People generally kept their wine downstairs.
Perhaps he’d explore the cellar first.
ChapterSix
Corin took his sweettime caring for Aster’s horse, telling himself that the beast deserved a little petting and soothing after being installed in a strange shed during a snowstorm. The horse might be warm and fed—Corin had also carried back a bale of hay from the village the night before—but he hadn’t exactly been able to provide the kind of equine luxury the animal would be used to. It was common decency to spend more time grooming him.
And if the horse’s snorting and eye-rolling suggested he knew damn well Corin was using him as an excuse to hide from his master, he chose to ignore it.
Maybe the horse didn’t know anything at all and Corin’s guilty conscience was really the one rolling its eyes and snorting.
Fuck.
He rearranged the horse’s blanket yet again to make sure it covered his withers. Even though it was late morning and both the warmest and brightest part of the day, the light filtering into the shed made it look like evening, and the air hadn’t gotten above freezing. The snow showed some signs of slowing, though. Corin might be able to get Aster on his way back to his family sooner than he’d thought.
Aster. Corin knew he was in the right. Heknewit. If a man gave his word, he had to retract it directly if he changed his mind and stay to face the music. He couldn’t simply run away.
Butyouran away. For the tenth or perhaps thousandth time, Corin told his conscience to go fuck itself. His situation had been entirely different. No one would’ve expected Aster to go through with the marriage if Marellus had been seen fucking someone else in public. If that didn’t constitute a tacit breaking off of an engagement, Corin didn’t know what did. Corin had been running from the humiliation of his engagement being broken that way. Not from the task of breaking it off in the first place.
But he had to take Aster’s age and experience, or lack thereof, into account. Like most dragons, Corin looked younger than he really was to a human eye—although dragons weren’t considered fully mature until their mid-thirties, which made up the difference a bit. His relatives still saw him as a callow youth even though he’d utterly failed to celebrate his thirty-seventh birthday a few months back.
Still. Fifteen of those years had been spent in King Theobert’s service, and those years hadn’t all been peaceful; no one could call Corin inexperienced or naïve. Corin didn’t know Aster’s exact age, but Belinda was twelve years his junior and Aster even younger than that. Twenty-three at the most.
For fuck’s sake. Marellus was an asshole, and everyone knew it. Aster’s valet had probably exaggerated what he’d heard to its greatest possible extent; gossips always relished the drama of it all. And no one with an adult’s common sense would expect a wealthy nobleman entering into a convenient marriage, like Marellus, to have any sentimentality about his husband-to-be.
But that didn’t mean Corin couldn’t sympathize with Aster’s very real misery and disappointment and shame, his fear of a future that offered nothing but unhappiness. And it also didn’t mean Corin had any excuse for the way he’d snarled at him, the way he’d taken out his own lingering anger on an innocent object. The look on his face when Corin had told him he’d need to leave…those eyes. Aster’s huge, pleading blue eyes would haunt Corin’s fucking dreams, damn it all. And not only because of their resemblance to his sister’s. On their own account.
But Aster couldn’t be Corin’s problem. He had to go home and sort it out himself one way or the other.
Aster’s horse had started giving him sidelong glances that suggested imminent kicking if Corin didn’t clear the fuck out and leave him alone to munch his hay in peace, and the smell of horse had gotten a bit thick anyway.
He shoved the door of the shed open and stepped out into the whirling snow, wedging the door shut again behind him. For a moment he simply stood there with his overheated face tipped up to the stormy sky, breathing deeply to let the invisibly tiny flakes of snow slide down into his lungs and extinguish some of his overproduction of draconic flame. He’d gotten agitated enough to start breathing smoke at Aster, an unforgiveable faux pas. If his family could only see him now: half-dressed and grubby and unshaven, unable to control his flames or his scales, not only still cowering in the mountains to escape his own shame but harboring a human fugitive.
Enough stalling. No trace of Corin’s bootprints showed between the door to the tower and the shed, which meant he’d been bothering Aster’s horse far longer than warranted. Like it or not, Aster would be his guest for another couple of days until the weather cleared. Sleeping in his bed. Looking at him with those eyes.
Fucking hell.
Stomping back to the door didn’t feel quite as satisfying with every step cushioned by inches of snow, but he gave it his best shot all the same. And he wrenched the door open with enough force that he heard an ominous crack from the hinges.
God, he really needed to control his own strength, not that he cared if he ripped this fucking place to shreds with his bare hands.
Aster would care, though. He might be frightened at worst and disappointed in Corin’s behavior at best. And that was enough to make him shut the door more gently behind him.
But Aster wasn’t there. Where the hell could he have gotten to? And why? He could’ve gone to the garderobe, of course—but the garderobe was empty. Corin ran up the stairs and checked each floor. Nothing.
Now driven by something Corin would’ve denied with his dying breath could be incipient panic, he ran back down the stairs, taking them three at a time, heart pounding. He’d been dismissive, angry, even cruel to the lad. What if he’d pushed him over the edge?
Possibly literally. The bridge in front of the gate went over a deep canyon, too steep and jagged to climb down even in the best of weather. A fall, or a jump, from that bridge…and if a man felt he had no options, nowhere to go, no future…
Corin nearly ran into the gate face-first in his haste and got halfway through lifting the bar when he realized.
The gate would be open if Aster had gone through it.
God, he was an idiot.
He leaned his forehead against the rough wood, his own harsh breaths echoing in his ears.
The soft scrape of a footstep behind him had him spinning around, sure he’d turned a dark bronze from the blood he could feel flooding his face. Fuck, how incredibly embarrassing to be caught like that. Aster smiled at him sunnily from the doorway to the hall.
