one gown that’d fit me right.
And then I’m the giant in a dress that pinches, and everyone’s looking, which—that’s the opposite of what you want, isn’t it? ”
When she got nervous, she babbled, words tumbling out, hands moving. It was—
Cute?
Shit. Did I think cute? That was the dragon. That had to be the fucking dragon. He was a fool when it came to her.
She’d badly underestimated what three besotted immortal princes could arrange when given a week to do it. Three gowns reached her at once, carried by the same messenger, and not one of them came with a card. The heirs were a great many things; subtle was not always among them.
Nikolai’s was a deep blood red, cut bold and low and built to be remembered, the silk falling in one long clean line broken by a slit to the thigh. The bloodsucker had never met a room he didn’t mean to own the instant he entered it, and he’d dressed Max to do the same.
Caspian’s had been built for one purpose: to put every curve she owned on open display. Deep storm-blue, his house color, fitted like it had been poured over her, every long, muscled line of her on show. Tasteful, just barely.
Aelindor’s was the clever one. At a glance it read as simple—an elegant fall of fabric, nothing shouting.
But woven through it, swirling and folding over each other like currents in dark water, ran five colors: the silver of Virgo, the oxblood of Sagittarius, the storm-blue of Aries, the charcoal-and-gold of Leo—the four houses—and threaded in among them, a fifth that belonged to no house at all.
Midnight blue, shot through with a single streak of white.
Her color. The exact color of her hair. Subtle and deafening at once, and only someone who knew the houses would ever hear it.
And then there was the gown I’d had made for her—my best tailor, weeks of work, a thing that shifted and rippled like blue dragon fire when it moved. I’d had it finished, and I’d kept it. Never sent it. My dragon had raged at me over the missing messenger.
And here she stood. I wasn’t remotely surprised she’d chosen Aelindor’s, as though some instinct in her had read every thread of it, the four Zodiac Houses and hers stitched in beside them, like she’d always belonged in the weave.
She was stunning. Harshly beautiful.
The gown flowed like moonlight when she moved, the hidden colors catching and turning under the Stormglass light, and the whole room had simply stopped breathing just to look.
Her midnight hair, the white streak in it bright as struck silver, fell loose to her shoulders.
She held her chin level and her spine straight and dared the room to find her wanting.
Not one of them could. And on a pair of high heels, she stood taller than any other soul on the continent.
I took a slow pull of my martini and set my face to warn the whole room off disturbing me while I drank her in.
Caspian appeared at my shoulder anyway.
“Gorgeous, isn’t she. My girl.” Pure satisfaction rippled off him.
“And she wore the boots I sent. I’m calling that a clean win.
Look—I’m no dress man, nobody beats Aelindor there, fine, I’ll say it once and never again.
But shoes? Shoes I know. A tall, regal, one-of-a-kind woman like Max needs something she can stand in all night that still looks like a weapon and goes with anything.
And I’ll tell you what warms my heart, Drakken—tonight my girl gets to look down her nose at the whole room, not just at me, for a change.
” He grinned. “It sucks to be Nikolai. Scored a flat zero. She didn’t even wear the belt he sent with his gown. Oh, and the sapphire’s Aelindor’s too.”
That big midnight stone at her throat, ringed in diamonds. Of course it was.
“She isn’t your girl,” I half-snarled. I only wanted him to stop talking; he’d already wrecked what little peace I’d carved out. There was no angle in the room from which I could watch Max without some fool wandering into my line of sight.
“Jealous?” The shifter’s smirk widened. “Careful, Drakken. You’re drooling.”
If he weren’t the finest fighting partner my dragon had ever carried, I’d have put his teeth on the floor.
“Grow the fuck up and shut your mouth, Caspian.”
He shut it. Not because I’d told him to; because we’d both caught the way Xander was looking at her.
He’d been holding the center of the floor, wine in hand, charming Aelindor and President Whitmore with some story, laughing in the right places like a man who’d had a thousand years to practice laughing.
Now he was staring at Max, who stood at the entrance like a star torn from the sky and dropped into our ballroom, singular and impossible to look away from.
He looked at her possessively, as if she were simply a rare thing he hadn’t finished acquiring yet.
White-hot rage tore through my veins.
I didn’t care what stood unsettled between Max and me. I didn’t care that she’d cut me from her team, that she flinched from my shadow. Xander would not lay a fucking finger on her. He would not fold her into that collection of his, one more rare, breathing thing behind warded glass.
Not over my dead body. Not even then.
And then the fear hit.
What if she didn’t come back? What if the Haven swallowed her—if a trap closed, if the plan came apart in some way none of us had foreseen, if tonight was the last time I ever—
I couldn’t breathe.
I knew this feeling. I’d met it once before, a very long time ago, on my knees in a different hall, watching a blade come down on my mother’s neck and then my father’s, knowing mine was the next throat in the line.
I had not felt it since. I had built my entire life so that I would never have to feel it again.
And a slip of a cadet who couldn’t stand the sight of me had just dragged it up out of the grave with nothing but the threat of her own absence.
Caspian let out a low growl beside me, and my dragon answered it in my chest.
“I need to go take care of something,” the wolf said, his green eyes lit with fire.
“You do that, wolf.”
My voice came out cold and flat. I pushed off the pillar I’d been leaning against and moved after him, ready at his back.