14. Leo
LEO
She said my name in her sleep last night! I haven’t stopped hearing it since.
I could scent the arousal coming off her in the dark, and that’s the part that won’t leave me alone.
I’ve spent the whole day in meetings I don’t remember, signing approvals I didn’t read, because every time the room goes quiet there it is again. That scent in the air. My name in her mouth. Unfinished. Like she didn’t get to the end of what she wanted.
I should be thinking about the insider with Covenant clearance. The thing turning over beneath the resort.
Instead I’m thinking about the sound she made and that amazing scent.
This is exactly the weakness my father warned me about.
The masquerade is Evelina’s idea, which means it’s a trap dressed as a party.
The Lunar Hall has been stripped and rebuilt overnight into something out of a fever dream. Black marble floors. Floating candles that burn silver instead of gold. A ceiling charmed to show the storm raging over the dome above us, lightning crawling between the wards.
Every guest wears a mask. That’s the rule tonight. Magic runs honestly under the moon, so they hide their faces and pretend that helps.
I wear black. I always wear black. My mask is simple, matte, covering half my face.
Tristan finds me within ninety seconds.
“You look like you’re attending your own funeral,” he says.
“I’m attending yours, if you don’t move.”
“There he is.” He claps my shoulder. “The warmth. The charm.”
Then she walks in, and the room stops mattering.
Brynn.
I know her instantly. Mask or no mask. The bond would tell me in a dark sea of a thousand people, but I don’t need it. I’d know her by the way she pauses at the top of the stairs like she’s daring the room to look at her.
The room looks.
She’s in deep red. The color of the cocktails the resort is famous for. Her dress moves when she moves, slit to the thigh, and her mask is gold and catches the candlelight every time she turns her head.
My wolf wakes up so fast it hurts.
“Close your mouth,” Tristan murmurs. “You’ll catch a moth.”
I close my mouth.
I don’t stop staring. I’m aware that I should. I’m aware that half the hall is now watching me watch her, and that I’m confirming every rumor the resort has spread since the chandeliers turned red.
I find I don’t care.
She comes down the stairs like she owns them. Spots me. Falters for half a step, then recovers, chin up, because she’s stubborn to the bone and she’d rather die than let me see I rattled her.
The same way I’d rather die than let her see she’s wrecked me.
We’re a matched set of liars.
She doesn’t reach me.
A man cuts in first.
He’s tall. Polished. Handsome. One of the Fae delegation, gold-masked, the kind of smile that’s been practiced in a mirror. He takes Brynn’s hand before she can pull it back and bows over it like we’re in a different century.
“You’re the witch who broke the resort,” he says. Loud enough to carry. “I’ve been wanting to meet you all week.”
Brynn laughs, polite and tight. “I get that a lot.”
“Dance with me.”
It isn’t a question.
My wolf surges up my spine like a wave breaking.
“Breathe,” Tristan says beside me, very low. “Your eyes are going silver.”
“He has his hand on her.”
“He’s asking her to dance, not declaring war.”
“Same thing.”
I watch the Fae lead her onto the floor. I watch his palm settle at her waist. I watch her smile go thin and her shoulders go stiff and the bond between us pull taut as a wire, because she doesn’t want this, and I can feel that she doesn’t want this, and the knowing makes it worse, not better.
“Leo.” Tristan’s not laughing anymore. “If you cross that floor like this, you’ll start a diplomatic incident.”
“Then I’ll finish it.”
I cross the floor.
I don’t rush. Rushing is for men who’ve already lost control. I walk like the room belongs to me, because tonight it does. I stop at the Fae’s shoulder.
“I’m cutting in.”
He turns. His smile holds. Barely. “We’ve only just started.”
“And now you’re finished.”
For a moment he weighs it. Whether the connection’s worth the fight. Whether the cold thing looking out of my eyes is worth crossing.
He decides it isn’t. They always do.
He releases her with a bow and melts back into the crowd, and I take his place before the space between us can cool.
My hand finds her waist.
The bond detonates the second we touch. Quiet. Private. A pulse of heat that runs from my palm straight through both of us, and her breath catches, and I feel that catch like it’s my own.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she says.
