The place had been dressed up for the occasion.
My heart slammed against my ribs as I stood outside the double doors of the ballroom, knowing I’d be face to face with my enemy in minutes.
“Steady, cadet,” Frost said. “You’ve been trained for this.”
I nodded, unclenched my clammy fingers, and walked through the doors.
The ballroom was half full and humming. Officers in dress uniform moved across the floor, house colors sharp under the Stormglass chandeliers, amber liquor in hand. Among them drifted the visitors—the Haven’s people, smooth and watchful in fine southern cloth, and New Columbia’s envoy in funeral black, not one of whom seemed to know how to let their face rest. A jazz quartet played something pre-Rupture in the corner.
Beneath the polish and the music, the room thrummed with the particular tension of enemies being very, very civil to one another.
And then, as though I were a lodestone, every head in the room swung toward me at once and fixed there.
I blamed it on my height and the heels.
Your power leaked out of you on all that high feeling, and every predator in the room felt it,the demon analyzed.Seize the opportunity.
What opportunity? My mind went briefly, uselessly blank under the weight of the whole room’s stare before my purpose snapped back into place.
I had a job: draw Xander’s eye, let him get a long, clear look at me, then vanish.
As I searched the room for Xander, my gaze found the heirs first, every one of them.
Each was in the dress uniform of his house, and they were a sight.
Aelindor in Virgo silver, the winged maiden worked in gold over his heart, ethereal and somehow the stillest point in the room. Nikolai in Sagittarius oxblood, gold stripes at his cuff, looking ready to eat lesser things for sport. Caspian in storm-blue Aries, combat-cut and broad as a doorway, ringed bydelegates—the women in particular—tossing off jokes, working the room, his eyes never once leaving me.
And Drakken in Leo charcoal. Hard and dark and watchful as a blade left out in the cold.
He started toward me. Just one step, as if his body had moved before he’d cleared it with himself. Then Delia slid into his path in the server’s shirt and skirt that marked her as one of the six chosen for the honor. She set her fingers on his arm and curled them there, anchoring herself to him.
I wondered, not kindly, whether Drakken had been the one to choose her for the honor.
I swallowed the sour taste at the back of my throat and dragged my gaze off them both.
It slid instead to Aelindor and Nikolai—the two men who had already had their hands and their mouths on me. One had knelt and used his tongue on me until I came apart; the other had taken my virginity last night and left the memory of it written through every inch of my body. The two recollections crashed together without my leave—Nikolai’s mouth working me open, then Aelindor’s cock moving in me, slow and then fast, hard, and brutal.
Heat flooded low and sudden. It wasn’t only the sex, the pleasure. It was the bond, the new bright thread that ran from Aelindor straight into my chest and pulled, and the dizzying, impossible fact that I belonged to this now, to them, and wanted it with everything I was.
My face went hot, the flesh between my thighs still sore from hours of fucking. I forbade myself to go there again and fought to keep the heat out of my eyes.
What in every hell was I doing—going molten over lovers while my one job tonight was to dangle myself in front of my enemy? What kind of soldier ran this hot on her way into the field?
Get a grip,I told myself.Now.
I drew in a slow breath and pushed all of it down—the heat, the memories, the insistent tug—folded it small and shut it behind the part of me that had survived everything by going cold when it counted. The woman could want them later. The soldier had a mark to bait.
Aelindor and Nikolai stood with two men whose backs were to me. One of them was Xander; I’d have wagered my chakrams on it. Aelindor always kept his enemies close enough to watch them breathe.
Both heirs were already looking at me from across the room. They’d felt me before I ever stepped through the door—the bond ran strongest with Aelindor now, since we’d mated, a line drawn taut between us that no crowd could muffle.
The two men with them turned their heads at the same moment.
One studied me with open curiosity and distrust, and I placed him from a briefing photograph—the President of New Columbia.
It was the other man who turned my blood to ice.
Xander. The Collector.
