Chapter 34
Thirty-Four
Cara
Fear and I walked back through the encampment together.
His fingers twined through mine, and I smiled up at him as best I could.
He was still so damned handsome, this villain of mine, with his dark hair curling around his ears and the honey warmth of his eyes and the way he moved, all lean, muscular grace.
Once again, I was far too keenly aware of how the rebels were watching us.
It was a mix of mortals and shifters and even—to my surprise—the occasional low Fae.
Some of them were following us as we neared our quarters, seeking an audience with Fear, and I stiffened my shoulders along with my resolve. Luckily, he brushed them off.
I wasn’t ready to be anyone’s hero.
Not when I’d just seen my parents reunited after twenty years, after he had enchanted her and ruined her, trying to make me into a weapon.
Fear pulled me to a halt in front of the campfire in front of our quarters. The firelight cast flickering shadows, catching the golden glimmer of his gaze, the softness of his lips above that hard jaw.
“Wife.”
Gods, he was good at that warm, rough rumble, that sex-soaked voice. It was fake, and yet something inside me still caught, like a spark igniting. “You’re exhausted. Let me take care of you.”
Perhaps he could see I was flagging, and he was trying to rescue me in his own way. Not for my sake, of course, but because he needed me at my best.
I smiled up at him. “You are so very good at that, husband.”
His gaze heated as if the word husband meant something to him. Gods, he was good.
His hand slid from mine to my waist, settling there as if it always belonged.
Heat flared through me at the contact, sharp and unwelcome and impossible to ignore.
I tilted my face up to his, leaning my body into his in a way that would read as trust. The fire crackled behind us, sending a burst of sparks into the air.
He dipped his head. My fingers slid over the back of his neck, finding some of his soft curls, the muscle there.
The first brush of his mouth against mine was light, almost careful. A lie.
His other hand came up, fingers sliding into my hair. The world narrowed abruptly to the heat of him, the press of his mouth, the slow, deliberate way he kissed me as if we had nowhere else to be, nothing else to do but this.
I parted my lips under his, letting him in just enough to sell it. My hand came up, sliding against his chest, feeling the steady strength of him beneath my palm.
He didn’t rush me. He followed my lead, waiting until my lips parted to deepen the kiss.
That might have been the most dangerous thing of all, because it meant I chose every inch of contact between us.
The way my body wrapped to his, my thighs finding either side of his leg, and my fingers tightened in his collar.
The kiss deepened by degrees, slow and controlled, a careful burn instead of a blaze. His thumb traced a path along my jaw, then stilled there, as if he could feel the tension I couldn’t quite hide, even now.
Even here.
Especially here.
For a heartbeat, I had forgotten why we were doing this.
Forgot the eyes on us, the performance, the careful lie we were building together.
There was only the way his mouth moved against mine—tender, unhurried, entirely certain—and the answering heat that coiled low in my stomach in spite of everything I knew, in spite of everything I should have felt.
His breath caught, barely, but I felt it like a crack in his armor. He wanted me too. He wasn’t entirely in control.
The fire snapped again, loud in the quiet that had fallen around us, and I became aware of the world rushing back in.
I drew back slowly, letting it linger, making the break look reluctant. My fingers curled in the front of his shirt a second longer before I let go.
His forehead rested briefly against mine, his breath brushing warm over my lips, close enough that anyone watching would think it intimacy.
“Come inside,” he murmured, low enough that only I could hear.
I nodded, my pulse unsteady for reasons I refused to examine.
Then I turned with him toward the tent, his hand finding my hip. He drew me close, his touch protective.
Behind us, the camp watched.
And believed every second of our little act.
The tent flap fell closed.
The camp’s soft evening noise dulled slightly, but the privacy felt like a hush. Fear’s arm was still around my waist.
In the dim light his eyes were very gold, and there was something faintly smiling about his lips that I wasn’t sure if I scorned or not. The morning in the queen’s castle felt as if it had been approximately four years ago. Deciding to stab him, and the reasons why, felt even further distant.
“Now you are free for the night. They’ll assume we are busy. You can rest.” He started to pull away.
His mission was complete. There was some mercy in it, even if it was just to preserve his plots.
I still hated him. I still distrusted him.
But I still desired him, as always.
