“Yes. When I’m Maximilian’s.”
“You are far from a distraction. Especially from my urges.” His jaw tightened against the saccharine kiss she planted upon his cheek. “You are the sole cause of my suffering.”
“That is all I’ll be to you when I’m Maximilian’s wife, isn’t it?” She stepped back and regarded him with all the malice and curiosity of a fool taunting a starved lion with a piece of steak. “A distraction for your bloodlust. A vessel for your pleasure.”
Garin was silent, his fury palpable.
They hadn’t heard anything for a while; perhaps everyone was so hungover from the feast, they’d gone back to bed. Swallowing against the fading satisfaction and rising bitterness, Lilac turned to try the knob again.Shit—the door didn’t budge. Garin began to chuckle, sounding even more chilling in the dark.
Lilac whirled to see him him reaching for her, jerking her arm out of the way and swiftly replacing it with her blade. She laid it against Garin’s Adam’s Apple, tilting his chin up.
“You are deliciously fast,” he said with a deep laugh.
She pressed the blade harder against him. “You might command my will, but my touch is still mine to give. And when I do… it won’t be because you demanded it. It will be because I chose to ruin you with it.”
“Come to me.”
So much for those hawthorn berries.
Lilac’s body reacted immediately. The force of his command was so powerful it took her breath away, causing her to fall against him. Garin caught her at the elbows, dodging the haphazard slash of her blade. He plucked it out of her grasp and bent, gathering her skirts to place it neatly back into her garter, his fingers scrupulously lingering at her outer thigh.
“It would be a tortuous, most painful affair,” he breathed, straightening, “if you chose to ruin me upon these benches.”
“Go to hell.”
Garin’s eyes, softened by his laughter, were pools of muted starlight as he pulled her into his arms. “Your body and blood are my distraction, onlyas salvation might reprieve a man plagued by his own melancholy. The way it might remind him of the beauty of sunsets, and the smell of baking bread, and good things on the horizon. You are the veiled specter in the night, haunting my dreams each time I close my eyes.” He swept Lilac’s left hand into his and pressed his lips against her fingers. “And the relief of golden sunrise. There is nothing human about what I feel for you, Eleanor, yet you offer yourself to me like a fool. As if I have not considered taking you far, far away from here. Where crooked kings cannot touch you.”
She should’ve been alarmed by how quickly her rage succumbed to desire, despite the evident warning in his words. She should detest that there’d be reasonable temptation if he ever offered such a fantasy.
But Lilac leaned into his embrace, inhaling deeply the scents of juniper and firewood.
His confession was an ax in her chest, his words the deadliest of poisons.
“They deserve a monarch who will fight,” she whispered. But her conviction was already weakened, by spell or by the heart. It was anyone’s guess.
Garin bent to her ear—her hand in his, his other palm pressed to the small of her back as if they were afforded the surreptitious privacy of the center of a bustling dancefloor. “By the time I made the decision, you wouldn’t have a choice.”
The door swung open, the top cracking off its hinge. Wide-eyed, Piper stood there with a large half-full cart at her hip, the one maids used to collect soiled laundry.
Sound flooded the tiny closet—sound they should’ve heard from inside. Worried voices and footsteps. Lilac wiped at the moisture in her eyes.
“What do you mean, no one knows where she is?” came her mother’s shrill voice in the distance. “First Henri, now her?”
“She called a meeting in her library,” replied Yanna, sounding apprehensive. “They’d been waiting for some time, so I thought I’d ask. I’m sure she’s fine.”
“Not to worry,” Piper called out, jostling the cart violently toward their door. “I found her.”
Immediately understanding, Lilac pushed Garin aside and lifted Ciel’scorpse from the corner bench. She shoved it at Piper, who dumped it into the laundry cart, tugging and piling the garments over it.
“What is all that noise?” Marguerite poked her head around the corner, blinking into the dim hall. “Oh, thank heavens.” Her gaze lingered on the girls before darting into the closet. She gasped. “Are you all right, Sir Albrecht?”
Garin’s hand was pressed to his mouth, which remained shut. “I’m fine,” he said behind it, unable to dislodge the hunger in his voice.
Even her mother heard it; Marguerite’s eyes widened. Whispers erupted in the room beyond.
“He’s still feelingveryunder the weather,” Lilac said hastily. “He is not himself. After his bad reaction to the wine.”
“He was supposed to remain in the infirmary,” Madame Kemble shouted over the second floor bannister.
