“If there’s room for improvement, he ought to know it,” Aelindor went on, perfectly serious. “Your pleasure matters more than his pride. Every single time.”
“Uh? Well, he’s…he’s very good,” I said, and felt the flush crawl down my neck. “That’s the problem. I think I’m addicted to it. The feeding, and everything that comes with it. Sometimes I feel like I’m chasing a high, and the high is Nikolai.” I made myself keep going. “And it isn’t only him. I want all of you. Not Drakken, obviously, but the rest of you, I can’t seem to stop wanting, and it’s like—” I searched for the word. “It’s like?—”
“Like there’s a bond between all of us and you,” Aelindor said quietly. “Invisible but unbreakable. Each of us to you, and you to each of us.”
I nodded and pulled in a breath. The air felt too heavy to hold.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it down to the floor. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I must be wired wrong. If you want to cast me out, I understand. But I’m still useful. Please remember that. Even if my character is too cracked for you to want, think of me as an asset. A weapon to point at the White Witch and her Pallid Court, if that’s all I’m good for now. Whatever I’m worth to you, don’t pull your support from the extraction. Punish me however you like, but not by leaving Missy in that place.” I drew a breath. “And if you won’t hear even that much, I’m going for my sister with a team or without one.”
This was the fallout, and I’d take it standing. Every time I’d tried to do right by them, I came up short. Sometimes I wondered if I was built to wreck things, if some part of me loved the long drop of the free fall.
“Are you finished?” he asked, soft.
“Finished?” I whispered.
There it was. The final verdict. I’d thought I was braced for it, but my heart still dropped straight into my stomach.
Aelindor was done with me. I’d earned it.
Great job, Max.
Great job!Coldiron chirped from my armguard, delighted.
“Stop wallowing, love.” His mouth curved. “And forgive me for putting you in this position.”
Confusion bloomed where dread had just been sitting. He didn’t sound like a man casting me out. The heat in his eyes hadn’t cooled a degree. The hand caressing my breast moved like it was his favorite thing to do in the world before he reluctantly withdrew it and traced my cheek with his knuckles, his other arm curling around my waist. Holding on. Not letting me walk away.
I wasn’t going anywhere.
“I should have told you sooner,” he said. “Been open with you. But there was never a clean moment for it. And then I thought you’d already settled into this. You seem at home with all of us, and you have been for a while. So we gave you time. Time to figure it out and come to terms with yourself. And with us.”
“Come to terms?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”
“You belong to all of us, Max. And we belong to you.”
My heart stuttered so hard I was afraid it would give out entirely.
“But how…how would this even work?” My thoughts ran in every direction. “One woman and—what, three men? Four? No one would stand for it. Everywhere I’ve ever been, it’s one and one. A woman and a man. That’s marriage. That’s family. That’s the whole foundation the world’s built on. People would call me—” I couldn’t finish that one.
I already knew what Delia and her circle called me.
“Traditionally, yes. One man, one woman.” Aelindor’s thumb traced my jawline, slow and deliberate, and the sensation spread from the point of contact outward. “Fae are notoriouslyterritorial. So are vampires, shifters, and dragons. The four of us run more territorial than any of our kinds. By every rule you know, males like us should sooner tear each other apart than share the air around a single woman.” His eyes held mine, open in a way I hadn’t seen from him before. “But we aren’t governed by tradition or doctrine. We live by no one’s rules. Only fate binds us—the five of us, tied at a level older and deeper than any custom. And even so, no fate could’ve made us bow if we hadn’t already wanted you.”
“You all want to…share me?”
Delia’s words slithered up from memory. The things she whispered about the mine rat spreading her legs for every heir in the fortress.
“Sharing is part of it,” Aelindor said. “Cherishing you and building a life with you is more like it.” He brushed a kiss over the tip of my nose, feather-light, before continuing. “Hear me, Max. In this, you hold the reins. You decide whether you’ll have us or not. If you choose us, every one of us will count himself honored—not entitled. This isn’t a fling, and it isn’t a convenience. It’s a bond, eternal and unbreakable. We’ve waited a long time for you to be ready to want it.”
It felt right and wrong in the same breath. Right from somewhere deep in my bones, in my blood, in the part of me that had always come alive when all four of them filled a room. But the concept of me being with all four of them went against everything I’d been raised to believe—that honest love ran between one man and one woman and went no further, that anything else was shameful, the bedrock the whole world stood on.
I ran my dry lip between my teeth. My pulse wouldn’t settle. The shock sat in my chest, tangled up with old shame and a defiant hope that he meant every word.
I’d spent my whole life being told what I was and how I should live, and now Aelindor was handing me the choice—not just anyone, but the most powerful heirs on the continent, as if they’d bow to me, a former slave miner.
“What about Drakken?” I asked. “He hates me.”
“Don’t trouble yourself over Drakken, even if he never comes around. You call the shots, always. You have every right to reject any one of us. Me included.”
