“Tell me something, Max.” He’d settled in beside me, his arm slung around my shoulders, like we were old pals sharing a drink, and now he wanted all my secrets. “Were your parents tall too?”
I’d never had a conversation like this with anyone. And as he asked, I realized I couldn’t clearly remember what my parents had looked like. Their faces had blurred, the color of their eyes faded out. A wave of grief caught me off guard.
“I’m forgetting them,” I said. “I still remember their teachings. But everything else…it’s going.”
Caspian took my hand. “Time is a motherfucker. It erodes everything.” His voice had lost its lightness. “I can’t see my parents’ faces clearly anymore either. Except—” He stopped, unable to finish.
I knew the White Witch had executed his parents. The same woman had murdered Drakken’s and Nikolai’s as well.
That was what talking about family in the Rupture got you. Everyone had lost someone.
I wasn’t going to let him sink into the past, down a hole he might not climb out of. Not today.
“My da was average height. My ma was tiny,” I said, dragging him back to the present. “So it’s not the genes. I hit a growth spurt at nine and couldn’t stop it. Shot up like a weed.”
The past flew out of me like it had been waiting for the right air. Caspian was super easy to talk to. Nearly impossible to keep a guard up around. The prince could probably make the dead confide in him.
“By eleven I was taller than everyone in the mine.”
I could still feel those years in my muscle memory—the hunger of eating the same ration as everyone else while my body demanded twice as much.
I wasn’t about to tell him how I’d had to bind my chest as it filled out year by year. Caspian’s eyes wandered more than the other heirs’; that heated gaze of his kept dropping to my mouth or my boobs. Probably the animal in him. It wasn’t that the looking offended me—it was that it made me flush and my blood run hot, and when it became too much, I didn’t know what to dowith myself. Especially since his nose was so keen. Shifters could smell arousal.
“Tell me about Missy.” His thumb brushed across my cheek, tender, and my breath hitched. I fought not to lean into it. “Why’d you call your sister ‘little viper’? She bites?”
My eyes went misty, stinging.
“She was my little spy. The best,” I said. “Sweetest smile you’ve ever seen, hiding the most vicious intentions toward the guards and overseers. They had her running errands. She had quick feet and a quicker mind. Never forgot a direction, never garbled one. She’d been gathering intel for me for a year. Never once got caught.” I paused. “Missy isn’t my blood. Her mother died in childbirth, and after her father’s accident in the shafts, she came to live with me. I’ve loved her more than blood.”
“We’ll get her back,” Caspian said. The easy warmth was gone, replaced by the weight of a man who didn’t break promises. “Every resource. Every power we’ve got.”
I nodded, blinking hard to fight back tears.
Caspian’s hand shot out, and I was flat on my back on the mat before my brain could register the movement.
“What—”
I shoved at his shoulder. He laughed, repositioning, one hand catching my wrist, his weight settling over me with the casual ease of a man who’d done this a thousand times.
One moment grief and gravity; the next, all mischief. He was doing it on purpose, the same thing I’d done for him a minute ago, dragging him up out of the dark.
“Training’s started,” he said, smiling down at me. “Always expect the unexpected, Max. In a real fight, nobody announces it. No warning, no courtesy. You act or you lose.” He shifted his weight. “Today’s lesson: once you’re on the ground, you’re still not done. This works for you because of your size. A smaller woman should do everything in her power to stay off the ground—once she’s pinned, she doesn’t get up. But you’re built like me. Like the Spartans. We’ve got the reach and the density. Use them. Get on top of me.”
His weight shifted, demonstrating how thoroughly I was being caged. The prince was broad-shouldered and all hard muscle, his heat bleeding through the fabric between us. My body answered before I could tell it not to. I fought the urge to wrap my legs around his waist, which got harder by the second as his scent hit me: green earth, open air, pure male. My focus scattered.
I tried a hip escape. He countered effortlessly. I tried another angle. He adjusted easily, still pinning me, still caging me in.
“Don’t fight the weight. Work with it. Now where’s your leverage?”
“Hips?” I tried. “Except you’ve got my knees locked.”
If he hadn’t had my lower legs locked so tight, I’d have driven a knee straight up into his nuts and given him a nice surprise.
I wiggled beneath him, driving my hip into the opening his weight created on one side. He gave an inch. Not much—but the principle landed. He adjusted his grip on my wrists, face closer now, minty breath warm against my skin, lips inches from mine. My breath caught. My pulse spiked. His wolf was right there behind his eyes, watching me with rapt interest.
Earlier, when Aelindor had been training me, we’d both nearly lost it. If every session was going to go like that, I wasn’t sure I’d survive. My knees went weak for all four of them, and I had zero defenses built against any of them.
“What’s in it for me,” I said, “to end up on top?”
