Max
When I opened the three boxes the messenger had left, I was lost for words.
I lifted each gown out and turned it in the light, and I loved all three.
“Which one are you going to pick?” Bryn asked. She’d been assigned as my escort for the night. No gown for her. She’d wear her first-year uniform, and she didn’t blink at it.
I had no idea which heir had sent which.
They’d all arrived at once, no cards, every one of them quietly seeing to me.
I only knew Drakken had sent nothing. Which was fine.
Entirely fine. And if some small, stupidly girlish corner of me felt a pinch over it, I shut that corner and didn’t look at it too closely.
I hoped whichever I chose, the others wouldn’t take offense. But when I slid into the one that drew my hand—the deceptively plain one—and fastened the necklace that came with it at my throat, I didn’t feel like a fraud dressed up in borrowed finery.
I felt like I belonged in it. Which made no sense at all, coming from where I came from.
Where you came from is higher than anywhere these people have ever stood, the demon said.
If I hadn’t known better, I’d have called the tone proud. As though I’d come a long, long way.
Hadn’t I?
Bryn tried her hand at my hair and makeup and gave it up halfway through. My hair fell to my shoulders on its own, the white streak running bright through the dark, and there wasn’t much paint could add to a face like mine—it drew the eye whether I wanted it to or not.
“What about war paint?” I asked, half serious—four blue stripes down each cheek, the way I’d worn them in the mine.
Bryn gave me a flat look. “Absolutely not. It’s a diplomatic ball, Max. Turn up painted for war and the heirs would have my head, and they’d be right to. Wrong message entirely.”
Fair enough.
Frost came to collect us and drive us to the Officers Club.
“I’ve always wanted to see the inside of the club,” Bryn said, practically vibrating.
“Now you will,” Frost said. “Remember the part you’re playing, cadet. You walk Max in. The moment she moves toward the center of the floor, you peel off and disappear along the wall.”
“Yes, Major,” Bryn said.
With Major Frost at our side, we slid through the security check at the door without a second glance. Light jazz drifted down the broad stairwell to meet us before we’d even begun to climb.
The place had been dressed up for the occasion.
My heart slammed against my ribs as I stood outside the double doors of the ballroom, knowing I’d be face to face with my enemy in minutes.
“Steady, cadet,” Frost said. “You’ve been trained for this.”
I nodded, unclenched my clammy fingers, and walked through the doors.
The ballroom was half full and humming. Officers in dress uniform moved across the floor, house colors sharp under the Stormglass chandeliers, amber liquor in hand.
Among them drifted the visitors—the Haven’s people, smooth and watchful in fine southern cloth, and New Columbia’s envoy in funeral black, not one of whom seemed to know how to let their face rest. A jazz quartet played something pre-Rupture in the corner.
Beneath the polish and the music, the room thrummed with the particular tension of enemies being very, very civil to one another.
And then, as though I were a lodestone, every head in the room swung toward me at once and fixed there.
I blamed it on my height and the heels.
Your power leaked out of you on all that high feeling, and every predator in the room felt it, the demon analyzed. Seize the opportunity.
What opportunity? My mind went briefly, uselessly blank under the weight of the whole room’s stare before my purpose snapped back into place.
I had a job: draw Xander’s eye, let him get a long, clear look at me, then vanish.
As I searched the room for Xander, my gaze found the heirs first, every one of them.
Each was in the dress uniform of his house, and they were a sight.
Aelindor in Virgo silver, the winged maiden worked in gold over his heart, ethereal and somehow the stillest point in the room.
Nikolai in Sagittarius oxblood, gold stripes at his cuff, looking ready to eat lesser things for sport.
Caspian in storm-blue Aries, combat-cut and broad as a doorway, ringed by delegates—the women in particular—tossing off jokes, working the room, his eyes never once leaving me.
And Drakken in Leo charcoal. Hard and dark and watchful as a blade left out in the cold.
He started toward me. Just one step, as if his body had moved before he’d cleared it with himself. Then Delia slid into his path in the server’s shirt and skirt that marked her as one of the six chosen for the honor. She set her fingers on his arm and curled them there, anchoring herself to him.
I wondered, not kindly, whether Drakken had been the one to choose her for the honor.
I swallowed the sour taste at the back of my throat and dragged my gaze off them both.
It slid instead to Aelindor and Nikolai—the two men who had already had their hands and their mouths on me.
One had knelt and used his tongue on me until I came apart; the other had taken my virginity last night and left the memory of it written through every inch of my body.
The two recollections crashed together without my leave—Nikolai’s mouth working me open, then Aelindor’s cock moving in me, slow and then fast, hard, and brutal.
Heat flooded low and sudden. It wasn’t only the sex, the pleasure. It was the bond, the new bright thread that ran from Aelindor straight into my chest and pulled, and the dizzying, impossible fact that I belonged to this now, to them, and wanted it with everything I was.
My face went hot, the flesh between my thighs still sore from hours of fucking. I forbade myself to go there again and fought to keep the heat out of my eyes.
What in every hell was I doing—going molten over lovers while my one job tonight was to dangle myself in front of my enemy? What kind of soldier ran this hot on her way into the field?
Get a grip, I told myself. Now.
I drew in a slow breath and pushed all of it down—the heat, the memories, the insistent tug—folded it small and shut it behind the part of me that had survived everything by going cold when it counted. The woman could want them later. The soldier had a mark to bait.
Aelindor and Nikolai stood with two men whose backs were to me. One of them was Xander; I’d have wagered my chakrams on it. Aelindor always kept his enemies close enough to watch them breathe.
Both heirs were already looking at me from across the room. They’d felt me before I ever stepped through the door—the bond ran strongest with Aelindor now, since we’d mated, a line drawn taut between us that no crowd could muffle.
The two men with them turned their heads at the same moment.
One studied me with open curiosity and distrust, and I placed him from a briefing photograph—the President of New Columbia.
It was the other man who turned my blood to ice.
Xander. The Collector.
The heirs had shown me pictures. In the flesh he was more striking, almost brassy with it, and far younger than any thousand-year-old evil had a right to look. The moment his eyes found me, his power rolled out, whipping the air.
Then I felt Aelindor’s magic rise to meet it. Drawing a line: no outsider threw his weight around in the Fae heir’s house.
A breath later, Xander folded his power back down. Subtle, but not quite subtle enough. I’d caught the exchange without the aid of the demon, and that told me something about myself. My power had grown. Quietly, without my permission, it had been growing for a while.
Xander’s amber eyes locked on me, tiger-bright and hungry, and I fought down a shiver. Had the bastard already filed me away in that collection of his, somewhere between a warded relic and a caged song? He’d never have me. Not breathing. Not as a corpse.
I held his stare and didn’t flinch. He’d seen me. That was the whole point.
Ten seconds, and I’d slip out of the ballroom to meet the rest of the Nightingale team, and we’d ride for the Haven under cover of the dark. Caspian and Nikolai would peel away after me; Drakken would slide in to cover the gaps and keep the room from noticing who’d gone missing. That was the plan.
Ten. Nine. Eight.
Three. Two—
“Max! Max!”
A voice I knew in my bones. A voice that still haunted my dreams at night, hand in hand with Rogue’s—and Rogue was dead, devoured. The sound of it drove the air out of my lungs, and for one endless second, I couldn’t drag any back in.
Desta.