1. All of these infuriating men
ALL OF THESE INFURIATING MEN
ENORA
Why were the words ‘get up, get dressed, and see yourself out’ impossible to parse for the men in my life?
A lack of critical blood flow, maybe, or just flippant arrogance mixed with the bruised egos and childhood trauma that had them always disregarding my explicit instructions. Regardless of what the answer really was, it was not the day for me to unpack any of that.
After all, my days of unrestricted fun had officially met their most finite end.
My days of sticking to my staunch, commitment-free principles.
Nights that ran into mornings, filled with anyone I pleased.
They were officially over.
I was positive I’d told Theo to leave after the midnight bell tolled, but the muscular limbs draped over my body and the muted rumble of a snore ghosting my ear said otherwise. Now, I usually wouldn’t mind being pinned facedown into the plushness of my bed, but I had shit to do.
I gave a half-hearted shift beneath him, but to no avail.
Theo was built as damned heavy as the thousand-year-old oak trees lining the outer bailey and as clingy as their wisps of sticky pollen in the gusty spring air.
He also exuded the same heat as a damned hearth, even though the one warming my room had long since snuffed out.
The cool air that greeted my fingers as I wiggled them out of my rumpled coverlet made me recoil.
The warmth of his body drew me back in before I yielded to a full-bodied sigh driven more by disappointment than satisfaction.
This was exactly why I’d asked him to leave.
Some distant relative of feelings was floating to the forefront of my mind, like fish with razor-sharp teeth ready to breach the placid surface, and I refused to give it a lick of air. If I gave them breath now, they’d never go back under.
Not on the day I was forced to leave everything I knew behind.
As if his slumbering form knew the silent battle I was waging, strong fingers curled around my side, squeezing softly.
Goddess above, I’d miss this.
And not just Theo—though I sought his company more often than I cared to admit—but what his sporadic presence represented at its most base form: my autonomy.
My freedom to come and go.
To dress for comfort—not expectations.
To volunteer for any cavalry assignment I wanted.
To have my bed warmed at my discretion.
Some of that liberty had fallen away in recent months already, in the special guard detail monitoring my every action, reporting my unfavorable activities to my newly crowned half-brother.
In the stationed bodies outside my door and my windows, posted outside of every one of my haunts. Just in case I bolted. Again.
Spending the last thirty-one years of my life as the beloved bastard child—and only daughter—of a benevolent king had accorded me comforts I’d taken for granted, comforts most women of the lower court were rarely granted, let alone one of my unusual position.
Still, I spent too many years ignorant of the true value of the freedom constructed for me with care, far more precious than any gem or metal mined from the deepest veins of the sprawling mountains we called home.
Freedom I only had for another day.
“Theo,” I finally groaned, my voice hoarse with sleep and the sixth pitcher of wine we’d shared.
A muffled grunt responded.
He slept like a fucking log too.
“Theo,” I ground out again, working my hand beneath him to pinch the taught planes of his stomach with all the force I could muster.
Faster than an unconscious man should have, my paramour peeled away from me like lightning into the clouds and fired one hell of a sleepy scowl my way.
“What the fuck, Nor?” came his rasp as his russet eyes filled with betrayal.
A quiet chuckle slipped out of me, and I curled up on my side, reaching over to brush an errant ebony lock from his face. “Morning to you too, Theo.”
Everything about him softened, and he settled onto his side with a lazy smile. “Morning, princess.”
“I see you didn’t get dressed or leave.”
“Well, seeing as you gave those instructions while you used me as a pillow and then fell asleep on me…” Theo cocked a dark brow; there were likely a thousand other reasons why that he wanted to add to the list. “No, Nora, I did neither of those things. Hell, I didn’t even hear the tolling of the first bell. I was so fucking spent.”
The smirk that crawled across my lips was one I had little control over.
“You’re welcome.” I rolled onto my back and stretched away the remaining dredges of my sleepiness with a petulant grumble.
Theo’s hand brushed my stomach, no doubt ready to haul me back for an encore of our last performance, but I was an object in unstoppable motion. Pushing upright, I swung my legs over the bed and pulled my burgundy and cream robe from where it lived draped over the edge of my headboard.
“Nora…” came Theo’s whine of protest.
“No time for dallying this morning.” I swept the cool silk across my shoulders and tugged it over my arms before I tiptoed across the frigid stone floors to draw back a few curtains.
