Chapter 5 #3
“I would tell you I wanted to marry you sober, as a priest. I would tell you I wanted to marry you, drunk, crawling to you on my hands and knees.” His thumb moved, slow and deliberate, across my cheekbone.
“You’re a madman.” I looked at him properly, the way I usually avoided doing at close range because it never helped me think clearly.
The lamplight caught the angle of his jaw, the highlights within his thick, dark hair, the gold of his eyes.
He had a way of looking at me when we spoke as if I were the center of the world, the only person whose voice he wished to hear.
But he looked at everyone that way when he was invested in conversation. His focused attention was one of his many devastating charms.
“You’re the one who makes me so.” He leaned closer, and my entire body tried to strain toward him.
My hand rose to his shoulder, which was warm and solid through his tunic, though I wasn’t entirely sure if I meant to push him away or pull him closer. “Fear.”
“Cara,” he said back, in the dark, sexy tone he used when he was being deliberately unhelpful. “What are you thinking of?”
I didn’t have a follow-up. I had started saying his name without knowing what I intended to attach to it, which he knew and which was evident in the amusement that was doing something unfair to the line of his mouth.
His hand slid back into my hair, gentle and certain. He let me close the distance.
His mouth was warm and unhurried, the way his hands had been, and he kissed me like we had all the time to savor touching each other. He kissed me, slow and controlled, and then less controlled, and when my hand fisted in his shirt, he made a faint sound as if he were on the verge of unraveling.
As if a mortal girl could unravel the dragon prince.
Into the space between our lips, I murmured, “I’m thinking about what a lot of work you are.”
“Mm.” He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear with the same unhurried care he’d done everything else. “And yet.”
And yet. That was the entirety of my problem.
I was on my way to kissing him again when there was a hammering at the door. Another Bismyth shifter moved toward it, but Asrael stopped him with a gesture. Asrael swung the door open, blocking the entrance with his body.
Ander stood at the doorway.
He had several Amber shifters behind him, all of them still armed from the Hunt and looking as if they might still use their weapons again. But for a moment, none of the clan tension registered in his face. His gaze went straight to me, and what crossed his expression was sheer relief.
Then he saw Fieran’s arm around me. His gaze dropped to my hand, and his eyes narrowed when he saw the ring. But still, relief was written plain across the handsome lines of his face.
“You brought her into Bismyth. Stole her from my clan though I won her fairly.” He said the words without the heat I’d have expected.
“I’m coming back to Amber.”
Ander’s gaze slipped over my face and back to Fear. He always seemed to seek out Fear, even though he found with his presence nothing but exasperation. “You’ve married her, and yet you’re sending her back to me?”
“The plan requires it,” Fieran said mildly.
“She’s safer with you.” His gaze found mine, blazing with intensity, and my chest tightened. “Keep her in Bismyth. We have too much of the queen’s attention at the moment.”
“I’m aware of the queen’s attention.” Fieran rose to his feet. “I’m also aware of what she can and can’t do with it. You’ll keep Cara safe. You’ve proven yourself capable when we were in the arena.”
Every word was hooked, even though I knew it cost him something to reference Ander beating him. Even if I had helped Ander.
Ander looked at him for a long moment. I had the distinct impression of two people who understood each other completely and hated what they understood. “You don’t get to use her.”
“I could not. She has made her decisions.”
Ander’s eyes found mine. The rage dropped and what was underneath it was pity. Not contempt. The expression of someone watching a person they care about walk into something they can see and she cannot. It was worse than anger would have been. “Let me talk to Cara alone.”
Fieran waited until I nodded. His thumb brushed my jaw once, light and deliberate, and then he stepped back and walked toward the far alcove with every appearance of a man whose evening was going exactly as planned.
Ander and I moved into my old room, where he paced among the discarded furniture.
He had been annoyed when he discovered this was my room, but now he was too perturbed to even register the clutter.
I closed the door behind us, muffling the sounds of celebration; his frustrated face was reflected in a dozen discarded mirrors.
“I chose this,” I said, before he could start.
He rubbed a hand over his face. In the dimmer light, he looked exhausted, and not from the Hunt. “I have no doubt you believe that you did.”
“I did choose it. To protect him. To protect what he’s trying to create.”
“He’s let you want something badly enough to make a decision you can’t undo, Cara.” He caught my hand in his to raise it between our faces. The light glinted off the ring, off my sigil and Fear’s. “Think about when he started making the ring. When he had your sigil etched.”
The ring. The sigil I had traced on his skin without knowing he would remember every line.
“I begged Fear to marry me last night,” I told him. “I was afraid Tay was in danger, and now my family will be safe. He wouldn’t do it. He had wanted me to choose him or reject him with a clear mind.”
“Did he?” Ander watched my face. “And is your family indeed safe now?”
I refused to answer. Ander let the words dangle painfully long before he sighed. “I’m not saying this to hurt you. I’m saying it because you’re the most capable mortal I’ve met, and I need you to think clearly.”
“I know he planned this. I understand marrying me serves his plots.” Lightbringer. Shadowbane’s mate had come from Clan Amber. I needed to know her story. I needed to know her powers.
And I needed to protect Lightbringer from the queen.
“You know one layer of his plans,” Ander said. “He set up half a dozen stories to obscure what he wants from you. He is very much the queen’s creature, twisted and devious.”
The words felt like a slap. Fear was always a dozen steps ahead with his plots, but he was nothing like the queen. She was cruel and power-hungry. Fear was genuine in his desire to free mortals and shifters alike. He would do anything for Bismyth.
“He needs me to marry him to serve his plans,” I agreed. “But I need to marry him to protect my family. Fear and I are using each other.”
Ander looked at me with a regretful twist to his lips. “You think he hasn’t planned this, Cara? That every step hasn’t been designed to make you think you chose it?”
His words hit me harder than they should have. The sense of being trapped felt as if it were attached to Ander’s presence, and suddenly all I wanted was to get away from him.
“I understand,” I said coolly. “But could you protect my family? Could you force a bond on the queen that would keep her from slaying them?”
For the briefest time, emotions shifted over Ander’s face, there and gone—he didn’t want any of them to show. Then his jaw hardened and his gaze met mine.
“No,” he said, the word flat. “I cannot.”
“Then it doesn’t matter if Fear manipulated me into marrying him, if he plotted this since the moment he met me.”
His gaze studied mine. “I would do stupid things, too, if it could bring my family back.”
My anger flared. But just as quickly, I heard the ragged edge of Ander’s earlier grief as he faced me. A terrible sense of foreboding gripped my chest, and I found I could no longer meet Ander’s gaze.
“Oh, Cara.” Ander’s voice was gritty with restrained emotion. “It’s for your own sake that I want you with Bismyth. Believe me, I’d be furious otherwise that Fear stole me from you when he could not win you fairly.”
I raised my head sharply. “I’m not a prize to be won.”
“You are a prize,” he told me. “And under the rites of the Trials, you were to be won.”
He offered me his hand. “Be careful, Cara. And remember I’m here to help you when you need me.”
Not if. When.
“And I am here for you,” I said breezily, though I doubted it meant anything to him. What could a mortal do for a shifter like Ander?
But his gaze softened slightly. “Thank you.”
When we stepped into the main chamber, his raised voice was curt. “Fear!”
He looked as if he hated having Fear’s name on his lips as much as Fear hated to name Ander. “I would discuss terms with you for this favor.”