I caught the collar of his shirt to keep him from pulling away. He turned back, his lips parting slightly in confusion, a furrow dimpling the space between his brows.
It was almost a lunge. Graceless. My hands closed on his shoulders, and he should have pulled back—it should have read as an attack, after everything I had done to him—but he always read me so well.
My lips were on his, a wild plunging kiss, my body pushing against his and knowing he would catch me.
Then his hands were in my hair, and he kissed me back with nothing careful in it at all.
I barely saw the room around us as we moved through it, catching it in fractured glimpses between our kisses: a bed, a fire glowing in a brazier, the post at the center of the tent—
Ah fuck, the post.
We stumbled into it, and the whole tent rocked.
Then the back of my knees found the bed.
All between these glimpses, his lips on mine, the two of us trading fierce, urgent kisses, the tip of his tongue teasing between the seam of my lips, my hand on his cheek, and my own tongue slipping needily against his.
His hands tightened in my hair, not gently, as if he weren’t quite managing to control either of us anymore. I made a sound against his mouth that I had not planned and felt his answering groan of need.
The two of us stumbled onto the soft quilts. He pulled me over his lap, straddling him.
His thumb traced the line of my jaw, my throat, his knuckle dragging slow and deliberate, and I was aware of my own pulse under it, too fast, embarrassingly fast.
My anger still burned bright. It existed alongside this: the heat he carried, the weight of his hands, the specific devastating unfairness of how well he kissed, the fact that he kissed me with complete unhurried attention, as if there were nothing else in the world that mattered besides me in this moment.
I was furious at him, and I was pulling him closer.
Then I bit his lip. Hard.
He drew back. His eyes were dark. His breathing was not steady. He did not look at me as if being bitten had hurt his feelings one bit, and something in me clenched and wanted to keep going.
“Right.” His voice was not his usual voice, but the roughened version I had heard a handful of times. It made me feel like I was already a queen without having to fight that Fae bitch for her throne.
I put my hand on his chest, on the warm, hard muscle, and I wanted to pull him closer even as I held him deliberately at a distance. I was still thinking of Maris and Corbyn and how he had caused her pain.
“Tell me everything.”
My voice came out steadier than I felt, so I went on. “I won’t throw away the rebellion, no matter if it costs being bound to you all my life. I want to stop the queen. So tell me everything.”
“You’re certain?” The concern that flashed across his face might have been real. I could not tell, and I was trying to accept that I could not tell and that maybe it didn’t matter.
He was my ally, my dreadful, fearsome, deceitful ally. Bound to me just as I was to him. His excellence in lying was a strength that served us both. Most of the time.
“Don’t ask me that again.”
Decision settled in his face, replacing either the concern or the act. What was left was not tender.
He moved beneath me, pushing himself up onto his elbows. I slid off his lap, no longer straddling him, and both of us arranged ourselves so we were sitting face to face on the bed, our knees almost touching.
“I told you Lightbringer would be able to manifest unique powers. Beyond what we have seen from any other dragon.”
“Yes. She can break enchantments, right?”
“That was a bit of a lie,” Fear said, quick and brutal. It reminded me of someone ripping off a bandage. “Lightbringer can ignite mortal magic.”
He sounded harsh. I had the feeling he had just delivered some form of punishment, though I didn’t know why.
“There is no guarantee how a dragon’s capabilities and their mortal’s will combine and what they can do together.” He went on. “So you may manifest the ability to ignite mortal magic. Or you might manifest other gifts.”
“To give us back our magic?”
I was never far from the memory of having my magic drained: the Fae leaning above me, beautiful and disinterested, as I screamed.
“Yes. Lightbringer manifesting fully, bonding completely, her magic shaping that way…whether you have that power depends on so many factors. If it manifests, you could return magic to every mortal in this kingdom who had their magic stripped away. You could make mortals powerful enough to face the Fae, freed from their favors.”
The lamp light moved across his face.
“Lidi,” I said. “I could give Lidi back her magic?”
The name sat between us. I pictured her humming as she threaded flowers in my hair with her nimble fingers, the way flowers had turned toward her as if she were the sun made mortal.
Along with the memory of her magic came the devastation of a child losing the thing that had made her feel extraordinary.