A strategic retreat, however. . .
Bright eyes, a cage of arms. His unique scent a perfume I inadvertently inhale and as it settles into my lungs it feels like home. Like fate.
A duo of harps with percussion that echo the staccato beats of my heart join the strings, a wordless androgynous voice twining through the notes. It's haunting, ethereal.
“I made no offer and I gave you no right; neither to send that letter, nor come to my home.”
As if I’m no threat. As if my submission isinevitable.His power is greater than mine. His will? No.
Nothing is inevitable but vengeance, and the blood of a mother running strong in her daughter’s veins. My mother was the strongest in Everenne, second only to the demon holding me. She never claimed the designation Old One, but I’ve wondered.
“What is right?” Renaud begins a slow perusal, a quizzical light in his cold stare.
“It starts with consent.” I say this, unironically, to aHigh Lord—without clawing his eyes out.
Fingertips brush again along the curve of my hips, sliding over silk, ownership in his touch. “You consented to the dance.”
I force my jaw to unclench, my anger ticking up a notch. “I consented to dance, not for you to fuck me while standing in public.”
“After I fuck you, Aerinne, you won't be capable of standing.”
English. Raw, savage English.
His voice punches past my defenses, embeds in my core and sprouts vines of black and blue roses that twine round and round, caging me in velvet and thorns. Struggling only tightens the trap, increases the pain that infiltrates my lungs. The air in them burns as they constrict.
His voice smoothes as he slips back into Everennesse. “But if you have never beheld Fae make love while dancing, you have never beheld Fae truly dance.”
I can’t breathe and when I look into his eyes, I see nothing but endless night. Darkness that calls to my soul, even as pinpricks of the brightest light shine through, last hope for the hopeless. Everyone is staring. My breaths come faster, ice picks beginning to hammer at my temples?—
“Look at me, Aerinne, and not the Courts. Count to your ten, if you must. You are safe.” Calm, implacable. An emotionless offer of an anchor I grasp even as I loathe needing him.
“Safe?” Moonlight morphs into a pulsing aura, the beamscrystal shards stabbing my temples. Too fast, he whirls us too fast. “How are yousafe?”
I haven't been fully safe outside my District and at times even outside my home since my mother died. I need to be a High Lord if I want relative safety. High Lords are monsters.
But my mother was a High Lord.
Breathe, just breathe. I inhale lavender air, staring up into his eyes, a wisp of beautiful mocking laughter in the distance but there is no mockery as he looks at me.
What will I have to do, become, to survive the Vow?
“Calm, or you will hyperventilate.” He retreats behind a voice absent contempt and the sensual teasing from moments before. Now there is only glaciers, and equally cold steel. “You are mine, Aerinne. Nothing can harm you unless I will it. No one will so much as approach you without my leave. Breathe, Malisse ni. Control your thoughts and emotions, do not be controlled by them.”
I haven't drawn true breath since the day on the battlefield he'd forced us to accept a white flag or die. No, even before then, the moment his gaze met mine across the remnants of an ambush as he saved my people from imminent death.
Ironically, I owe the male I must kill my life. Maybe this is how he chooses to call in the debt. But I don't want seduction. If I'm forced to interact with him, what I want is. . .nothing. To feel nothing.
I want all of this to be over.
“Your mother and I first met on the shores of Avallonne, your ancestral home,” he says. “We were true children.”
I focus on the music, on his unexpected words like the necklace was unexpected, on the press of his hands that arenow soothing rather than sexual, his scent—smoke and blackberries and frost dripping from evergreens in the deep of winter.
“She was the scion of the island, and I the conqueror’s get. But our gazes met and over time, despite my father, I understood that family is not only blood, but choice.”
I listen as he speaks of my mother in a cadence as if I’m a human priest and this a confessional. Such an odd practice, giving up one’s secrets to a stranger behind a veil. I don't even want to give up my secrets to myself.
“I was selfish,” he continues in a quieter voice, eyes going remote. “When I was dragged back to Ninephe, I couldn't leave her behind. Her life would have been happier if I had.”