“He had his hands on you.”
“That’s how dancing works.”
“Not with you.”
She tips her head back to look at me through the gold mask, and her eyes are bright, furious, want and irritation tangled up so tight even she can’t pull them apart.
“You can’t just claim me in front of two hundred people, Leo.”
“I just did.”
“I hate what you just did.”
“Too bad.”
"You're impossible!"
We move.
I don’t know who’s leading. Both of us. Neither. The music carries and we follow it, closer than the dance requires, closer than is wise, her body fitted to mine like the resort built us to slot together.
“People are staring,” she says.
“Let them.”
“That’s not the Ice King talking.”
“No, apparently it isn’t.”
Her hand slides up my chest. Stops over my heart, which is going far too fast for a man who’s supposed to feel nothing. She feels it. I watch her feel it. I watch her decide what to do with the proof that she’s not the only one coming apart.
“Take me somewhere,” she says, “that isn’t here.”
The balcony is empty.
I shut the doors behind us and the music drops to a hum. Out here it’s just storm and silver light and the dome groaning overhead, and Brynn, pulling off her mask, looking at me like she’s done pretending for the night.
“I still think this is a bad idea,” she says.
“The worst.” I back her toward the railing.
I kiss her.
She opens for me on a sound that goes straight through my body, and I’m done, I’m gone, my hands in her hair and at her waist and dragging her up against me like distance is something I’ll die of. She tastes like sweet wine. The bond pours through us both, white-hot, no wall left to hide behind.
She fists my shirt. Pulls. I press her into the railing and she arches and the slit in that red dress falls open and my hand finds bare thigh, warm and trembling, and the growl that comes out of me isn’t human.
“Leo.” My name again. Out loud this time. Finished.
I drag my mouth down her throat.
I find the place I found in her dream, the place I shouldn’t know about, the place where a mark would go, and I feel her pulse slamming under my lips and I want to bite. The need is so old and so deep it terrifies me.
“I can feel what you want,” she breathes. “Through the bond. I can feel it.”
“Then you know I’m barely holding it together.”
“What if I don’t want you to?”
My control cracks straight down the middle.
I lift her. Set her on the wide stone rail with the storm at her back, step between her knees, and she wraps her legs around me and pulls me in and we both stop breathing at the contact.
“I should’ve done this days ago,” I say against her mouth. “The Covenant be damned.”
She goes still.
Just for a second. A flicker. But I feel it, the way her body changes under my hands, the way the bond stutters.
“What did you say?” she whispers.
I pull back enough to see her face. “The Covenant. The bond rules. I meant...”
“No.” Her eyes are wide. “You said it like... you said it the way the witnesses say it. The Fairmonts say it like that.”
My blood goes cold.
She told me the Covenant witnesses say it, the thing only a Fairmont would know in her bones, and she did it without thinking, and now she’s watching the realization land on my face and she’s going pale under the gold light.
“Brynn.” My voice has dropped to something low and careful. “How do you know how the witnesses say it?”
“I don’t. I just...”
“You just told me.”
“I read it. Somewhere. In the greenhouse records, I...”
“You’re lying.”
She flinches. And that’s worse than any confession.
I’ve suspected since I scented Covenant blood under her magic that first night.
I buried it because the bond didn’t care and I didn’t want to care either.
I told myself suspicion wasn’t proof.
This is proof.
She doesn’t just have the blood. She knows the rites. She knows the Covenant from the inside, the way only a witness does, the way someone raised in it would.
She isn’t a witch who stumbled into a secret.
She is the secret.
“Leo.” She slides off the railing. Reaches for me. “Let me explain...”
“How long?” I step back. The cold is coming up through me like floodwater, the old armor snapping back into place.
“How long have you known what you are while I’ve been...” I can’t finish it. While I’ve been falling.
“It’s not that simple.”
“Then make it simple.”
The storm cracks overhead. Below us, through the doors, the masquerade glitters on, two hundred masked liars dancing, and out here the only two people who matter are staring at each other across a chasm that opened in the space of one whispered word.
“Tell me the truth,” I say. “All of it. Right now. What are you, Brynn Fairmont?”