“Joyce is coming to help me pack, because, apparently, I’ve put it off too long, and she’ll have another one of those combustion episodes if she finds you naked in my bed again. ”
Theo chuckled, and then he sighed, and I heard the soft thud of him slumping back onto the mattress. “I think I’m still in disbelief. Never thought you’d be shipped off to get married.”
I stiffened, and it wasn’t because my robe was wide open and I’d just made eye contact with a gardener a dozen paces outside my window. Being shipped off to get married wasn’t something I thought I’d ever deal with either.
“We’re not going there, Theo,” I said through a clenched jaw.
We had an agreement, just like I had with anyone I considered a friend who hadn’t up and abandoned me these last few months. An agreement to not, under any circumstances, discuss my unfathomably fucked-up life events.
The worst part was, for most of my adult years, my father had joked about marrying me off for a trade deal whenever I’d do something that tested his endless reserves of patience for me—though he was quick to remind us both that it would be more of a punishment for the provincial lords than anyone else.
But it was always a joke, nothing more.
He knew the unease that kind of attachment brought me after a lifetime of being abandoned at every turn, and he vowed never to force my hand so long as he drew breath.
But six months ago, my life underwent upheaval.
The King of Odessa died.
My structure and stability.
My father.
Gone.
Wiped from the face of our corporeal realm by something as sublunary as an illness of his heart. It was brutal in its swiftness, and I still struggled to rationalize how I’d had breakfast with him that morning, only to be minutes late to his deathbed that evening.
Nothing had been the same since.
It only took my younger half-brother a few months to undo every promise my father had ever made to me and a sizeable portion of the ones he’d made to our people. The boy tyrant, many called him, and I wholeheartedly agreed.
I glanced back just as Theo rose from bed and yielded to a full-bodied stretch, every nude, bronzed inch of his sculpture-like physique on display. Regrettably, I forced my attention away and tied my silk robe as if it caused my plight.
“Can’t ignore it anymore, sweets. I mean, Queen Enora…” Theo’s tone took on mocking grandeur from behind me as he sorted through his discarded clothing. “It’s got a bit of a ring to it.”
“Queen?” I scoffed and grabbed a brush from my dressing table. “I’ll be lucky if I’m a consort. Probably part of a fucking gaggle of miserable women, all relegated to fawning and child-rearing with anyone else who makes the old bastard’s cock twitch.”
A beat of anger bubbled up in me at that thought, and I took it out directly on the knotted ends of my hair.
I was positive I’d worn it in a braid last night, but the mess in my hands was nothing of the sort.
My father always said my hair was like corn-silk in its color and texture, just like my mother, but I’d beg to argue it was more like a burlap sack forgotten out on the plains.
“Oh, come on, Nor,” Theo said with a pitying chuckle.
He came up behind me, shirt unbuttoned and trousers barely tied, and fought the brush from my grip. We traded barbed looks in the mirror, but I relented. He swept my hair back, letting it roll down to my waist, and worked at the ends with gentleness that belied his stature.
“One…” Theo finally said. “Those dark fae bastards don’t know what’s about to hit them. Their king’s old cock won’t be the only one twitching in your presence, if you know what I mean.”
The corners of my mouth curled into an involuntary smile. “You can’t say that and speak so plainly.”
His rich russet eyes flickered up in the mirror, framed by dark brows, and he had the audacity to scoff at me before he returned to brushing my hair. “Says who?”
“Me. The pantheon. Whichever decrepit scholar decided on our laws of grammar. My first tutor, I bet. She was a real—”
“Two,” Theo boomed overtop of me.
I rolled my eyes. “Two…”
He hesitated—shocking, for someone who had little verbal filter.
“Things aren’t great here, Nor. Not anymore.” The sudden graveness in Theo’s voice pulled an unwelcome band of tension through my spine. “He clipped your wings. We can all see it. But maybe this’ll get a little wind under them again, even if it’s over a different landscape.”
He.
My half-brother, Calder—our newly crowned king.
I’d never known a more innocuous word to rob a room of all its light and air.
Never mind that Theo and I did not have conversations of this sort ever. We got along so well because we sorted through our woes in one of two (sometimes one then two) ways—fight or fuck. This was neither of those, only confirmed by the way my jaw ached from being clenched.
It took a long time to muster up anything in response.