I looked at Corvin. He looked back at me, and neither of us blinked.
She was the one to act next. She reached up and took Corvin’s face between her hands. He resisted her touch for half a breath, but then she pressed her thumbs to his jaw and turned his face toward her, wanting to meet his eyes, and he let her.That was the part that got to me. The letting. The way he did as she asked, not because she forced him, but because some part of him had been waiting for permission.
“Imagine it’s just us,” she said quietly. “Just the two of us.”
Corvin shook his head as his hands came up and closed around her wrists, not pulling them away, just holding them there. As if holding her was the only thing that made sense, and he couldn’t work out whether to stop or continue.
“This isn’t how it should happen.” His voice was low and rough. “It isn’t how it was meant to be between us, Guin.”
Guin.
The name landed wrong in my chest because of the mere fact that it wasn’t her full name or a title. No, it was the diminutive, thefamiliar. It was the kind of name a man used when he’d been saying it in private for long enough that the shortened version felt more true than the one she’d been born with.
I held very still.
END HIM!The words burned up through me like something trying to crack bone.END HIM NOW! HE TOUCHES WHAT IS OURS!
I didn’t respond because I was too busy watching the way they looked at one another. And in their expressions was something I didn’t want to see: genuine caring.
SHE IS OURS!
The heat didn’t leave; it spread instead, up through my shoulders, into my jaw, and I realized I’d set my teeth together hard enough to make my jaw ache. I released the pressure deliberately, rolled my jaw, and stood with my arms crossed and my back against the wall, my face arranged into something that resembled mild amusement. But inside, it was another story altogether. Inside, I was wrangling the beast, forcing it into submission.
“This isn’t worth either of our lives,” she whispered up to him. “So we give the king what he wants.”
This was the only time she’d ever said anything close to that sentiment, and I fucking hated every word. But I stood there because I had to. Because I’d brought this on myself, and my reasons for being here still remained. I would best the fucking beast. I would prove who was master and who was not. And this was the only way I knew how to do just that.
Corvin was silent. His chest rose and fell with the visible effort it took him to restrain himself. I knew him well enough to know that he was seething. I’d seen him seething before, across twenty years and half a dozen battlefields, and I recognized the signs: the stillness, the controlled breath, the way his shoulders sat an inch higher than they should.
She didn’t wait for his agreement; instead, she backed away from him. He just watched her.
Her fingers went to the laces of her tunic, and she worked them loose without ceremony, without any apparent acknowledgment that I existed in this room at all. That was deliberate, or at least I cataloged it as deliberate and filed it away without reaction.
She pulled the tunic over her head.
Corvin’s anger changed shape then. I watched it happen. The rigidity in his jaw shifted, his breath slowing fractionally as his eyes tracked her. The seething drained out of him and was replaced by something else entirely: something older, quieter, and far more complicated.
Her back was to me, and the light in the cell worked along the lines of her spine, the dip of her waist, the flare of her hips. She undid her braies and let them drop to the ground, then she stepped out of them.
OURS,the dragon said, and the single word came with a pressure so immense it was almost physical: a full-body wantthat wasn’t entirely mine and yet felt as if it was. The line between us had gone indistinct in the heat of it, and for a moment, I couldn’t tell with any certainty where the beast ended and I began.
She stood still; she didn’t turn around. And I was overcome with the need to touch her, to feel that silken cavity between her thighs. My cock was engorging just thinking about it.
Take her,the dragon urged.She is here. She is bare. She is—
—No.
She bares herself but not for us—
—No.
She should bare herself for US—
—She bares herself because I ordered it.I held the thought like a weapon, cold and clean.I ordered this. It happens because I decide it happens. Because I am the fucking king. And you are nothing.
The dragon screamed at me.
I stood against the wall and felt it scream, but I didn’t move. Didn’t move, even though I had to clench my hands into fists to keep from wrapping my arm around her so I could pull her against the hard length of me.
