Page 72 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy

Osric was convinced that Fairhrim had entirely forgotten last night’s events, until she looked over her shoulder and said, “After last night, I’ve concluded that your choice of alias is appropriate.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Goodbye, Mr. Hungwell.”

The innocence was replaced by a smile, impish, cheeky. She pressed her tacn to the waystone and was gone.

She knew. She had known the whole time. Shehadbeen doing it on purpose.

She was entirely responsible for the erection rubbing itself raw in his trousers.

Osric sighed towards the sky and told himself that he was a grown man, and that he would not be wanking off to her for the second time that day.

He went inside and pumped himself empty in the shower.

Pathetic.

14

Tintagel Castle

Aurienne

Rather stormy, that last look Mordaunt had cast towards her. Aurienne half expected him to follow her through the waystone.

If he looked at her like that again, her legs were going to get divorced.

She went to her quarters to change out of her holidaying dress and then, with brisk strides (her first meeting was at half two; it was now quarter to three), went to her office.

Her memories of the night’s events had been, at first, genuinely fuzzy. They had come back to her through the morning as the hangover receded. By the time they visited the libraries, she remembered everything. Every twitch, every gasp, every position, every bodily fluid exchanged or ingested.

She blamed the wine for last night’s decision-making. It was why she had paused at the bust of Pliny the Elder.In vino veritas. There had been a bit too much veritas last night. Too much unguarded sincerity. Toomuch of the bared soul. And the blasphemy of the shuddering clasp of tacn on tacn—

Aurienne’s cheeks warmed at the memories. It meant nothing. It was scratching an itch.

And when she had indulged in the thrill of teasing Mordaunt just now, had that also meant nothing? She had delighted in his clenched jaw, his restraint. No wine to blame for her actions there. Only, perhaps, the euphoria of the books, clouding her judgement. Rosefell Hall was all decaying magnificence, but Mordaunt had prioritised the libraries, and managed to not only maintain but improve them. This newly discovered competence awoke something in Aurienne and mingled with the bibliophilia latent in every scholar. It made a potent combination.

Two libraries.

Two.

She reached her office and found Felicette, Swanstone’s resident Ingenaut, waiting for her.

“So sorry,” said Aurienne with a grimace. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

Felicette specialised in microfluidics. She and Aurienne were investigating how to mimic Aurienne’s micro-occlusions in the treatment of uncontrolled seith haemorrhages, so that others might treat the condition without Aurienne present.

“You’re one kilosecond late,” said Felicette, consulting a complex pocket watch. “I forgive you.”

Aurienne, thoroughly distracted by thoughts of Mordaunt, was grateful that Felicette was as well prepared as usual. Aurienne’s monosyllabic contributions got her through most of the meeting. The Ingenaut went through recent studies on the rheological properties of seith and debated, largely with herself, whether they should go with capillary flow resistors in seith channels or rather find a way to temporarily induce stenosis.

“There is one thing that’s preoccupying me, as we develop this,” said Aurienne. “Abuse or exploitation potential, if the occlusion serum—if that’s what we end up with—gets into the wrong hands. It could be misused.”

“Misused?”

Aurienne couldn’t share that she had been asked to use her occlusions to cripple the leader of the Fyren Order, and that she had shocked the Wardens who had witnessed it into perturbed silence.

She said evasively, “We must make sure it’s confined to medical applications. There’s potential for darker ones. If anyone wanted to incapacitate a member of an Order—or several of them…We would never, of course, but others might.”