Within the room were seven people, two torches that were fighting a losing battle against the damp, and a table that had seen better centuries. Merlin stood in one corner of the room, wearing that expression he always wore: the one that suggested he already knew how every sentence in the room would end. He was a smug bastard.
“Morgan, how nice of you to join us,” Vaelen said. It was his fault I was late, and I shot him a pointed look across the table. Inresponse, his mouth twitched into a lopsided grin, which suited him because he was, if nothing else, the epitome of the word: rogue.
This morning, he’d spread me across the bed like a feast, his tongue working between my thighs until I trembled on the edge of losing all my composure. But rather than allowing me over the brink of no return, he’d popped his head up and, with a grin, asked, “The weather’s been unusually warm for autumn, don’t you think?”
I’d gripped his hair, trying to guide him back, and, of course, he’d resumed his ministrations with gusto, circling my quim with his tongue in that way of his until my hips bucked against his mouth and certain release began to grip me.
“I heard the grain harvest was particularly good this year.”
Three times the bastard had brought me to the precipice, and three times he’d tortured me with idiotic conversations while my cunt throbbed with need.
After his final comment, which I believed had something to do with a donkey, I’d had enough. I’d shoved him onto his back, climbed on top of his face, and ridden his tongue until I shattered while he groaned beneath me. Then he’d flipped me over, shoved his cock (which had already orgasmed twice by this point) so deep inside me that I’d shredded his back with my fingernails, and he’d fucked me without ceremony until we both exploded in mutual bliss.
The memory heated my cheeks as I took my seat. I could still feel his release dripping out of me.
“Apologies for my tardiness,” I said to no one in particular, arranging my skirts as I took my seat at the head of the table, somewhere I was quite sure Merlin had just been sitting. Now the old fool was standing in the corner of the room, busying himself with a series of floating charts of constellations,planetary orbits, or some other useless task. “I was detained by rather...pressingmatters.”
Vaelen’s light brown eyes darkened with satisfaction, the insufferable man.
It was then that I noticed the woman seated to Vaelen’s left. She was very pretty and she was younger than me: two things I didn’t approve of.
She was in her mid-twenties, had I to guess, with light brunette hair that fell in loose waves around her shoulders. She had wide hazel-brown eyes with a dark brown inner ring, and those eyes were currently moving around the table with the quick intelligence of someone who missed very little and pretended to miss even less. Tattoos wound up her right arm in dark patterns that disappeared beneath her sleeve. She sat with the particular posture of someone who was comfortable in rooms like this, not because she’d been born to them, but because she’d decided to be.
She was also, I noted, looking directly at me with an expression that was equal parts curiosity and assessment and not a single part intimidation.
I found that immediately interesting.
“You’ve brought company,” I said to Vaelen, keeping my voice light.
His mouth curved. “Yes, this is Hailey Jewel Leavitt, my right hand.”
“I wasn’t aware your right hand had a name,” I said as I gave Hailey a polite smile and she returned it. In truth, I wasn’t aware that Vaelen had a right hand in the rebellion at all, one who wasn’t me, at any rate. And further, I hadn’t been aware that his “right hand” was as attractive as she was.
“She has several opinions as well,” Hailey said pleasantly, still looking at me with those bright, steady eyes. “Shall I sharethem, or are we saving that conversation for the part when everyone starts arguing?”
Carlisle made a sound at the same time that Corvin’s mouth moved in something that wasn’t quite a smile but was adjacent to one.
Vaelen said nothing, which told me everything I needed to know. As to his right hand, Hailey, I filed her away in the part of my mind I reserved for things that required further examination and returned my attention to the room and to the scoundrel who was currently grinning at me like a fool.
The truth of it was that very few men had ever held my interest long enough to matter. Centuries had a way of making humanity predictable: their desires, their cruelties, their small, desperate ambitions all cycling through the same tired patterns. I’d outlived kings and watched empires dissolve into footnotes. Love, lust, and companionship? I’d burned through all of them and come out the other side untouched.
Then Vaelen happened.
I couldn’t entirely explain it. Perhaps it was our separations, and more pointedly, the long silences between us where I convinced myself we were finished. Months would pass at a time. Once, a whole year passed. During those times, I’d feel nothing more than a passing interest in noting it had been quite a while since I’d seen or thought of him. Then he’d appear at the edge of my vision like smoke from a doused fire, and everything I’d so carefully constructed would develop inconvenient cracks.
The worst part was that I didn’t mind.
His games were the only ones that still surprised me. He moved through the world sideways, never where I expected him to be, and never quite readable. Perhaps it was that exact quality, the genuine impossibility of predicting him, that made something ancient in my chest feel temporarily new again.
I smoothed my sleeves and directed my attention to the map that was spread across the table.
Time to pay attention, Morgan.
Carlisle had his palms laid flat on the table, his iron-gray hair falling loose around his jaw. He had the stillness of a man who’d stopped bothering to raise his voice because he’d discovered quiet was more frightening.
“Two days.” His fingers pressed into the wood like he was marking a grave. “We had a window, and we had people in position.” Then he looked at me. “And then you told Vaelen to wait.”
“No, I told Vaelen tohold.” I pulled off my gloves one finger at a time. “There is a distinction.”
