“That is exactly what I am telling you, Stepmother.”
Her lips were narrow. She pursed them into a pouty, doll-like kiss. “You know I don’t like it when you call me that.”
“It serves as a useful reminder that you aren’t actually my mother.”
She sucked in a hiss through her teeth, while her servant girls plastered themselves to the settee.
“I’ll ask again. Where is Moncho?”
“You believe this ‘Moncho’ is more important than your sire? Than Our Dominance?” The taunting was gone. What remained was as cutting as a blade.
“Of course I don’t. There is no one in the entire Opalese more important than my father.”
Good one, Baz.
Terencia scowled and thumped back onto the cushions, smearing the blood, male seed, and pudding mixture onto them anew. She closed her eyes for a moment, as if to still spinning. I couldn’t decide how much of her act was real.
Eventually, she sighed, as if Baz were the greatest of disappointments. But why? For not rushing to answer her summons, flinging off his clothes, and ramming his dick inside her without pause?
Deep within me, my monster snarled at the imagery I should never have conjured. Now both my monster and I wanted to murder the bitch until she stayed dead.
“Your precious soldier is bound to the underside of the bed.”
Without waiting for Baz’s command, Night and Ed jogged toward the bed, mindful to avoid dubious puddles along the way.
“He wouldn’t stop trying to tell me what to do, and only one man tells me what to do.” The blaze of her eyes said: that man was Junot, and she hated him for the power he wielded over her. “And before you give me a headache with all your asking, your other precious soldier is in the pool. At least Levin understands his duty to his empress.”
Splashing through what I hoped was water, Zi ran to Lev. She slid to her knees, patting his bare shoulder while running her other hand along his wet hair. Félix didn’t leave Baz’s opposite side from mine.
At Zi’s touch, Lev groaned. He sagged his head back onto her shoulder.
“Crute,” he said.
What did the furry creature have to do with anything?
“And…” But Lev couldn’t finish.
Aziza pulled him out of the pool and plopped him beside it, his body spent and limp. Then she tromped into the thigh-high water, mindless of her boots and leathers but careful to keep her mordaris from getting wet. She reached the larger of the facedown men first. She turned him over and dragged him poolside, where Félix waited to help him out.
“I don’t recognize him,” she told Baz.
When she waded back in to flip the second body, her words sliced like her mordaris.
“It’s Crute. He’s dead.”
Ah. The boy whom I’d first seen speaking with Baz outside the brothel, Slake.
With water sluicing down them, she dragged Crute’s body to rest beside the unidentified man, who also looked very dead. Ed and Night were pulling a barely conscious Moncho from underneath the bed. Baz was taking it all in.
The empress’ full attention, however, had shifted from Baz to me—just me.
“Who do we have here?”
The Bazrians, even Moncho and Lev, though weakly, turned toward me.
Terencia chuckled. “If you wanted to roleplay and bind me up, Alobaz, all you had to do was ask. Although I would never let you scar me up, not even for play. I’m too pretty for that.”
Zi gasped softly as the same realization was hitting me.
