As usual, I tried to ignore it, but my face went hotter.
“Welcome home, Max,” Nikolai said. That rich, leisured voice could make sophisticated women lose their footing.
“Thank you, Prince Nikolai.” Mine came out the way it always did, low and a little rough, the voice I’d spent my entire life honing while pretending to be a boy. “It’s good to be back.”
“Take a couple of days off.” His gaze dropped to the hollows under my eyes. “You look like shit. Did you sleep at all out there?”
I opened my mouth with nothing ready. It was hard to know how to respond when someone had traveled this far to meet you and then told you that you looked like shit.
Caspian materialized before I had a comeback. Somehow, he’d peeled away from the entourage and closed the distance, making sure Nikolai wouldn’t have me to himself for long.
“You really know how to flatter a woman, Nikolai.” The shifter prince dropped his arm around my shoulders with easy possessiveness. “Let’s go, Max. Car’s waiting.”
Frost had already slipped past, silver eyes forward, professionally blind.
“Max rides with me,” Nikolai said.
“Fine, I’ll join her.” Caspian’s grin didn’t waver.
“I didn’t invite you, wolf.”
“I invited myself,” Caspian said easily. “One extra pair of eyes never hurts where Max’s safety is concerned. You should know that, vamp.”
My safety? Seriously? It was the heirs who needed protecting.
“Why the hell,” Nikolai asked, “would I need an unnecessary pair of animal eyes?”
“You don’t want to show your pettiness in front of a lady.” Caspian’s smile turned sharp. “Especially a lady like Max, bloodsucker.”
I wasn’t a lady, but I said nothing. The last thing I wanted was to get between them.
Nikolai shook his head in disgust, then let it go. A crowded platform wasn’t the venue, and even the vampire heir knew it.
We rode back to the fortress in Nikolai’s car. Aelindor was in another armored vehicle with two commanders and a general. Fifty-odd military transports in convoy around us.
I sat between two princes on a bench seat built for three and watched Denver come into view through the windshield. I thought about how everyone at the fortress would see the first-year cadet riding with two princes like she belonged with them.
I was still working out whether she did.
Chapter 14
Nikolai
The Sanguine Tower felt like a mausoleum without Max.
I’d held the base while the other three heirs rode to Greyhold with Max. I understood the necessity—one heir always stayed behind, standard protocol. That didn’t stop me from wearing a track between my desk, the window, and a chess board I’d set up against myself.
Then the dispatch arrived. Demons on the train. An archdemon leading the assault. And Max had climbed to the roof against orders and put herself between Aelindor and two Coldiron-tipped arrows.
I knocked the chess board off the table. The pieces scattered across the marble, and I hadn’t picked them up.
She’d caught the arrow between her palms and thrown it back at the archdemon. I didn’t know how to hold that image without my cock going painfully hard and my chest cracking open at the same time.
I hadn’t fed from a warm vein since she left. I’d promised her—one mouthful per week, from her alone—and I’d kept it, even as bottled stock turned every meal into endurance. I’d mixed in wine, whiskey, anything to cut the flatness. Nothing helped. Every source tasted like ash after hers. Nectar and flameand midnight sun—that was what ran in Max Morning’s veins. Everything else was counterfeit.
I’d worried so much that I’d decided: if they hadn’t returned in another week, protocol be damned, I was going to Greyhold myself.
At the station, I’d seen her through the glass before the train stopped. She’d filled out since she arrived at the fortress. The gauntness was gone, and her height, her sharpness, a particular quality of presence about her drew the eye.
